AAbout 14% of Ireland is moorland: vast areas of moss-covered land, beneath which layers of ancient history have blended into the moist grass-black turf. Captivated by their unearthly beauty, Seamus Heaney wrote some of his best poems about bogs – and about the bodies discovered, perfectly preserved, in their eerie depths.
Sheila Armstrong’s excellent second novel, The Red Mouth, also focuses on two swamp discoveries: the “monster, swamp-black deer” of a great Irish elk, and the dismembered body of a girl known as the Bellero Woman. From here we follow the interconnected lives of these haunted people, literally and figuratively, through these excavations and the supernatural landscape they yielded.
There’s Patch, a recently returned immigrant facing bone-aching loneliness, soothed only by a rescue dog who leads him to a deer antler in the earth. And Maeve, a socially concerned scientist, is sent to conduct an environmental assessment of the swamp, but there she finds “a penetrating fear, a languid acceptance of death”. Decades earlier, Tomas, a turf-cutter, is trying to support his young family even as the advances of progress threaten his way of life. She meets Professor Liam Fleming, an archaeologist whose relentless obsession with the Bellero Woman defines her career, while the women around her – her estranged partner, her troubled young daughters – fall apart.
Armstrong’s acclaimed debut novel, 2023’s Falling Animals, also began with two discoveries – first a dead seal, then a dead man on a beach in County Sligo – before expanding outward, with each of its 18 chapters told from a different perspective. In The Red Mouth, we follow the same characters through time: troubled young daughters becoming troubled adults; The Bellero Woman becomes a museum exhibit and a symbol of Irish history that may or may not exist; The swamp becomes a managed forest and becomes a national park.
Time is a preoccupation for the characters too. Tomas, for example, considers the word “evolution” as “certainly evolution has already occurred, over hundreds of thousands of years, by the pressure and formation of a blanket of peat across a reef in the middle of the Atlantic”. And yet, Tomas also finds himself returning to Fleming’s mantra that “there are no experts, there are only us, only now”. This tension between the ancient past and one’s immediate present is at the center of today’s climate conversation – and indeed, at the center of much of today’s climate narrative. How can we foster an appreciation of deep geological time while recognizing the particular urgency of our current, cataclysmic moment?
In the hands of another novelist such concerns might have seemed abstract or burdensome, but the remarkable strength of Armstrong’s writing ensures that this is never the case. Outside the swamp we find “a cool green matrix of sphagnum” and “large sods arranged in uneven mounds that imitate the droppings of some great animal”; Above are “swirling sherbet skies” and “buttery August light”. The prose throughout is peppered with scientific terms, ancient folklore, and snippets of Irish language.
This vivid lyricism is reminiscent of other Irish writers like Paul Lynch or Sarah Baum (Patch and His Dog, in particular, on Baum’s gorgeous debut Spill Simmer Falter Wither). Viewed from a distance, the reading experience resembles Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, where a handful of individual lives and private concerns are pitted against a vast and sublime beauty – only this time we’re not in heaven, but down in the dirt. Like Harvey’s novel, some readers of The Red Mouth may bemoan the lack of dialogue or clear plot. There are no great sensations: time unfolds in quiet increments; New losses accrue; Mysteries are set up only to remain unanswered. However, as one of Fleming’s daughters, Brigitte, realised, life is like that: “Things happen one after another, and there is no smooth parabolic curve that can connect all the checkpoints… Uncertainty is the only certainty”. In Armstrong’s meditative and profound novel, such uncertainty, so masterfully presented, is more than enough to keep us going to the end.
