Forget about the clean, green, bucolic valleys and hills of Ireland's countryside. The Glorious Heresies, Lisa McInerney's debut novel and winner of the 2016 Baileys Women's Prize for fiction, focuses on the gritty underbelly of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. The inner-city Cork the characters occupy is tough, irreverent, and grim, but it has its darkly comic side as well, splendidly rendered in McInerney's exuberant, lilting, and profane prose.
Some reviewers say the novel begins with a murder, but technically, when grandmother Maureen Phelan clocks an intruder on the head with a tacky religious tchotchke, it's more a case of self-defense, or at worst manslaughter. Maureen calls in her fearsome gangster son Jimmy to dispose of the body, he involves Tony, a ne'er-do-well former schoolmate, and the repercussions of Maureen's act ultimately connect not only Maureen, Jimmy, and Tony, but also Jimmy's teenage son Ryan and sex worker Georgie, who's half-heartedly trying to escape her trade and her drug habit through religion.
The dwindling power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, along with its cruel legacy with regard to unwed mothers (as shown in the film The Magdalen Sisters) provide much of the foundation to The Glorious Heresies. The moral gap left by the fading of religion is described by one of the characters: "There's nothing there. No confessor, no penitent, no sin, no sacrament. Just actions to be burned away." For many in the book, that gap is filled by alcohol, drugs, and violence. There's not much to be had by way of redemption, but McInerney's narrative genius, tough gallows humor, and the absolute pleasure she offers in her use of language make it a novel well worth savoring. Lisa McInerney is indeed a glorious new talent.
