When You Wake and Find Me Gone (2002) is an oldie from the TBR. I bought it because Maureen McCarthy's name was familiar from her bestselling novel Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life (1995) which was made into a mini-series. A script-writer and novelist, she seems to write mainly YA, and the preoccupations of When You Wake and Fine Me Gone would be in that territory except that at 425 pages, it seems overlong for that market.



 

All throughout time there have been children who have had to struggle with the problem of whether it's possible to love a parent who's committed a heinous crime, but Mary McCarthy's attempt at dealing with this issue is naïve and unsatisfactory.

#SpoilerAlert

The central character, Kit, is the daughter of terrorists involved in the sectarian violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. She doesn't know this for much of the novel, but when she does, she never really wrestles with the horror of knowing what her parents have done. She is more preoccupied with her infatuation with a university lecturer, with her conflicted relationship with Leonie, the older sister who turns out to be her mother, and with the identity issues that flow from that.

When the novel opens, Kit is at university in the city, living in a grubby sharehouse with friends Tam and Brendan (who has Irish heritage too.) By chance she attends a lecture on terrorism and captivated as much by Sebastian the lecturer as she is by the topic of intractable international conflicts, she switches from literature to politics and also gets the lead role in a university play directed by Sebastian.

So when she gets a phone call from upcountry to tell her to come home because her sister Leonie has been involved in a car accident and may die, she refuses because she can't let down the cast of the forthcoming play. The plot makes its way through far too many pages of angst-ridden pleas from family and friends who try to make her realise that her priorities are misplaced. All of these pleas are focussed on her relationship with the possibly dying and probably brain-damaged Leonie, and not at all about her responsibility to provide loving support to her anguished family. This spectacular selfishness is justified in the novel by Kit's resentment about Leonie's on-and-off presence in her life.

Kit is not some giddy 15 year old. She is 20.

The circuit-breaker for this impasse is her older brother Johnny, the one who is studying to be a priest. It is he who breaks the news to her that Leonie is not her older sister, but her mother. Everyone else has known that she was born illegitimate in Northern Ireland, so they have all been lying to her, but no one knows who the father is.

But there are 425 pages to fill, and so by a series of fortunate events, including a benefactor to pay her expenses, Kit abandons her family in extremis and goes off to Northern Ireland to find the father she has never met. ( )

How would you react if you found out that your only sister, the one person you once idolised, but then let you down big time, was actually your mother?
Twenty year old Kit has just found out her sister is her mother meaning the two people she'd always thought were her parents are actually her grandparents, and her real father is somewhere in the depths of Ireland.
The book teaches you about forgiveness, understanding, love and the violence of the "wars" in Ireland. ( )

I found this to be a totally convincing book about a girl's efforts to trace her parents' past through scraps of information. Kit's journey of discovery is painful and difficult but the way the story is told is realistic and engaging throughout. ( )

Excellent book. ( )