The Dazzling Truth by Helen Cullen -Review & Excerpt
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Description:
When we met we were such untethered spirits floating through the world, as if one of us might drift away if we didn’t hold hands tightly. We were imperfect people, who fitted perfectly together.
On an island off the west coast of Ireland, the Moone family are shattered by tragedy.
Murtagh Moone is a potter and devoted husband to Maeve, an actor struggling with her most challenging role yet – being a mother to their four children. Now Murtagh must hold his family close as we bear witness to their story before that tragic night.
We return to the day Maeve and Murtagh meet, outside Trinity College in Dublin, and watch how one love story gives rise to another. And as the Moone children learn who their parents truly are, we journey onwards with them to a future that none of the Moones could predict . . .
Except perhaps Maeve herself.
Review:
The Dazzling Truth by Helen Cullen is a standalone Irish family saga. The story revolves around the Moone family in Ireland, which starts off with a terrible tragedy in 2005, that shatters the family. Maeve and Murtagh Moone and their 4 children live on a small island (Inis Óg) west of the mainland. It is Christmas Eve, and when morning comes Murtagh realizes Maeve is not home. He knows she likes to take walks when she needs to be alone, but he becomes concerned when she has not returned. The family and the townsfolk all help to look for Maeve, and late that day she will tragically be found, with Murtagh trying to hold his family together.
The story then switches to 1978, detailing how Maeve and Murtagh met at college, and how an American woman and an Irish man fell in love. Maeve was an inspiring actress and Murtagh had a bright future as a potter, creating wonderful ceramics. The storyline then jumps forward each chapter by a year or two, as we learn all aspects of their life. Murtagh’s understanding and helping Maeve, when her bipolar depressive condition acts up, which will get progressively worse over the years. They move to Inis Og, where Maeve will give up her career, and Murtagh becomes successful; friendships develop, and mostly the birth of each of their children; Nollaig (first girl), twins Mossy & Dillion, and Sive the youngest girl. Maeve manages to control her issues (which started slowly when she was very young), but her debilitating condition worsens her to exhaustion, doing her best to not let her family know how bad it has become. This will eventually lead to the tragedy that takes place in 2005
The story then moves forward after the tragedy with the family suffering and coming apart through the seams. We watch as each child over the years has a hard time dealing with what happened, and Murtagh does his best to keep them together.
The Dazzling Truth was a story of family, love, tragedy, mental illness, with good/bad times; especially with the children going on with their own lives and dealing with the past. I have to say that early the story was a bit slow, but the ending was very well done and satisfying. The Dazzling Truth was very well written by Helen Cullen.
Reviewed by Barb
Copy provided by Publisher
But Maeve wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table.
Nor was she meditating on the stone step of the back door drinking milk straight from the glass bottle it was delivered in.
She wasn’t dozing on the living-room sofa, the television on but silent, an empty crystal tumbler tucked inside the pocket of her peacock-blue silk dressing gown, the one on which she had painstakingly embroidered a murmuration of starlings in the finest silver thread.
Instead, there was an empty space on the bannister where her coat should have been hanging.
Murtagh opened the front door and flinched at a swarm of spitting raindrops. The blistering wind mocked the threadbare cotton of his pyjamas. He bent his head into the onslaught and pushed forward, dragging the heavy scarlet door behind him. The brass knocker clanged against the wood; he flinched, hoping it had not woken the children. Shivering, he picked a route in his slippers around the muddy puddles spreading across the cobblestoned pathway. Leaning over the wrought-iron gate that separated their own familial island from the winding lane of the island proper, he scanned the dark horizon for a glimpse of Maeve in the faraway glow of a streetlamp.
In the distance, the sea and sky had melted into one anthracite mist, each indiscernible from the other. Sheep huddled together for comfort in Peadar Óg’s field, the waterlogged green that bordered the Moones’ land to the right; the plaintive baying of the animals sounded mournful. Murtagh nodded at them.
