MOTHERLAND by Timothy O'Grady

MOTHERLAND Reviews

• 
  Jim

  With the aid of his dying grandfather and a tamed monkey, a writer searches for his mother across time, space, and reality, journeying to a troubled Ireland - that's the blurb but I don't remember much about the book itself. I flicked through it but nothing jumped out at me. I know I finished it and I know I didn't hate it but that's about it.
• 
  David

  I loved how the book balances its irony with sincerity. The prose is usually very funny and filled with old men half-remembering things and images with millennia of literary significance and impossible events described oh so drolly, but the book is ultimately driven by the protagonist's love for his mother. If at first I felt that love was a joke--they sleep in the same bed, how weird!--the novel ultimately takes it seriously, and by its resolution, it's quite moving.
  
  I must admit that the first fifty pages or so were somewhat slow moving, I mean, there's a monkey and a tragically desiccated tortoise, but then we have to settle back with a friendless narrator as he slowly prepares to read a book. It's worthwhile, though, as soon as the story of Hervey begins and the novel opens up a thousand years of origin stories and violent deaths.
  
  As an American reading the book many years after the Troubles died down, it's hard for me to get a good grasp on its politics, but like all good lit, it's removed from any specific world. In fact, the world Motherland takes place in is so strange (we've got a disguised old man like something out of a fairy tale alongside a Houdini-like escape artist and then also a shuddered housing project, which seems to be a specifically 1980s reference, and that's not even considering the already mentioned bejeweled monkey) that it seems to sidestep the problem of historical context altogether, even though, in a final ironic twist, it is ultimately about the problem (and joy) of historical context.