Maeve Binchy (24 page)

Wherever she went, people came to her with their problems and she loved nothing better than to lift them out of their
self-pity
and turn them back on themselves, to galvanise them into making their own push to find and grow into and have
confidence
in themselves and make the right decisions, as she had managed to do in her own life.

Always, in the end, it was Maeve’s interest in people, women especially, and rigorous adherence to her existential principles, which enabled her to meet her purpose and confer real meaning on her existence.

Remaining a journalist, even when she didn’t need the money, meant that Maeve could exercise her developing matriarchal role through the
Irish Times
as well as through the novels, which
she did right through the 1990s, the decade which marked the start of a new column called ‘Unasked for Advice’. It became one of the most popular items in the newspaper.

But the novels would be the more subtle avenue for social purpose. Her journalism had led to her fiction. Now, the fiction took up the mantle of her social journalism in a different way. The trouble with giving people advice in a column, she used to say, is that they rarely listen. With a fictional story you can reach people in a way that you cannot by telling them straight. ‘Sometimes, seeing seventeen-year-olds in agonies of
self-consciousness
, I’d love to tell them. But they wouldn’t believe me. Perhaps, instead, I put the message into my books.’
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‘The secret of the universe is that we do have to take control of our own lives’ remained her mantra in the novels as it was in her journalism and in her life. In the novels the fictional
heroines
are ordinary women who over the course of the story begin to play the hand that they have been dealt and, realising that no one is going to ride in over the hill and change things for them, stand up for themselves and come to discover, enhance and believe in their own self-worth – hard work on yourself is required, dressing up and imagining it will not be enough. ‘The ugly duckling does not become a beautiful swan. She becomes a confident duck able to take charge of her own life and problems,’ as Maeve put it so many times.

There’s something akin to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, who appeared five years after Benny in
Circle of Friends
, her lack of self-esteem arising from obsessively following the advice of women’s style magazines, the very medium that provides the
stereotype that Benny and Maeve (because of their size) cannot hope to live up to.

Millions of readers identified with the heroines who were in part the alter egos of their author, like Benny, Clare O’Brien, Signora O’Donoghue and Angela O’Hara, and felt included in Maeve’s world. ‘She never marginalised us,’ Cristina Odone wrote in the
New Statesman
.

Maeve’s world is inclusive. Her world gives people the
confidence
to become their own person. She abjured those who would sell you a style to buy into, which was what consumerism, from the 1960s on, had been all about. Consumerism, feminism, even Catholicism in its damning of Protestants to everlasting Hell – all the ‘isms’ were in the business of forming a
membership
that excludes or marginalises individuals as outsiders.

The goldfish bowl communities in which she sets the early novels provide the close but also often repressed environments where all this is played out. The early novels – up to
The Glass Lake
in 1994 – are set in small, traditional Catholic-Irish communities such as Kilgarret, Castlebay, Knockglen, Shancarrig and Lough Glass. They take us back to the 1950s and 1960s and record what
women felt in those communities at that time. The value of these communities is very much in the balance.

In
Firefly Summer
, in sleepy little Mountfern, there is a great sense of belonging. In the end, when O’Neill’s hotel, which has threatened traditional life there, is razed to the ground, a strange roar of approval goes up as the building collapses, as if
emanating
from some deep unconscious well of the town’s people. But the American O’Neill himself, who had returned to the land of his ancestors, returns home wondering how on earth he ever thought that this was his place and these his people. There is a sense of the Mountfern community’s roots feeding it from a rich bed of tradition, but also tying it down and limiting it, isolating it from the wider world.

In
The Glass Lake
, Kit McMahon lives in a similar community, Lough Glass, and understands its shortcomings. Her mother would love to have worked in the pharmacy, but working is only for women who are widows or unmarried or whose husband is somehow incapable of holding down a job. It wasn’t proper for her father to have let his wife work. Now times are changing. Kit’s mother expects that in the following decade (the 1960s) there’ll be nothing a woman cannot do.

Maeve describes tradition – but nothing is static, and change is in the air. In
The Glass Lake
the phrase ‘career woman’ is in current usage in London in 1953. And in the same decade in
Light a Penny Candle
, Elizabeth tells her father that women are interested in getting work outside the home and men are no longer interested in settling down like they were. Her father
makes it clear, however, that he would rather she lived what he calls ‘a proper life’ and ‘be looked after’.

Tackling the 1950s and 1960s at a distance, in the time in which she was writing, the whole drift of Maeve’s thinking was away from the political and authoritarian and towards the individual and the family, and the community values on which Christianity had been based originally. Maeve said that there was a horror of premarital pregnancy verging on hysteria, because using contraception and having an abortion had been made mortal sins. Since then the law has taken on the difficult role of bringing Ireland out of this kind of authoritarian,
punitive
theocracy into the modern world, and both sides of every argument have been made forcefully.

Maeve’s younger brother William, educated at UCD like her, Professor of Law at Trinity College, a barrister practising at the Irish Bar from 1968 to 1970, served as a research counsellor to the Irish Law Reform Commission and as special legal advisor on family law reform to the Department of Justice, which put him in an important position on a number of campaigns about issues on which his sister was writing. He came out in favour of the
constitutional
ban on abortion in 1983 and against the introduction of divorce in Ireland in 1986, and again in 1995, unsuccessfully, when the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland repealed the constitutional prohibition of divorce.

