by Ali Smith
(a review of the novels of Martina Evans)
Times Literary Supplement, March 24, 2000
Martina Evans’s first two novels dealt with the pressures of modern peer-group behaviour and popular culture on a tradition-bound people. In Midnight Feast (1996), a story of charismatic starvation (rather like an anorexic Madchen in Uniform), Evans takes Southern Irish sexual and religious repressions to their unhealthy conclusion; her convent-girl heroine’s “own mystical song” is playing in her head as she comes “out of the Lourdes’ dormitory”, having made herself sick after eating. The protagonist of The Glass Mountain (1997), Maeve, desperate to be a punk in Cork but scared of the Devil and noises in the dark, spends the novel coming to terms with what anarchy might actually mean. Both books are determined reclamations of innocence, their poorly nourished girls sharing a craving for sweet things, guiltily in denial about their fascination with the body, and brought by Evans through narrative chaos to the kindness of a semi-happy ending. In both, Evan’s prose shimmers somewhere strange and changeable between peculiarly heightened realism and sheer fever.
In her third novel with the monster of early adolescence and the existentialism of early adulthood behind her, Evans approaches these same preoccupations -nourishment, guilt, sexual prohibition - with a maturity of voice, a calm steady temperature and a new narrative clarity. No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors, a story of the demise of the Poleites, a dwindling Protestant sect in a tiny Southern Irish village gives her the perfect narrative: a repressed culture within a repressed culture.
“Poleites didn’t have a church, they weren’t allowed to listen to music; no gramophones, no radios, no televisions. They couldn’t go to the cinema and mix with crowds. No pubs. They couldn’t go to a dancehall to slide their feet over a slippery floor. They weren’t allowed medical treatment.” Recognising a gift horse when she sees it, Evans goes to town on the eroticizing of the forbidden, and some of the best writing here is about the hedonism of “longing for purity and cures”, the “witchcraft” of the pharmacy, the hopelessly taboo promise of anti-biotics. Alongside the younger, pert, non-Poleite villagers, the “infidels” who know how to work banned washing machines and X-ray machines, dark Beulah Kingston, the novel’s grave helplessly embittered and likeable protagonist, has spent a lifetime wanting what she can never have and hiding her sinful desires (her craving for the jaunty Catholic doctor to “examine” her and tell her the latin names of bones, and her frivolous enjoyment of the smells and bright colours of bottles of fabric conditioner).
As well as providing a healthy excoriation of the oppressive religious and national structures that force her characters to repeat stultified or inherited roles, Evans examines the question of what constitutes health. Beulah’s failing health, she suggests, is the failing health of all those whose religious myopia leaves them frail, even tragically blunted. But there is a sense in which the characters of No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors are allowed to be less blunt, more human than those in her other novels. Although driven hard by the plot’s good strong melodrama, bursting with unrequited loves and cruel rejections, self hatreds and remorse, they are allowed the poetry and benignity of the oblivious, and for the first time in Evans’s fiction, the eyes of the distanced narrator –maybe a quiet approximation of a God. Something is lost, some sense of urgency and rawness that the earlier books had. What is gained is a gravitas, no less angry and righteous, that is both self-consciously literary and humane; and a narrative judgement that is good-humoured, knows when to withhold and when to tell, and lifts the novel well beyond the mundane needs of a happy ending into something a lot more effecting and robust.
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