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Bring back the beast

I want to tell you about a book I love. Its title is The Maiden Dinosaur and it was written by an Irish writer called Janet McNeill. I recently re-read it after a gap of about twenty years, for the Great Northern Novel Debate hosted by the John Hewitt Spring Festival. The idea of the debate is that three writers choose a novel, each with a Northern Irish connection, and pit the three against each other. My choice was up against David Park’s The Truth Commissioner, a book being championed by novelist Heather Richardson, and The Road to Ballyshannon by David Martin, selected by poet Martin Mooney. The assembled audience in the Londonderry Arms Hotel in Carnlough heard the arguments for and against each of the books and then took a vote. The result (for the first time in the Festival’s history) was a draw between McNeill’s book and Park’s. I was pretty pleased with that. David Park is a very popular and successful contemporary novelist. McNeill’s book is, unfortunately, out of print.

The Maiden Dinosaur was first published in 1964 by Geoffrey Bles, and again in 1984 by Blackstaff Press, Belfast and Arlen House, Dublin. The book tells the story of Sarah Vincent, a fifty-two year old unmarried school teacher living in Thronehill, her parental home, on the north shore of Belfast Lough. It is the early 1960’s. Sarah is an only child, her parents have passed on and the once grand Victorian villa is now subdivided into flats, rented by her former school friends or their family members. Thirty-five years after she has left the confines of her middle-class school, Sarah is still surrounded by the people that she has known and loved the best and with whom she feels the safest. She and her friends meet every month in a city tea-room where they reminisce about their school days, and talk about the changing times. The ladies are finding it difficult to adjust, some of them because this new reported sexual liberation is so alien to them (and this is true of Sarah whose friends seem to rely on her to be the archetypal virgin of the group), and some of them, because they regret missing out on it (and this is certainly true of Sarah’s friend Helen). ‘All over the country there are women like us,’ says Addie, one of the more outspoken of the group, ‘taking tea with the friends they were at school with. As if that’s the only time we’d ever really lived.’ That sense of being out-of-step with the time in which one finds oneself hearkens back to the ‘dinosaur’ of the title, but the word has another significance. As a naive schoolgirl, Sarah was confronted with physical love in its most visceral form: she broke in on her father and governess in the act of a violent love-making (a discovery that appears orchestrated by her vindictive and ailing mother) and the experience causes her to make a drastic decision. She would, she decides, take nothing to do with love. She would armour herself against physical intimacy in a way that would make it impossible for her self-preservation to be breached. ‘I can do it,’ she tells herself at the time, ‘I can do anything. There is no need to feel. I can make my own terms… The motions and the mask of loving.’ And it is the motions and the mask of loving that occupy the entire book.

One of the techniques of the book that appeals to me most is the way in which the ghosts of the past continue to inhabit Thronehill: as she enters the hallway, Sarah catches the smell of her father’s cigar; she hears the tinkling of the cow-bell from her mother’s sofa in the drawing room (now Addie’s flat); hears Miss Fennimore’s piano-playing drifting across the hall. The touch is very light: McNeill moves us gently, almost imperceptibly, from the present to the past and the effect is always surprising. We get caught up in Sarah’s everyday life, her school work, her visits, the disastrous (and hilarious) shopping trip for a monstrous purple dress, and these appearances by the former members of her household catch us off-guard. It’s as if these people still need something from her: forgiveness, understanding, atonement. McNeill is incisive about relationships: the multiple ways in which we interact with each other and how the mask that one wears for one situation, or one person, is not the one that is required in another. She writes about the tensions and nuances of friendship quite beautifully. The characters in The Maiden Dinosaur are repeatedly being caught acting the part of their other selves, and so Addie is downstairs greeting her friend’s attractive husband George when she realises that she has been overheard by Sarah on the landing above and is embarrassed about that performance, not because it wasn’t genuine, but because the Addie who greets George is a different version from the one she shows Sarah. They all play games: George’s mentally ill wife Kitty taunts and baits both George and Sarah in turn; Sarah circles around George for news of their absent friend Helen; Helen plays the grieving mother and the abandoned wife for Sarah. McNeill doesn’t shy away from exploring the petty jealousies that dog people, even people who love each other; she is forensic about how fraught even the closest of relationships can be, how beset they are with traps.

This is a book that’s told with real insight and honesty and, it’s important to say, with laugh-out-loud humour. Sarah is also a poet and is undeluded enough to acknowledge that her ego (which she refers to as ‘the beast’) needs to be exercised from time to time. Every writer must identify with this: the beast is permitted an occasional back-scratching, a roll or two around the floor. One of the funniest episodes in the book is a scene in a television studio when Sarah and Addie are invited for an interview about Sarah’s work. The beast, which had been breathing warmly down Sarah’s neck from the back seat of the car on the way to the studio, mysteriously disappears once they enter the building. The importance of finding a ‘shape’ for the interview is impressed upon them by the condescending young presenter who seems determined to present Sarah as a provincial, pastoral poetess. ‘This is where the beast should have made his entrance,’ muses Sarah, ‘but there was no sign of him. Beasts in the Province are private animals, secretly cosseted. One requires a licence from London or America to justify a public parade.’ One can’t help but wonder how much of McNeill’s personal experience was expressed in that sentiment of Sarah’s.

I think it’s a huge shame that this book is no longer in print and I’m wondering if there isn’t a digital publisher out there somewhere who might take it up? The campaign starts here: bring back the scaly beast, regardless of where the licence comes from. It's very much needed. There are few enough Irish women writers of this period in print. It's time to represent.