Paddy Richardson
The Good Mistress by Anne Tiernan (Moa Press, 2025), 416pp, $38
In a recent New Zealand Listener article, ‘The Personal is Political’, Charlotte Grimshaw discusses the notion of the ‘major and minor’, regarding how novels may be perceived and states: ‘there’s still a sense that larger truths can’t be drawn from the small things in life: the psychology of mundane encounters, the day-to-day behaviour of the human animal’. But then she adds: ‘Everyday interactions are not trivial: they are micro versions of world events.’
I was drawn to the ideas expressed in that Listener article in terms of The Good Mistress, the second novel by Irish–New Zealand author Anne Tiernan, which focuses on the lives of three women, Maeve, Juliet and Erica. While the novel is deliberately narrow in terms of scope—since it is primarily centred on these women and their lives—the mundane concerns which preoccupy and affect them have wider implications. Each woman is encountering the changes and challenges common to women in mid-life: stroppy children, the approach of menopause, aging parents, regretted career choices, stale relationships and, in some cases, addictions. At the same time, there are the rewards and wisdoms that long-term friendships bring, and the enriching connections that can develop with adolescent children.
The story is told through the differing perspectives of the three women, who were childhood friends or at least acquaintances, growing up in the small (fictional) Irish town of Ballyboyne. What initially brings them together again, and is the springboard for the narrative, is the sudden and unexpected death of Erica’s husband, Rory, who was for a time Juliet’s lover. Juliet leaves Auckland, where she has been living and working as a solo mum, taking Ruby her daughter with her, on the general understanding that she is returning to her former home in Ballyboyne to care for her mother, Denise, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. However, her abruptly undertaken journey is designed to coincide with Rory’s funeral.
Rory’s funeral ceremony is where the novel begins, and we’re told about this occasion from Juliet’s perspective. She is filled with roiling emotions—sorrow and loss, as well as a feeling of unfairness—because as his former mistress and Rory’s secret, she must be seated towards the back of the church, while of course Erica, the widow, is prominently seated in the front pew. Anne Tiernan is skilful at juxtaposing sardonic humour and the process of grieving. Juliet’s attention is drawn to the grief-stricken woman sobbing beside her, and she asks how she knew Rory: ‘I didn’t. But the poor family. God be good to them.’ Funerals are community events here. Later, as Juliet surveys the coffin, she reflects on how Rory treated her: ‘And now he’s ghosted her in the most literal way possible. It’s almost funny. Well, he’d think so, anyway.’
Later, at the cemetery, Maeve and Juliet come across the grave of their former friend, Dan, who died when he was 17, and, while Rory’s death is the catalyst for what unfolds over the next few days, both Dan’s and Rory’s deaths are integral to the plot: Dan’s because of the long-term effects on the friends, then only teenagers, into adult life; and Rory’s because of the realisations and reckonings his death provokes. Rory, a man behaving badly, has epitomised male privilege and entitlement, which in Ireland as elsewhere was and is systemic. Maeve recalls that when her mother, Lily, worked at the women’s refuge:
She used to say the most dangerous partners weren’t the ones who screamed in public. Those guys were just insecure thugs, so impetuous that it was easy to outwit them. The true devils would appear reasonable and articulate, so tightly controlled on the surface that you knew a manipulative narcissist lurked underneath. Those were the ones who always lured the women back in the end. The ones who’d sooner kill than lose.
Tiernan seamlessly toggles between past and present, and it is that past, when Juliet, Dan, Rory and Maeve are teenagers, which is one of the most compelling aspects of this novel. The quartet were inseparable friends. Their various personalities in the process of being formed and their struggles with the social rules and inhibitions of the time provide the dynamic for what happens later. Juliet and Maeve in particular retain lasting memories of these past intense friendships: ‘There was something so unique about those teenage relationships, the heightened hormonal states they were in adding an extra layer of meaning.’
Despite their closeness as friends, the freedom they have, their unrestrained drinking, their adolescent brashness and their certainty that they’re immune from harm lead to a carelessness with each other and with their own physical safety. Over the course of the novel, Tiernan skilfully builds tension through carefully spaced fragments from the past, creating a sense of unease, a growing fear that these young people are taking too many risks: ‘the sexual frisson that existed felt like that first snag in a cloth that was teetering on the brink of unravelling’.
