In any case, the lilt of his poetic prose is not enough to carry the novel. It feels as if you are running, tripping, stumbling along - even if sentences starting in fashionably lower-case letters become irritating after a while.
Watermark sense by clodagh full#
He plays with punctuation, often leaving out full stops, which gives Watermark a breathless quality. O'Reilly's imagery is fresh and inventive he can conjure up a mood, pin down a nuance, capture a fleeting emotion with one startling simile.
But the only joy in Watermark is in the language. When, near the end, we are told that happiness is still alive in Veronica "like a bird in the bare dripping branch singing", there is fleeting hope that respite is on the way. A sense of "ugly dread", as O'Reilly puts it, is woven into the fabric of this dark book. This woman is ruptured and her insides spill out on every page. At one point, she says, "I am a statue in a city of love," yet there is nothing at all to suggest that love exists in any shape or form in Sean O'Reilly's dystopia. It is difficult too to know who Veronica is. possessed of a demon spirit", yet we rarely have a sense of who he really is. The most present, Veronica's housemate Donal, is drawn as "difficult, enigmatic.
Yet few of the characters are fully fleshed out. Veronica is surrounded by broken people who lead fragmented, unsatisfying lives in an unspecified Irish city that is a mecca of drinking, parties and dislocation. It is a novel that looks melancholy straight in the face and never shies away from the almost unbearable pain of a woman who is trying "to make herself come true".īut she is not alone. The language is brutal, the fantasies male and the juxtaposition of violence and beauty is uncomfortable, to say the least. Like Flaubert, O'Reilly tries to get into the female psyche but his exploration of Veronica's sexuality and his graphic descriptions of her sexual encounters - real or imagined - with men are deeply unsettling. If Emma sought solace in affairs, shopping and later motherhood, Veronica is driven into a nightmarish search for intimacy after her lover Martin abandons her. Veronica, the protagonist, has been described as an Emma Bovary for our age - and, like Flaubert's famous character, she does appear to be on a relentless search to fill some gaping hole within. That familiar lyrical voice opens his latest offering Watermark, and the reader is quickly drawn into a contemporary urban landscape where the hollowness of materialism is visible everywhere in the cinnamon tan of a limousine-driver, in his slick artificial smile, in the heroine's firebranded verdigris cowboy boots. His first two novels - Love and Sleep and The Swing of Things - are greetedwith acclaim, the latter appearing on more than oneliterary shortlist. Watermark Sean O'Reilly Stinging Fly Press, ?10.00 THE story so far: Derry-born Sean O'Reilly is hailed as a talented new writer whose raw, lyrical voice exposes the underbelly of prosperous 21st-century Ireland.
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