Ordinary Human Failings - Megan Nolan

 

I'm a regular reader of crime fiction and I especially enjoy police procedurals, so when I began combing through the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction longlist Ordinary Human Failings was the one that first caught my attention. 

On its surface, the novel does not sound all that unusual: an Irish family has moved from Waterford to 1990 London hoping for a fresh start but find that the things they fled in Waterford are only amplified in London. Alcoholism, joblessness, social stigmas, and poor parenting skills are not things easily run away from, as the Greens are about to learn the hard way after the youngest member of the family, a ten-year-old, becomes the chief suspect in the murder of another little girl.

But Ordinary Human Failings, beginning as it does as a murder mystery about damaged children, class prejudice, and the cutthroat news media, sneaks up on you and turns itself into something much more than that almost before you know it. This is a literary novel filled with memorable characters, most of them trapped in a multi-generational family unit that has failed them all. It's a story about family loyalties, addiction, parental neglect, and people who have been beaten down for so long that they have long since given up on ever bettering themselves. And now a tabloid reporter wants to set the family on fire for his own personal gain.

The term literary fiction, fluid as it is these days, can be a hard term to define, but literary fiction is generally more serious and more character driven than genre fiction. Ordinary Human Failings explores what happens when an already severely damaged family is forced to endure the public pressure cooker stress that results from having one of its own publicly labeled a monster of the worst sort. It doesn't get much more serious than that, and once all the characters have been introduced, it becomes obvious that this is more than a police procedural. 

And what characters they are:

• Carmel - the woman who fled Ireland to hide her teen pregnancy,
• Richie, Carmel's half-brother - a man crushed by the bottle,
• John, their father - who has largely given up on life,
• Rose, the love of John's life - whose death stuns John,
• Lucy, Carmel's ten-year-old daughter  - a playground bully, and
• Tom, the tabloid reporter desperate to find the bombshell story that will make him famous - even if he has to make it up himself.

Now the family has no one to turn to except each other. Whether they come out stronger on the other side of the investigation or are finally shattered for good remains to be seen. 

"There is no secret, Tom, or else there are hundreds of them, and none of them interesting enough for you. The secret is that we're a family, we're just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours." - Carmel Green to Tom Hargreaves

I'm going to remember these characters and their story for a long time. 

Megan Nolan jacket photo