This leads to the major trauma at the heart of the novel, where the friends are depicted drinking and playing spin the bottle. Dan is gay and becomes distressed when Rory makes an offensive remark targeting Dan’s vulnerability over his sexuality. When his drowned body is discovered the following day, there is uncertainty whether his death was accidental or suicide. Whatever the truth, his death and Rory’s feelings of guilt have lasting and devastating implications: ‘I’m a bad person, Jules. You need to stay away from me. Please stay away from me.’ Despite marrying the perfect wife and owning the perfect house, Rory’s numerous affairs, his lack of commitment to marriage and his failure to engage with Erica’s unhappiness, alcoholism and her need for help imply an inability to engage as a mature adult, a failure to move past and deal with the fallout from his masculinist behaviour. In fact, both have alcohol issues, as do Juliet and Maeve, and alcohol is a kind of river in the book, down which the main characters are helplessly floating.
Erica, though not part of the original group of friends, also grew up in Ballyboyne. Rory is attracted by her blonde, blue-eyed good looks, and by her prosperous and conventional family background; it as if he is choosing the absolute opposite to Juliet’s unpredictable and impulsive wildness. The seeming perfection of Erica’s life—the large house and the glamourous trappings of success—is undercut by her reflections on the unhappiness and frustration with her past life with Rory, his affairs and his detachment from her. In a way, the glamour is part of a perfectly maintained facade, part of her well-drilled sense of keeping up appearances. Following his death, we learn she hated the big house from the beginning as kitsch and clunky: ‘It looked like the kind of house Bilbo Baggins—if he was a nouveau riche property developer—might dream up after a night on the mead. Rory mistook her tears for happy ones.’
Maeve is also ostensibly successful as a crime writer, but Tiernan again portrays the truth below the surface. Maeve is in a ‘near constant sweaty stage of low-level bewilderment and rage’ as she struggles to write the next book in her bestselling series, to parent her teenage sons and to care for her mother, Lily, who has dementia. Her mother’s dementia is also a source of conflict in her already strained marriage. That is not to say that this is all grim social realism. The novel is frequently if wryly funny, as in the following exchange, between Maeve and her mother:
‘Who’s Jamie?’
‘Your grandson. My son.’
‘Oh, no I don’t have any grandsons. Only a daughter.’
‘Yes, that’s me.’
She claps her hands and laughs. ‘You’re not my daughter. Look at you, you’re far too old.’
Juliet, however, is the most energetically portrayed character and also the most damaged. Her affair with Rory has been long term, one-sided and obsessive, and at the heart of the failure of her marriage and her inability to commit to a career or any type of life that she might enjoy. Her feelings of ‘being apart from everyone’, of being ‘cleaved in two’ is connected not only with her migrant status, since she is now living in New Zealand, but with the hope she lived with that Rory eventually would leave Erica and they would be together. While devastating, Rory’s death, in fact, removes this illusion from her. Now that she faces the truth that Rory did not consider Juliet his great love, that she was not his only woman but one of many, she begins to examine opportunities, though what these are the novel leaves as open-ended questions.
In its scope The Good Mistress spans a formerly dismal, closeted realm of mysteries and secrets dominated by the Catholic clergy of the Ireland of 35 years ago, where young women had to flee overseas for abortions, to today’s Celtic Tiger economy, consumer-driven, globally wired and permanently online. Shifting between decades, the narrative moves amongst each of the women, making them real and vibrant as they voice their experiences. But Tiernan’s use of witty observation, blended with empathy and warmth, is equally effective in building telling portraits of peripheral characters. When Maeve’s husband, Cillian, complains that ‘If your mother was in proper care, no-one would have to stay home to babysit,’ the novelist zooms in to have Maeve focus on him:
He takes off his oversized black glasses and places them carefully beside the laptop. She hates those pretentious glasses. They scream of a mid-life ache for relevancy. That and his new uniform of all black. If he starts wearing polo necks, she’ll have to leave him.
Just as Dan’s death has created rifts and an ongoing sense of loss, so Rory’s death initiates possibilities for all three women in coming to terms with unresolved grief, reconsidering past decisions, and making peace with the past, the present and what is to come. The Good Mistress, leading us into and through the messy labyrinth of the hopes, joys and anxieties of ordinary people with all of their flaws and failings, demonstrates that, as we consider the lives of others, we may be enticed towards the shock of recognition.
PADDY RICHARDSON is a short-story writer and the author of nine novels who lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her work has featured in a variety of journals, anthologies, and on radio, and has been highly commended in several writing competitions, including the Katherine Mansfield and Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards. She has held the University of Otago Burns Fellowship, as well as a number of other fellowships and residencies.
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