This poised, Jamesian debut novel about a Manchester family in the lead up to the first world war is a masterclass in detail and atmosphere
One of my favourite poems is Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts. In it, the poet writes of how the old masters recognised the “human position” of suffering: “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”. Auden summons the image of Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, where the mythical drama is playing out in the background, while “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster”. This poem and the painting it describes seem like a useful model for thinking about Adam O’Riordan’s gentle and intimate first novel, The Falling Thread.
The book opens in the white heat of the trenches: a barrage of shells approaches and Lieutenant Wright begins to count. “If he got to a thousand, he’d have made it.” Then the novel spools back in time to an earlier generation of the Wright family: it’s August, 1890, and we’re in a prosperous suburb of Manchester where Charles, the oldest of the Wright children, is mooning around the house, his eyes repeatedly drawn to Miss Greenhalgh, his sisters’ new governess. The two engage in a frantic fumble, a child is conceived, scandal barely averted. Meanwhile his sisters grow and change, with Tabitha becoming involved in a local charity for the underfed poor, while Eloise goes to art school and becomes a painter.
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