Eggshells
Caitriona Lally
Liberties Press
Caitriona Lally’s first novel traces protagonist Vivian Lawlor’s life after the recent death of her great-aunt. Everyone mourns differently, but posting the ashes of your deceased relative to strangers is fairly unconventional. This immediate introduction to the character’s mind is indicative of what to expect from Eggshells: dark humour and bizarre behaviour. Vivian is trying to find her way back to ‘another world’, where her parents said she really came from. This task has her chasing fairies and leprechauns around Dublin, much to the dismay of the humans she encounters along the way. Her only ally is the equally eccentric Penelope – a friend acquired through the age-old method of advertising on a tree trunk.
Eggshells expresses a Joycean sense of the ordinary as extraordinary, partially through modernist literary experimentation such as Vivian’s unique sketches and lists. Primarily, though, the experimentation is literal, as Vivian attempts various strategies in her quest to escape from this world. She states that she likes ‘to get lost in worlds inside other characters’ heads’. Lally’s brilliantly realised first-person narrative invites the reader to do just that. However, Eggshells also challenges us to interpret what it articulates about subjectivity, communication, and loneliness. With irony both comic and tragic, Vivian explains that sometimes it’s hard to know if Penelope is ‘very strange or very clever’. A memorable debut, this novel is not about knowing, but about never assuming to know.
Words: Peter Morgan
