Review of The Coast Road by Alan Murrin

Murrin's fascinating debut novel introduces a small town filled with complicated relationships and allows resentments, suspicions, petty grudges, and betrayals to swirl into powerful, dark forces that drive apart various characters and destroy lives.

"In my day the worst thing you could imagine was being unmarried--you just went with the first fellow who asked you.”

It's 1994 in a small town in County Donegal, Ireland. Izzy is a housewife increasingly impatient with her husband's controlling nature and public-focused politician's persona.

Colette is a poet who left her husband and sons for love with a married man in Dublin, but who has now returned--to a mix of resentment and fascination.

When the women become unlikely friends, their lives intersect in unexpected ways. Izzy is the avenue by which Colette hopes to have access to her children again, and Colette's bravery might inspire Izzy to break free of her unsupportive husband. Meanwhile both have become friends with the local priest, Father Brian Dempsey, who is an unjudgmental, joyful presence in their small worlds.

But this is not a charming small-town Irish story. Murrin's characters are bitter, sad, entitled, frustrated, bullying, resentful, put-upon, or angry. Some are blindsided by others' outbursts and demands; others fold under pressure they didn't expect. Some vendettas take on power and lead to pivotal breaks. The dark undercurrent to the story and the town grows more formidable as the story evolves, and characters prove themselves capable of more cruelty, more cold-blooded plotting, and more petty destruction than I had imagined.

In some relationships within the story, potentially enormous shifts fizzle and never take shape. In others, looming consequences and feared repercussions send various delicate situations over the edge; what seemed like empty threats of divorce dramatically shake up a family; what seemed like a temporary distance becomes tragically permanent; what seemed like harmless jealousy sends a citizen out of town forever; what seemed to be a couple playing at betrayal becomes a high-stakes, deadly situation.

Murrin's dialogue is perfection. The sing-songy cadence and negative questions ("Did she not...?" structure) feels perfectly Irish. A sinister feeling emerges and simmers throughout the remainder of the novel, ultimately leading to increasingly large emotional explosions that dramatically shift the story.

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The Coast Road is Alan Murrin's debut novel.

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