Book Review: The Coast Road by Alan Murrin – a novel about marriage and the price of non-conformity set in small town Ireland

I was impressed by this debut novel, which reminded me of fiction by other Irish authors I’ve enjoyed in the past, such as Anne Enright and Claire Keegan.

The Coast Road is set in a small coastal town in Donegal in the 1990s, a year or two before divorce became legal in Ireland. The story describes the awful predicaments people, and particularly women, could find themselves in while stuck in loveless marriages. It does this through three main characters.

Colette Crowley has escaped her loveless marriage to Shaun determined to live her life on her own terms. She’s a published poet but has done the unthinkable in running off to Dublin to live with a married man. Finding no joy in that relationship, she has come back to be closer to her younger children. But Shaun won’t let her see her kids, and it’s easy to drown her sorrows in booze.

When Colette rents a holiday cottage we meet Dolores Mullen, who is pregnant with her fourth child and all too aware that her husband sleeps with other women. She knows it could be dangerous to rent the cottage up the path from her home to Collette, but with another baby on the way, the Mullens need the money.

And then there’s Izzy, who is married to James Keaveney, a politician and a bully. Not allowed to work, Izzy fills her home with expensive china ornaments and does evening classes. The only brightness in her day are the chats she has with their priest, Father Brian. She knows Collette because her youngest son is friends with the youngest Crowley boy, but gets more friendly with her when she signs up for Collette’s creative writing class.

The three women are all deeply unhappy, and certainly unfulfilled while local opinion, the establishment and gossip all work against any idea of their standing up for themselves. In the background the political machine plays out, as a change in the divorce law is debated. But how this might help these women is yet to be seen, as Colette becomes more unstable, Izzy more angry and Dolores more anxious. The story slowly builds up to a breaking point that has you biting your nails.

When the detective asked Izzy what had woken her that night she could not say exactly. She’d been sleeping badly all winter. It was not uncommon for her to wake three or four times in the night. It was also the first time in several weeks she’d shared a bed with her husband, but she did not mention that. At some point she’d needed the toilet. Crossing the landing, she’d stopped at the window and looked out across the bay. It had become her habit in recent months to pause there and try to locate the point where on a clear day the gable of the cottage was just visible. The sky was mottled with cloud, the first of the morning light seeping through. Black smoke hung over the headland.
‘And straight away, I knew something had happened,’ she said.

As a male author Alan Murrin has done a great job at making these female characters believable, capturing not just their lives, but their voices and inner thoughts in a realistic way. And also their situation in a small town, where men have the power and nobody helps out if there is any sense of non-conformity. The writing is real, at times humorous, particularly through Izzy’s lens, the bigger situations balanced nicely with the minutiae of everyday life. It all adds up to an amazing story and reminded me a little of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These with characters needing to find courage to do the right thing against the tide of opinion.

Alan Murrin has won a couple of awards for this debut novel and I’ll be keen to see what he writes next. I enjoyed this as an audiobook and it was a superb read, narrated by Jessica Regan, who does a terrific job with all the characters. The Coast Road is another wee Irish gem and highly recommended – a five-star read from me.