Review of The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon: Powerful and delicate portrait of memories rising from the depths

Two siblings discover an entirely different perspective on their final childhood summer with their mother in this thoughtful and understated novel

Perceptive writing: Kathleen MacMahon. Photo by Mark Condren

Perceptive writing: Kathleen MacMahon. Photo by Mark Condren

The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon

Perceptive writing: Kathleen MacMahon. Photo by Mark Condren

Meadhbh McGrath

February 11 2023 02:30 AM

The Home Scar, Kathleen MacMahon’s fourth novel, opens with a local news story. A journalist at the Connacht Tribune receives a tip about the uncovering of a “drowned forest” following a storm that travelled from North America to Ireland’s west coast, and his report — a few lines accompanying the photograph of the exposed stumps on page three — gradually makes its way from national to international news.

Coverage in a British newspaper catches the attention of Christo, a mathematics professor at Cambridge University, who is immediately reminded of his visit to that same spot in Galway more than 25 years ago, when his Irish mother took him and his half-sister Cassie to see their ailing grandfather and ended up staying for one perfect summer — or so he remembers it.

Christo invites Cassie, now a sculptor living in Mexico, to join him in returning to Ireland and reliving that special holiday, the last one they shared together with their mother before her death by drug overdose. Cassie reluctantly agrees, and the two find themselves retracing their steps, even re-encountering a childhood friend, Seamus, who moved back to the area as an adult to write a book.

Like MacMahon’s previous, superb novel Nothing But Blue Sky, The Home Scar is a delicately observed portrait of memory, how perspectives take shape and how each of us processes and responds to our experiences.

For Christo and Cassie, then only 13 and 10, that summer was “an idyllic time in our lives”. The first part of the novel chronicles their somewhat awkward reunion after three and a half years apart, and their journey to the faded old cottage they once stayed in.

The title refers to the spot limpets wear away in a rock, “creating their own dent in the stone” to which they return when the tide goes out. Christo and Cassie’s family, too, left their mark on that seaside village, one that they only come to understand fully when they arrive back in Ireland.

In Galway, the siblings begin to realise that the locals hold a very different recollection of their time there. The newsagent cashier is brusque in serving them and the bartender grudgingly takes their orders. In part two, we learn Seamus’ side of the story, and why he “could hardly bear to think of that last summer”, so tragic was the aftermath.

What was for Christo and Cassie a “happy family summer” turns out to be “a drama that revolved around [their] mother”, whose presence looms large. She is not named, only referred to as “she”, but whether it’s in the local shop or the abbey where she attended school, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind who “she” is.

Born in Westmeath, she travelled the world as a model and later muse — or “groupie”, according to her own mother — for a famous rock star, with whom she had Christo and was introduced to cocaine. Two years on, she was single in California, where she met Cassie’s father.

Each sibling has a distinct perspective on their mother. For Christo, it is mostly a fond one, so glad was he to return home after spending time with his uninterested father’s new family. For Cassie, their mother was the only parent she ever knew, as she never had a relationship with her father. That bond is tarnished by her memories of the last days of their mother’s life, spent moving aimlessly around Mexico after Christo had left for boarding school. The sight of their mother’s dead body is a memory Cassie alone holds, and one that adds to the distance that developed between her and her brother over the years.

Now in their late 30s — both older than their mother was when she died — Christo leads a contentedly solitary existence, with no interest in dating or social activity beyond a weekly squash session with a colleague. Christo agonises over whether a joke will land in his lecture presentations, and his lack of pop culture knowledge makes him feel out of place in most conversations.

“You know the way cartoon characters are more human than we are?” Cassie explains. “That’s what Christo’s like — it’s like he’s trying really, really hard to be a real person, but he can’t because he’s made of wood.”

Cassie, meanwhile, is fiercely independent, insisting on living apart from her much older Mexican boyfriend during the week, and preferring to reply to his frequent declarations of love in Spanish rather than English: “Spoken in a language other than her own, it seemed to her to mean somehow less.” Unlike her mother, Cassie refuses to rely on a partner, and makes the “absence of vanity a central plank of her character”, spurning make-up or dye for her grey hairs.

In Ireland, the grown-up siblings manage to break through the awkwardness and formality that had built up during their separation, yet they cannot recapture the carefree ease of their youth. Their get-togethers with Seamus make for an interesting dynamic, as they sink back into petty childlike competitiveness, vying for his attention.

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Despite the trip taking place in September, MacMahon’s perceptive writing effectively conveys the potent sense of stagnation that settles in during long childhood summers at holiday homes, when time seems to stop and everything is done slowly, at a pace of your choosing.

Unfortunately, this sluggishness can also extend to the story itself, which starts to feel repetitive in the gentle banality of its characters’ memories — horseplay and 99s, Tayto sandwiches on the beach and jigsaws on rainy days — as well as their present-day excursions, seeking to learn more about their mother from people who had only glancing encounters with her.

The Home Scar is a thoughtful, understated novel, and while it never reaches the heights of Nothing But Blue Sky, it has a quiet power all its own.

The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon

Fiction: The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon
Sandycove, 336 pages, paperback €13.99; e-book £7.99

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Review of The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon: Powerful and delicate portrait of memories rising from the depths

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