“People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the time their happiness is taking form, or their lives are falling apart.” Chekhov’s quote on ordinary life, unfolding in that most complex of units – the family – comes to mind when reading Craig Jordan-Baker’s debut novel The Nacullians. Centred around the lives of the titular family, working-class, second-generation Irish immigrants in England, the book depicts the ups and downs of one clan over three generations.
The best books on family embrace the messiness at the heart of it – a subject that makes for compelling storytelling across genres. Recent examples in contemporary Irish fiction include Marian Keyes’s Grown-Ups, Liz Nugent’s Our Little Cruelties and Anne Enright’s Actress. Exploring family, whether that’s the large extended family of Keyes’s epic novel, the fraught fraternal relationships at the heart of Nugent’s, or the nuanced mother-and-daughter bond in Actress, means exploring the connections between people who share the same blood and history, who are of each other in a way that binds.
The Nacullians, “three generations of one family, living in a brick house in a line of other brick houses”, are certainly of each other. One of the main tropes of the book is how the past is repeated in present generations, especially when families have secrets. The book opens with the death of the matriarch, Patrice Nacullian, related by an omniscient narrator in a perfunctory tone that goes on to list the other family members, dead and alive.
Three Nacullian children subsequently take up most of the narrative space: Betty, who died by suicide as a teenager; Bernard, a racist brickie who had no choice but to follow his father Nandad into the business; and the unfortunate Shannon, a single mother who has kept the identity of the father of her son Greg a secret for many years.
Looping narrative
Jordan-Baker weaves the strands of these stories together in a looping narrative that pays homage to masters of the form such as Kate Atkinson. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Brighton, Jordan-Baker has published fiction in New Writing, Text, Firefly Magazine and Potluck. His first novel offers an engaging take on family life, in a similar vein to recent debuts by Irish authors Ronan Ryan, Ronán Hession and Darragh Martin.
Written in a darkly comic style, The Nacullians charts the traumas of the various family members, and their relationship with the city they inhabit. The latter is done in a metaliterary fashion that gets less annoying over the course of the book. Interludes on parks, rivers, the sky, among other generalities, are mixed into the chapters on family life. Jordan-Baker is interested not just in the family story but in how that story gets told. While initially this can seem tiresome, it develops into a multilayered treatise on memory and the stories we tell ourselves. Small, clever touches help this along, not least the appropriate choice of a family of bricklayers for an author who is preoccupied with narrative constructs.
The arch omniscient narrator works well in highlighting the flaws and prejudices of the characters: “Bernard did not tip the Somali taxi driver, who wasn’t really a Somali, but a Tamil who had once been raped by a Sri Lankan army officer in a canvas tent, far, far away from this city.” The voice is self-knowing but frequently funny: “There are too many tales about dogs. This is one of them . . . In my defence, I’m simply trying to show you how strongly some people react to fictional worlds where horrible things happen to dogs. This is because dogs are not dogs, but concentrations of warm and bubbly sentiment.”
Artifice of fiction
As it happens, some of the most touching scenes in the novel depend upon such sentimentalities, but the freshness of detail saves them from cliche. A colourful passage narrated by Thunder the family dog underscores the loss that will soon befall the human members of the Nacullians. Although it’s keen to highlight the artifice of fiction, the book is at its strongest when it convinces us to believe in it.
Not everything goes as smoothly. The author takes a little too much pleasure in bringing us round in circles, which sees the end of his story go out with a whimper. In a book that delights in showing its scaffolding, there are some parts that need more attention – Shannon’s history with a local businessowner; Greg’s poignant plea to know his father; racist Bernard’s comeuppance.
For the most part, however, Jordan-Baker does a fine job of homing in on the trauma and tensions in family life that can press painfully against an individual’s heart. When all the drama and narrative whirling is deconstructed, there is a simple and effective message in the foundations: “We all know that families are impossible to ignore, whatever we think of them.”
