Book Review: All We Shall Know

Is it possible for a book to be both hauntingly beautiful and deeply depressing? Melody Shee is a bright, educated woman in a stifling small Irish town, where modernity – her elderly father figuring out how to make coffee from videos online – and oppressive tradition collide. She first ‘lost her reason’ at fourteen, at her mother’s funeral, seeing the lie of rosary beads threaded through her still, pale hands; now at thirty-three she is often on shaky ground, contemplating suicide in the early days of her pregnancy.

This is her fourth pregnancy, the only one not to end in blood and pain and an ever-increasing distance between herself and Pat, her husband and childhood sweetheart. It is also not Pat’s child, which the community quickly discover. What they don’t know is that the father is Martin Toppy, a seventeen-year-old Traveller Melody was teaching how to read. What they don’t know is that Pat is not alone in the town in his frequenting of prostitutes – not that anyone wants to hear this, when there’s a woman to judge and shame.

Melody judges herself harshest of all, despite occasional moments of defiance; she frequently refers to herself as a bitch of various kinds and sees herself as a sinner in need of redemption. She is still haunted by the small-town politics, and the betrayal of a best friend that ended in a suicide. This is a place of dark secrets, of things not quite said, of horribleness. It is a place of both allegedly ‘respectable’ sorts and the rowdier Traveller community, getting involved in violent family feuds – a place that has been touched by the technology but not the social changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

So it is depressing, but also beautifully written and observed; the dialect is particularly strong and Melody, for all that she might be viewed as an unsympathetic heroine, is shockingly real and relatable.