So, Maeve found herself in the unusual position not of
arguing
against her brother but of airing situations for her individual heroines which could sway public opinion against his. Abortion
rears its head more than once in the novels and in ‘Shepherd’s Bush’, a story in
Central Line
, England’s role as Ireland’s
abortionist
first gets an airing.

May is quiet, shy, naïve and pregnant, a girl from Ireland on her way to London for an abortion. There are no legal abortions in Dublin and May knows no one who has had an illegal one there. England is less than an hour away. We are with her all the way – declaring to Customs that her reason for the visit is ‘business’, arriving at Shepherd’s Bush, seated in the pub where she will meet her friend Celia, where a lot of the accents are Irish, and in the doctor’s surgery with Dr Harris, who of course knows May only as a name on his register, but who gently questions her as to her reasons for the abortion. The avuncular Dr Harris is not just
ticking
boxes here and he charges May not a penny for his services, which is the first thing in the day that really worries her. She is used to paying the doctor at home. Harris tells her to send him a postcard of her beautiful country, which he used to visit with his wife before the Troubles started. So finally to the surgeon, Mr White, not any old surgeon, but well known, where May learns that the cost will be around £180 or £200, in cash. The whole thing is done expertly and efficiently with clinical care, but May’s room-mate in the private hospital turns out to be a girl who avails herself of the abortionist’s services on a regular basis. Almost
flippant
about what she is undertaking, she introduces herself as Hell.

A deeper cut at this issue, still dividing Ireland today, is taken a few years later in
Light a Penny Candle
, where Elizabeth, having long ago returned to London, has an abortion after she becomes pregnant by her regular boyfriend Johnny, whom she loves. She
hasn’t told happy-go-lucky Johnny that she is pregnant because she knows he won’t want to see her any more. Instead she asks Aisling, who has been brought up to see abortion as a fast route to Hell, to guide her.

Aisling can’t see why she won’t tell Johnny and argues that even if he won’t marry Elizabeth when he discovers she’s
pregnant
he’ll admire her all the more for having the baby. If, on the other hand, Elizabeth is decided on having an abortion, then it is a brave thing to do and again Johnny should be informed so that he can respond one way or the other. But to say nothing and try to make out nothing has happened when next they meet is wrong. No good will come of it.

Elizabeth senses that Aisling’s advice, however kind and caring, is plagued by the fact that she still lives under the shadow of the Church and believes everything about souls and limbo and Heaven and it being a mortal sin to have an abortion; that however modern she tries to be, Aisling cannot escape from the attitudes which were impressed upon her in Kilgarret since she was a child.

Going up the steps of the house where the abortionist, Mrs Norris, lives is for Aisling worse than going to confession after she’s been messing around with Ned Barrett. Later she will deny that she knelt in prayer, crying and working her rosary beads while Mrs Norris did her stuff. But Elizabeth knows that she did kneel and pray, because when Mrs Norris told her, she said she used words from ‘Hail Holy Queen’ and Mrs Norris wasn’t a Catholic and wouldn’t have been able to make a prayer like that up, unless she heard Aisling say it:

In
Light a Penny Candle
Maeve is mercilessly subtle in the way she embeds her disenchantment with Catholicism by allowing Aisling to ‘educate’ the naïve Protestant child Elizabeth in the catechism. Because Elizabeth is a Protestant she knows nothing. All must be explained to her. The way Maeve delivers Catholic beliefs is often charming, delightful, but as we smile she also makes us ask ourselves how rational adult minds could have believed some of these things to be true.

Maeve never encourages people not to believe in God –
everyone
is entitled to their own beliefs in her world – but matters of dogma, such as celibacy of the priesthood, are given a thorough going over, as in
Echoes
. Here her interest is in the hypocrisy that the rule engenders when the young priest Sean O’Hara takes a Japanese woman and makes a family with her. She shows the natural values of ‘family’ in conflict with what would seem to be the unnatural rules of the Church. Allied to this is the way the son’s leaving the priesthood undermines the family morally, with the children hiding the truth, just as Maeve had been made to keep her mother in the dark about casting aside her faith.

Behind every issue she tackles in the novels lies her obsession
with truth and its concomitants, hypocrisy and betrayal. Truth is what she looked for in fashioning herself after discarding the fantasies, half-truths and betrayals of her early life, which
threatened
the values that were endemic to her. In the end, Maeve’s fictional world, while breaking away from the status quo,
galvanises
the individual with the very family and community values on which the Christianity she discarded was originally based. But her characters face truth rather than simply paying lip service to it.

Following the great success of
Light a Penny Candle
, Maeve had suffered agonies writing her second novel,
Echoes
, fearing that perhaps she only had the one novel in her. Rosie, her editor, remembers that at first the plan was for a novel again split between Ireland and England, with Oxford the main English focus, but it didn’t work out and Maeve moved the action to Castlebay, lightly disguised setting for her fondly remembered summer holidays in Ballybunion. One character’s physical characteristics are of particular interest, namely those of schoolteacher Angela O’Hara. The drama
The Jewel in the Crown
, based on Paul Scott’s novel, was showing on television at the time she was writing the novel and along with millions of others Maeve was transfixed by the production. She was held
particularly
by Geraldine James in the role of Sarah Layton. She decided that if she would ever want to look like anyone other than herself it would have to be Geraldine James.

Maeve was so taken with the actress that she gave the
good-looking
O’Hara Geraldine’s physical features – her red-brown hair, greenish eyes – and secretly longed for her to play the role
in a film, the rights to which nobody had bought at this stage nor shown any interest in buying.