There was no sight of Maeve.
As he turned back towards the house he noticed Nollaig watching him from her bedroom window. The eldest daughter, she always seemed to witness the moments her parents had believed—hoped—were cloaked in invisibility, and then remained haunted by what she had seen. Ever since she was a toddler, Murtagh had monitored how her understanding grew, filling her up, and knew it would soon flood her eyes, always so questioning, permanently.
He waved at her as he blew back up the pathway. Later, he would feel the acute pain of finally recognising the prescience his daughter seemed to have absorbed from the womb.
‘How long is she gone?’
Nollaig was now standing before the hallway mirror, her face contorted as she vigorously tried to brush her frizzy mouse-brown hair into shape. She scraped it together into a tight ponytail that thrust from the back of her head as if it were a fox’s brush.
‘Ach, you should leave your gorgeous curls be, Noll,’ her father cajoled, ‘instead of fighting them.’
She smiled at him but slammed the mother-of-pearl hairbrush down on the sideboard.
‘I don’t have curls, I have Brillo pads,’ she sighed. ‘Did she say where she was going?’
Murtagh squeezed his daughter’s arm as he continued into the kitchen. ‘I’m sure your mother is just out for a walk. Happy birthday, love. Lá breithla shona duit.’
He placed a small copper saucepan of water on the range to boil and waved the invitation of an egg at his daughter. She nodded begrudgingly and curled into the green-and-gold striped armchair that sat in front of the stove.
‘With your white nightdress, you could almost pass for the Irish flag,’ he joked, and was gratified with her snort of glee.
He watched the clock hand count three minutes in silence. Expected any moment to hear his soaked wife splash through the door. He was poised, ready to run towards her with a towel and hushed reprimands for her careless wandering, but the boiling, cooling, cupping, cracking and spooning of each egg passed uninterrupted. Nollaig yawned, stretching her arms and legs before her in a stiff salute.
‘Why don’t you go back to bed for an hour?’ Murtagh asked. ‘We’ll all have proper breakfast together later.’
She eyed him with suspicion but acquiesced. ‘If Mam’s not back soon,’ she said, sidling away, ‘come and wake me. Promise? We’ll go out and find her. Remind her what day it is, for God’s sake.’
Murtagh nodded, ushered his daughter out of the kitchen and watched her climb the stairs.
Born on Christmas Eve, twenty years before, she was the only one of their children who came into the world via Galway maternity hospital and not into the impatient arms of Máire O’Dulaigh, the midwife of the island. She resented it; how it made her feel less of a true islander. What was more, the specialness of her own day for individual attention, her birth day, was irrevocably lost in the shared excitement of Christmas. In retrospect, it had been a mistake, perhaps, naming her Nollaig, the Irish for Christmas, and further compounding the association. No nickname had ever stuck, however. She wasn’t the sort of child who inspired others to claim her for their own with the intimacy of a given name.
‘Born ancient,’ her little sister, Sive, always said of her, with bored disdain.
And Murtagh sympathised. Nollaig carried the weight of being the eldest with pained perseverance, heavy responsibilities that were self-imposed. Her mother harboured a not always silent resentment of it, and it seemed only natural, if unfair, that Maeve and Sive gravitated more towards each other; the baby of the family shared her mother’s wit and wildness and often expressed the irritation her mother tried to hide at Nollaig’s sense of duty.Excerpted from The Dazzling Truth by Helen Cullen, Copyright © 2020 by Helen Cullen.
Published by Graydon House Books
HELEN CULLEN wrote her debut novel, The Lost Letters of William Woolf, while completing the Guardian/UEA novel writing program. She holds an MA in Theatre Studies from University College Dublin and is currently studying further at Brunel. Prior to writing full-time, Helen worked in journalism, broadcasting and most recently as a creative events and engagement specialist. Helen is Irish and currently lives in London.
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