Book Review : Fate Echoes Through an Irish Town

Echoes by Maeve Binchy (Viking: $17.95)

This is the kind of long, female-oriented, romance-family that is meant to be read by literate women with lots of time on their hands. That is, “Echoes,” if I read correctly, is food for the minds and hearts of women who are staying home with their children; but women who know how to read, who yearn for the larger world outside their dooryards, and who remember, however dimly, that there’s something else to life.

“Echoes” is in Ireland, in a skimpy little seaside resort that must make enough money to exist economically for the rest of the year from a slim 11-week summer season. No one will ever die of loneliness in this little town, the way people might in a big city like London, or even Dublin, but intolerance and ignorance are the watchwords, and although no one in Castlebay is terribly rich, many are terribly, irredeemably poor.

All of the sociological details of the town of Castlebay are right on the money. Three families share the focus here: Molly and Paddy Powers are part of the “gentry;” he’s the town doctor, she’s from Dublin, pines for distractions, dresses in two-piece knits, gets her hair “done” once a week, holds herself above the rest of the town, and--because of her largely self-imposed isolation--turns from a snob to a monster.

At the other end of the spectrum, Agnes and Tom O’Brien own a cluttered store on the cliffside. Tourists climbing up from the beach pause there for ice cream wrapped in newspaper. Townsfolk stop in for cigs and black pudding. Because of a series of miscarriages and stillbirths, that snobby doctor’s wife has only one child, a handsome lad named David. But the O’Briens, being practicing Catholics like everyone else in town, have a horde of untalented, unattractive, unlovable progeny: Tom and Ned and Chrissy and Ben and another one, and stuck in the middle, Clare, who, for reasons clear neither to herself nor the citizens of Castlebay nor the reader, is brilliant, beautiful and driven to shine academically. Clare will become the scholarship girl, travel as far as Dublin, and attend University College for her BA degree. Does it give it away to suggest that David and Clare are the Big Item in this book?

The fulcrum of this teeter-totter between rich and poor, between city and town, is the Doyle family. Old Mr. Doyle is a beach photographer. Mrs. Doyle is an agoraphobic. Young Fiona Doyle is beautiful, mysterious and as far as anyone knows chaste as snow. Gerry Doyle is gorgeous (short, though, so you know from the beginning he’s doomed to fail in love). But as far as the lark-abouts of Castlebay are concerned, what Gerry wants, Gerry gets. He’s the really interesting character here, because he’s almost smart enough, but not really smart enough. His father tells Gerry--with his dying breath-- Don’t expand the business! That seems like bad advice, because Castlebay is growing as a resort, but the reader knows, since this occurs in the ‘50s, that Polaroid cameras are going to be invented and beach photographers belong to the past. So, the Doyles are intelligent, but strangled by small-town mores and not quite enough IQ points. And Gerry can have anyone he wants . . . except Clare O’Brien.

The “Echoes” theme is played out thus: there is, in town, one Angela O’Hara, a 28-year-old virgin, who was herself a scholarship student years ago. She had “a great future ahead of her,” but her sisters fled the town and her brother went away to be a missionary. Angela got tagged to come home to Castlebay to care for her arthritic old mother. When Angela sees young Clare O’Brien, so smart, locked in the squalor of her working-class family, she vows that this beautiful and intelligent girl will move, through the magic of education, up and into a better class, and get a generally squarer shake than she, Angela has had.

Alas! Fate has other plans in store for all these characters. But it won’t hurt to reveal the message of this book to women: Work as hard as you can! Aim for the stars! Never count yourself down and out! Never go to a dance if you can hit the books instead. Do all this, and if you’re good, if you’re very good, you may end up married to a womanizing swine, with a baby and a bad case of postpartum depression.

What in the name of all that’s right and just is this message supposed to mean? Pity the women at home who read this--and believe it.