Kelly's Take on "The Mermaids Singing"

This whole book depressed the heck out of me. The premise is great – three generations of women, mother/daughter relationships, difficult life situations, each woman returning to Ireland (which I love) – but as their stories played out, they were so focused on sex and hopelessness that I finished the book quickly just so I wouldn’t have to be invested in it anymore. I can’t tell if this is a real or accurate portrayal of life, but I surely didn’t relate.

Cliona, the grandmother, loves her Irish home, but moves to America to be educated. She takes a job to make ends meet, gets pregnant and ends up staying at that job for far too long. The family she works for starts out decent, but ends up dysfunctional. Her daughter appears to hate her from her early childhood (which I don’t understand) – if that’s the only life she knew, what would make her look down on her mom for choosing that life? After all the drama with her daughter, she finally gets to go home to Ireland, meets and marries a man who loves her and cares for her, and makes a decently happy life there (though the author can’t let her life be really happy – and so points out that she really doesn’t love her husband). She was raised Catholic (very strictly in Ireland, less so in America, then back to Ireland) and does her best to be “religious.” But really, her so-called faith doesn’t seem to help her at all.

Grace, the daughter, was born and raised in the home of her mother’s employers. She apparently thought much of herself from the very beginning and chose to look down on her mom right away. She hated her mother’s employers (especially the wife) and seems to do everything to make life difficult for those she doesn’t like. She sleeps with the son of the house, though nothing comes of that relationship except hardship – she too ends up pregnant and discarded. (As I mentioned before, that whole family is also dysfunctional: mother goes mad, father has affairs, son sleeps with Grace then ditches her, etc.) She is forced to move to Ireland with her mom where she loses the baby, is depressed and angry, forces away the love/friendship offered to her by her step-sister (the one seemingly happy character in the book), marries a local man (much older than herself) and has a child with him, then leaves, spends the rest of her life sleeping with just about any man who offers, has an interesting relationship (more like friends than mother/daughter) with Grainne, gets cancer and dies estranged from Grainne because they can’t seem to deal with the cancer issue (I’m guessing here – I really couldn’t figure out why their once great relationship disintegrated). Grace hates the Catholic church and doesn’t have anything to do with it as soon as she’s old enough to decide for herself. Obviously her “faith” does no good for her either.

Grainne had a decent childhood in Ireland – loved by her father and grandparents, then taken away at a young age to live with her mom in America. She finally lets go of the idea of having her dad around, and becomes “best friends” with her mom. She sees all the relationships and apparently aspires to be just as promiscuous as her mother. We have here the sicko fascination she has with her mom’s boyfriends, too. When her mom dies, she tries to have a relationship with her mom’s last boyfriend, but ends up moving to Ireland with her grandmother instead. She, too, is depressed and angry there, and wants to meet her father, who avoids her. She starves herself in the meanwhile. Finally, she tracks him down and they start to have what seems to be a decent relationship (after her stint in the hospital because of the anorexia). Then there’s her love interest, her “cousin” (not really related by blood), who apparently thinks she’s really sexy starved to death and in the hospital, because they make out there. (Weird, in my book.) Raised by her mom who hated the church, Grainne doesn’t have need for it either.

So, I guess what bothers me most (besides the almost constant focus on sex) is that there is little to no hope in the book. Though it ends “okay” (Grainne and her dad reunited), that’s not the focus. Family doesn’t give hope/meaning, love and/or sex doesn’t give hope/meaning, church/faith doesn’t give hope/meaning. I guess in that sense the book makes a little sense to me – without a living, personal faith in Christ, nothing fills the voids that life has. Nothing is firm, permanent, secure or hopeful without God. I get that. But it doesn’t make the whole story worthwhile to me.