Almost 14% of Ireland is bog: vast swathes of moss-carpeted land, below which layers of ancient history have been compounded into mulch-black turf. