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Answers come from different strands of the novel: we are driven by shame and guilt, by loneliness and the urge to share what we know. So why did they do it? Robert thinks of those “old battered murderers speaking into their microphones” and asks why so many of us feel compelled to speak out the truth of our lives. Those who spoke knew it was dangerous to put their stories on record, whatever guarantees were given. News has broken that transcripts are going to be released from the Boston tapes – the interviews with loyalist and IRA fighters recorded by researchers at Boston College in the early 2000s on the understanding that they would not be made public until after the death of the interviewees.

Robert is thinking about war as well as love. In Turning for Home, Robert attests to the power of his long marriage in ways so moving that one wonders why as a society we are so much more eager to hear about young love than old. In his 2014 play Visitors, Norris thought his way into the lives of an elderly couple, still in love despite their failing bodies and signs of dementia.

#BARNEY MIN DANCING BALLET HOW TO#

But here again is the wistful lyricism that distinguishes all Norris’s work, the philosophical intelligence, and the acute, demotic empathy with people of diverse ages and in different kinds of trouble.įew young novelists have been so attentive to old age, yet considering our ageing population, the giant unsolved problem of how to care for the elderly and the complicated pain of seeing our relatives struggle on, the need for literary engagement feels urgent. This book is also a looser whole, and I missed the distinctive sense of place that shaped Five Rivers.

The two voices are similar in tone, so that the chord they make is less surprising than in the first novel. Robert and Kate narrate the same day from their separate vantage points, longing to understand and support each other but called away into their private preoccupations. Turning for Home again features alternating monologues. Norris’s great achievement was to make their voices work in harmony, like notes sounding together in a chord. Its five characters were exhilaratingly various: an army wife, a security guard, a teenage boy, a widower and a rough-spoken flower seller with a sideline in drugs – their complex lives all converging at the same moment in Salisbury, with the cathedral spire rising above them. Norris’s first novel, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, won huge acclaim. At 25, vulnerable but surviving, she is continually conscious of how close she came to starving herself to death. It’s a hard day, too, for his granddaughter Kate, who must speak to her mother for the first time in years. And he finds himself willingly recalled to his former role as an intermediary in the negotiations that followed the Enniskillen bombing and led towards the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation. He is wondering how he can get through the day without Hattie, the love of his life. But at 80, recently widowed, Robert hasn’t much heart for celebration. The family is gathering for his birthday, as it has gathered each May for the last 40 years. It’s set, for the most part, on a single day somewhere in the Hampshire countryside, at the home of the ageing Robert. I’m not sure it entirely holds together, but the disjunctions are part of what makes this courageous piece of work so memorable, strange and sad.

And by the end one feels that perhaps it has been most of all a study of the relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter. It moves, gradually, towards a terrifying account of anorexia. T his second novel by the highly accomplished Barney Norris, who made his name as a playwright before publishing fiction, begins as a book about the peace process in Ireland, memory, guilt and confession.

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