Kevin Curran, review of All We Shall Know', in The Observer (28 Aug. 2016) [sub-title -‘The Irish writer’s third novel explores new territory - a foray into the Traveller community - but his heroine lacks depth’]: ‘Donal Ryan’s third novel is a departure for him. With his previous two books he cruised along easy street with tales of woe and tragedy that picked up praise and rewards on the way, their unlikely heroes plucking at our heart strings. Here, with his female anti-hero Melody Shee, Ryan turns his back on the formula and veers off-road. Expect a bumpy ride. / Melody is 33 and has just informed her husband - who “13 and a bit weeks ago was the only boy I’d ever kissed” - that her unborn child is not his. A 17-year-old Traveller named Martin Toppy, whom she taught for more than a year, is the father. / [...] Refreshingly, Melody refuses to be a victim like the many narrators of Ryan’s other novels. But as if to offset this denial of easy sympathy, every other character becomes weak and needy. Within the opening 40-odd pages, everyone (other than Melody) cries: Melody’s husband on hearing about the pregnancy, Martin Toppy when he first arrives to be tutored, Melody’s father at the kitchen table, her childhood friend, Breedie, and a young Traveller woman, Mary. It is unrelenting. [...] It is the flashbacks to Melody’s relationship with Martin that gives the book much of its colour, but the moral consequences of her actions - seducing a boy of 16 over the course of a year - could have been examined in more depth. / Undoubtedly a departure for Ryan, All We Shall Know is a brave attempt at extending his oeuvre. It might just be an extension too far.’ (Available online; accessed 23.09.2016.)

Roy Foster, ‘All We Shall Know review: No flash in the pan’, in The Irish Times (17 Sept. 2016): ‘Donal Ryan’s fourth work of fiction in as many years shares some trademarks with its predecessors: short, brilliantly colloquial, lyrical, sometimes brutal. The universe is small-town and rural Ireland in a state of postmodern decay, peopled by the sad, the no-hopers, the binge drinkers. Bankrupt builders visit Latvian prostitutes in Limerick motels; threatening vigilantes patrol grass-grown housing estates; implicit violence hangs in the air and often bursts into reality. / But in some ways All We Shall Know is a new and ambitious departure: a story told from a woman’s viewpoint, where thwarted love drives the action rather than the search for drug-fuelled oblivion. Where it works, the novel exerts a powerful grip; even where it falters it remains in the mind. There is also a new (and not altogether successful) element that suggests an older Irish trope: faery lore. [...] That her young lover was also her pupil, and that she was teaching him to read - “All he brang home from school was nits” - suggest an echo of Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller’s alarmingly polished psychodrama. But Melody’s world is closer to that of a Marina Carr play, with its lurches into Grand Guignol and jarring flourishes of language. [...T]he novel moves towards a conclusion where forgiveness and redemption feature more optimistically than in Ryan’s earlier work, suggesting the world of Sebastian rather than Kevin Barry. The parallel structures of the novel are laid before the reader. / Mary is also the survivor of a passionate, confrontational and childless marriage. Her destiny and Melody’s final act of grace suggest a completed symmetry that does not carry full conviction, seen against the savage, ragged and unforgiving world that both women have inhabited. / But the novel, written at white heat in sentences that sometimes flow for a full paragraph, reads compulsively and is delivered with an impressively disciplined power. Ryan’s rise to prominence may have been meteoric and his output dizzyingly prolific, but he is a writer who is very far from being a flash in the pan.’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

John Burnside, review of All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan, in The Guardian (22 Sept. 2016) ‘At first glance, it may seem that Donal Ryan is returning to the well-proven territory of the 2013 Guardian first book award-winning, and Man Booker-longlisted, The Spinning Heart, or his much-praised The Thing About December of the same year. But as All We Shall Know progresses, we watch with growing fascination as he expands, not only his emotional range, but also his social sphere. The book builds on those earlier works to establish Ryan beyond dispute as one of the finest writers working in Ireland today. [...] As the book approaches its difficult conclusion, the possibility of healing, of atonement, is at least suggested by the narrator’s last, extraordinary gesture. Without disclosing the details of this final scene, it does not seem extravagant to claim it is worthy of Greek drama. That the tragedies of our own age happen in suburban semis, or on Travellers’ sites, does not make them any less cathartic - and Ryan’s choice of narrator, a character both deeply flawed and painfully guilty, shows him working in the great tradition of tragic fiction, his lonely adulteress coming to grief in the same shadowy spaces as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.’ [The reviewer substantially summarises the plot and characters ad interim.] (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

[ top ]

Notes
Day-job: In Feb. 2017, Ryan made it know to an Irish Independent interviewer that his income from writing was insufficient to pay a mortgage and that he was obliged to return to work as a civil servant - but also says that when he started writing he knew that he had to be “sellable”t; because he was in increasing debt as a result of the effect of government strigencies on his civil service salary.

[ top ]