IRELAND
Irish Independent
Fiction: The Ballroom Cafe: Secrets Can’t Last Forever, Ann O’Loughlin, Black and White Publishing, pbk, 322 pages, €11.28
Maggie Armstrong
PUBLISHED
19/07/2015
Irish people are only now learning about the forced adoption of babies born to unmarried mothers in mother-and-baby homes, a money-making scheme which may have gone on until the 1970s. Ann O’Loughlin quite fearlessly enters this little-explored ground in her first novel.
A long-time Irish Independent journalist and now reporter with the Irish Examiner, this time she bends the facts into a tale of scandal heaped upon scandal.
Setting her story in remote Co Wicklow in 2008, the author creates a home for our imagination in Roscarbury Hall, the tumbledown mansion shared by ageing sisters Ella and Roberta O’Callaghan.
Slow-marching, romantic prose draws us into an old world that is rustic, genteel, quaint – almost de Valera’s Ireland preserved in aspic.
Scandals lie in wait. It emerges the sisters don’t speak, they communicate through notes. (The many epistolary exchanges in the novel inspired the designers to add as many naff forms of handwriting. Though a book shouldn’t be judged on its fonts.) There is a “hard frost, thick and deep, between them”.
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