Admitting a weakness for Maeve Binchy novels

Well, why not? I've already admitted my affection for A. J. Cronin.

Maeve's books would win no literary awards. Plots, such as they are, are very realistic for perhaps half of a book, but Maeve then does not seem to know how to resolve the action, and the endings are boring or melodramatic. Themes are undetectable. Maeve's strength (and, at her best, one most notable) is for depicting relationships of all kinds (especially between friends), folk wisdom, and circumstances which, in one form or another, have been a part of every life.

Maeve often captures how misunderstanding and assumptions cut off communications. Sister Madeleine, the village's confidante at large in The Glass Lake, cuts people off before they can say what is troubling them - but, since her reputation is for being 'a living saint,' they accept this. Leonora in The Copper Beech is aware of a murder - when she attempts to speak of this to a priest in confession, her tentative 'testing the waters' leads to his assuming that what is troubling an adolescent must be uneasiness about sex. Madeleine, another character in The Copper Beech, is trying to be supportive and close with a school friend who enters a convent - and is cut off for being 'too intense.'

This week, I was using Maeve's "Light a Penny Candle" for my 'wind down late at night' reading. Maeve captured perfectly how tortuous it can be to have a problem one fears sharing - and how the hearer can both 'cut one off' and make things worse. Aisling has married a handsome, prosperous man who is quite charming, and she is the envy of the village. She is confused and deeply pained because her husband, Tony, is an alcoholic, and the marriage has not been consummated after 17 months. Finally, Aisling tries to confide in her mother, Eileen.

Eileen indeed cares about her daughter - but, as is even more common in families than at large, she falls into assumptions. Aisling's tentative mention of a personal problem leads Eileen to think that her daughter, whom she knows to be an innocent sort, is worried about details of sex in marriage (and takes Aisling's mention of there being no sex at all in her marriage to be a subtle way of speaking merely of a lack of pleasure.) Eileen cuts off the opportunity for a confidence by saying that telling people things can make us hate them for knowing them, and by adding that, when she had doubts about sex in the early months of her own marriage, she is glad she did not 'betray' her husband by consulting anyone else. Worst of all, she sees evidence of Aisling's pain and depression and calls her a 'lazy slut,' leaving her only with the (old, tired, but still common) reprimand not to 'feel sorry for herself.'

In the end, Aisling takes off, cutting herself off from the entire village including her family, because she knows she cannot be heard, let alone understood.

Such things happen in every life, of course. Families, in particular, often form a sterotypical image of a family member which no evidence to the contrary can shake. All of us have had times when we ached to share pain, or thought that an explanation could restore understanding with those whom we love - but, once people think they know the answer (or think that anyone who, for example, has the material security and handsome husband an Aisling has, should be glowing with contentment), there is no shaking this.

I believe the rarest of human gifts is that of truly being open in listening to others.