The Red Mouth by Sheila Armstrong review – an in-depth exploration of the Irish period | Fiction

AAbout 14% of Ireland is barren: most of the land is moss-carpeted, beneath which layers of history have been combined into mulch-black turf. Fascinated by their otherworldly beauty, Seamus Heaney wrote his best poems about bogs – and bodies were found, well preserved, in their murky depths.

Sheila Armstrong’s second best novel, The Red Mouth, focuses on two discoveries: the “terrible, black antler” of a large Irish elk, and the mutilated body of a girl known as the Belroe Woman. From here we follow the intersecting lives of the people who lived there, literally and figuratively, and these excavations and the amazing places that produced them.

There’s Patch, a recently arrived émigré raising a bone-chilling loneliness, only to be warmed by a rescue dog who leads him to the horns of the world. And there’s Maeve, a worried scientist sent to investigate the universe, only to discover “a great fear, an acceptance of death”. Decades earlier, Tomás, a turf cutter, is trying to support his young family even as progress threatens his life. He meets Professor Liam Fleming, an archaeologist whose constant obsession with the Belroe Woman comes to define his work, while the women around him – his estranged girlfriend, his troubled daughters – fall apart.

Armstrong’s best-known novel, 2023’s Falling Animals, began with two discoveries – first a dead seal, then a dead man on a beach in County Sligo – before expanding outward, with all 18 chapters told in different ways. In The Red Mouth, we circle the same characters over time: troubled teenage daughters become troubled adults; Belroe Woman becomes a museum exhibit and symbol of Irish history that may or may not exist; The bog becomes a managed wilderness and becomes a National Park.

Time is a concern for characters too. Tomás, for example, remembers the word “civilization”, since “certainly civilization has already happened, hundreds of thousands of years, the printing and formation of a blanket of peat across the rock singing itself in the middle of the Atlantic”. And yet, Tomás found himself returning to Fleming’s words that “there are no experts in this, just us, only here”. This conflict between the past and the present is at the heart of today’s climate debate – and, indeed, much of today’s fiction. How can we foster an appreciation of the earth’s deep time while also recognizing the urgency of our present, tragic times?

In the hands of another novelist such anxieties might sound absurd or burdensome, but the extraordinary power of Armstrong’s writing proves otherwise. Outside the bog we find “green sphagnum matrices” and “mature spikes placed in uneven piles that imitate the droppings of some large animal”; above is “curved sherbet sky” and “buttery August light”. The entire history is filled with scientific terms, ancient legends and short Irish words.

These beautiful songs remind us of other Irish writers such as Paul Lynch or Sara Baume (Patch and his dog, in particular, resemble Baume’s beautiful appearance. Spill Simmer Falter Wither). From a distance, the readings resemble those of Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, where some modest life and private concerns are set against a grand and majestic beauty – this time we are not in the sky, but underground. As with Harvey’s novel, some readers of The Red Mouth may lament the lack of dialogue or apparent plot. There are no great epiphanies: time spreads in silent increments; new losses are incurred; mysteries are set to remain unanswered. However, as Brigit, one of Fleming’s daughters, realizes, life is like that: “things happen, one after another, and there is no smooth connecting path that can connect all the places… uncertainty is the only certainty”. In Armstrong’s meditative and profound book, such uncertainty, interpreted so profoundly, is enough to sustain us to the end.