Review by Max Dunbar
The Whole Wild World
The problem with talking about books you enjoy is that you don’t want to go too far into a story for fear of revealing too much to potential readers. Confessions contains a great deal of story in its reckless sweep – it’s full of doublings, coincidences, hidden pregnancies, strange benefactors, big reveals and contradictions. But it would be more useful to write about the novel’s themes.
Confessions was headlined as ‘Choose your own adventure’ by one book blogger and at the centre of this epic is an ancient text game with excerpts that interval the story. (I don’t know why, but I loved the font of this novel, and am going to try and replicate it below.)
SCREAM SCHOOL IS A TEXT-BASED CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE VIDEO GAME. IT PUTS YOU, THE PLAYER, RIGHT AT THE CENTRE OF THE STORY. YOU GET TO DECIDE HOW IT UNFOLDS.
IN THIS ADVENTURE, SISTERS MAGNOLIA AND ROSEMARY HAVE BEEN SENT AWAY TO BOARDING SCHOOL IN BURTONPORT, COUNTY DONEGAL.
NOT LONG AFTER THEY ARRIVE, STUDENTS START TO DISAPPEAR.
The novel proper opens in the aftermath of 9/11. Cora Brady’s father has died in the Twin Towers attack and she has been left shellshocked. In due course Cora receives two letters: one from her dad’s life insurance offering a large payout, and another from her Aunt Ró in Donegal inviting her to stay. At this point in the choose your own adventure saga, you’d get to make a decision. Turn to page X if you want to go to Donegal. Turn to page Y if you take the money.
There is a brilliant novel, The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, that works in exactly that way. Cora could have taken her insurance money and gone wandering all over America. But in Confessions there’s not always a choice and some things just seem predestined. Back in Ireland Aunt Ró tells her family: ‘The thing about life is you don’t get an undo button. You can’t go back or start over. And even when you’re reading a book or watching a film, you don’t get to change anything. There’s just the one way it’ll go.’
By then we are in Burtonport in 2018 and Cora is a pro-choice activist preparing for the Irish referendum. Her daughter Lyca ‘knew Cora’s job was about choices – giving them to women.’ At seventeen Lyca has moved on from the Scream School game to playing The Sims on her tablet. Her gaming life is more sophisticated but Lyca still feels like she’s been born into a world without choices. Aunt Ró kept diaries all her life but when Lyca reads the journals she finds that the actual content stops somewhere in the eighties – after that Róisin has simply been copying out the old diary entries, again and again, filling new notebooks with past days. What preoccupies people is not the future but different interpretations of the past. After 9/11 Cora says that: ‘The same thing would happen with the towers. The complicated reasons scientists were giving to explain why they fell the way they did were less compelling than the people who were so sure it had been a demolition, controlled by the government.’
At the heart of Confessions is this contradiction: a world full of possibilities – ‘the whole wild world’ as the characters call it – that also feels oddly constricted. The timescale runs from the 1970s to around 2023, but these feel like short decades in which lives are brief, and sometimes cut off far too soon. We flip between the village of Burtonport and the city of New York, ultimately orbiting back to the spooky townhouse that lies at the centre of everything.
The Screamers’ house got its local name because it was originally a commune where people used primal scream therapy, so villagers got used to the shrieking that echoed day and night. It stands tall and proud through the novel’s decades and will likely stand for decades more. The Screamers’ house is where the characters explore, fall in love, have their significant moments, a place of temptation and fear. The text game excerpted in the novel is based on it; the artist Máire paints it; the doctor Scarlett goes to jail because of it; Róisin writes a ghost story inspired by the house, a story that is included in Confessions and accomplished enough to stand up on its own. The ending to the ghost story gives the truth to the handwritten legend Máire carries around with her, and the Angela Carter quote that epigraphs this novel: She herself is a haunted house.
And towards the end of the novel Lyca finally gets to the wild world of New York and she finds the city’s equivalent of the Screamers’ house – the old islands of Manhattan where they put the ‘undesirables’. Airey fills her narrative with lists, rollcalls, things to remember, and Lyca finds a coffee-table map that includes the nineteenth-century dumping grounds: ‘Emigrant Refuge & Hosp, Inebriate Asylum, Negro Point. Foundling Asylum, House of Refuge, Idiot Asylum.’ This section of the novel features Airey’s strongest writing: not only does she capture the sense of a lost time without boring you with her research, she seems to remember things about being young that most of us have long forgotten. After a long-awaited encounter that doesn’t fulfill her expectations, Lyca wanders through the city to the place where the asylums used to be:
There were more lamps lighting up the bridge. It was narrow and abandoned. In the distance, I could see the bat building. All the lights in the windows, like little blinking eyes. Above the building, the light was an eerie blue. Really, none of it looked real. I could have been the only person in the world. That made me feel powerful, like I might be able to change the story.
As a novel Confessions feels like that light from an asylum; it feels itself a haunted house.
Max’s blog can be found here.
Catherine Airey, Confessions (Viking 2025). 978-0241675182, 480 pp., hardback.
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