Sinéad Gleeson has forged a career that has, among other things, become largely devoted to supporting fellow artists, particularly female artists. So it is no surprise that with her debut novel – which tells the bewitching story of an artist caught up in the "small queendom" of an isolated community of women - she is firmly and exquisitely in her element.
"Element" is an operative word, as Gleeson locates her tale in the cinematic setting of a remote island, battered by natural and potentially supernatural forces. Nell, an artist focusing on durational works, makes a living giving tours to visitors, relishing in her knowledge of the island between gardening, sea swimming and creating her art.
One day, she arrives home to her cottage to find a handwritten note from the insular community of women living in a renovated old hilltop convent, inviting her to create an artwork for them. The invitation sets Nell's life careening, as well it would in so isolated a community.
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Listen: Sinead Gleeson talks to Miriam O'Callaghan
Island life is well conjured by Gleeson, from the boats that "bob like flocked birds" and harvesting pepper dulse seaweed off the shore, to the American and vaguely Viking-looking tourists that visit in summer. It’s the kind of place where "the vet doubles as a midwife" and the local lad working in the mini mart can identify a newcomer in a matter of hours.
It’s not all bucolic, either: Gleeson layers her descriptions with subtle nods to the legacy of trauma that persists on the island. The tracks that Nell cycles down are "quiet, quiet roads full of blame", while in the water near the convent stands the island’s stake, to which dissenters were tied for crimes ranging from refusing to pay a tithe to adultery.
For Nell, however, it’s the setting she needs to be able to do her work, devoid of commitments and ties. Gleeson astutely explores the realities of a life devoted to art – or the effort of cultivating one – turning over the sacrifices, assumptions and conflicts that accompany it. Nell is also not without regrets. As the author writes, "the island has a way of tethering people to the soul, despite high watermarks of loss".
When we meet Nell she is already daydreaming about creating her work elsewhere. Proud and protective of her self-sufficiency and refusal to be pinned down, Nell is still "caught off guard" by pangs of longing for community. Resorting to literally watching through windows at other people, she is an outsider of her own making. Not even two romantic trysts can fully satiate her deep need for companionship."
Contrasting this is the world of the female community led by the mysterious Maman, the Inions, who "live outside the parameters the world was desperate to impose on them". Some fled families, abusers, children and burnout, Gleeson writes, choosing a life that aims to provide peace.
As with any purportedly egalitarian group, power struggles burble to the surface, and Gleeson is masterful in her depiction of how even the most utopian communities can be threatened by a lust for power.
Thrumming through this novel is a profound respect for art. Gleeson goes so far as to include an afterword on art and artists that inspired the artworks created by Nell in the novel, which span from large-scale circles carved in sand to a Banshee call sound exhibition rigged through a forest.
Early on, after she offhandedly calls her current project "a thing", Nell is annoyed at herself for diminishing her art, and there’s a striking distinction made between "art", "labour" and "work". The act of making art, the mundane ins and outs of gathering materials and catching threads of inspiration, is brilliantly fleshed out, and the novel’s climatic ending leaves us with questions about the calamitous results of creation.
Gleeson handles the lofty themes of art, sacrifice, community, loneliness and more with grace and skill, turning them over like hagstones, the holed rocks that give the novel its title. Like those mythical stones – which are said to let you glimpse another world when you look through their centre – this novel immerses the reader in an eerily familiar world.
For this reason, it’s worth resisting the urge to put labels on it. Much like the sound that plagues the island – an unknown drone of noise based off of a real life phenomenon that has been reported around the world – resisting the urge to define this novel makes it all the more rewarding.
Hagstone is published by 4th Estate.
