Review of Sheila Armstrong’s Red Mouth – A Deep Exploration of Ireland’s Deep Time | imaginary

ANearly 14% of Ireland is moorland: vast expanses of moss-carpeted land, beneath which layers of ancient history have multiplied to form pitch-black grass. Fascinated by its eerie beauty, Seamus Heaney wrote some of his finest poetry about the moors – and bodies were discovered, perfectly preserved, in its eerie depths.

Sheila Armstrong’s great second novel, The Red Mouth, also centers around two finds from the moors: the “monstrous black antler” of a great Irish elk, and the mutilated body of a girl who became known as the “Belrow Woman.” From here, we follow the intersecting lives of those haunted, literally and figuratively, by these excavations and the strange landscapes they yielded.

There’s Patch, a recently returned immigrant suffering from bone-aching loneliness, which is only alleviated by a rescue dog who leads him to an antler in the ground. And there is Maeve, a socially anxious scientist who is sent to conduct environmental assessments of the swamp, only to find there “a seeping fear, and a dull acceptance of death.” Decades ago, Thomas, a grass cutter, tries to support his young family even when the march of progress threatens his way of life. He meets Professor Liam Fleming, an archaeologist whose lifelong obsession with the Bellero Woman defines his career, while the women around him – his estranged partner, his troubled young daughters – crumble.

Armstrong’s acclaimed debut novel, 2023’s Falling Animals, also begins with two discoveries – first a dead seal, then a dead man on a beach in County Sligo – before expanding outwards, with each of its eighteen chapters told from a different point of view. In “Red Mouth,” we keep revolving around the same characters over time: troubled little girls becoming troubled adults; Belroe Woman becomes a museum exhibit and a symbol of Irish history that may or may not have existed; The swamp becomes managed wilderness and becomes a national park.

Time is a primary concern for the characters as well. Thomas, for example, thinks of the word “development,” because “it is certain that development has already taken place, over hundreds of thousands of years, compressing and shaping the peat cover across a rock singing to itself in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.” However, Thomas also finds himself returning to Fleming’s motto: “There are no experts in this matter, just us, just now.” This tension between the ancient past and the immediate present lies at the heart of today’s climate conversation – indeed, much of today’s climate imagination. How can we enhance appreciation of deep geological time while also recognizing the urgency of the current cataclysmic moment?

In the hands of another novelist, such concerns could become abstract or heavy-handed, but the remarkable power of Armstrong’s writing ensures that this is never the case. In the swamp we find “quiet green arrays of sphagnum” and “twigs that have grown on uneven heaps imitating the droppings of some large animal”; Above are “twisted sherbet skies” and “frothy August light.” The prose is full of scientific jargon, ancient folklore, and snippets of the Irish language.

These lively lyricism call to mind other Irish writers like Paul Lynch or Sarah Baum (Patch and His Dog, in particular, echo Spill Simmer Falter Wither’s brilliant debut). Looking further, the reading experience is like that of Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Tropical, where another handful of individual lives and private concerns collide with a vast, sublime beauty – but this time we are not in heaven, but in the dirt. As with Harvey’s novel, some readers of Red Mouth may bemoan the lack of clear dialogue or plot. There are no major epiphanies: time unfolds in quiet increments; Accumulation of new losses; Mysteries are only set up to remain unanswered. However, as Brigitte, one of Fleming’s daughters, realised, such is life: “Things happen, one after another, and there is no smooth parabolic curve that can connect all the checkpoints… Uncertainty is the only certainty.” In Armstrong’s meditative and profound novel, this uncertainty, beautifully rendered, is more than enough to keep us alive until the end.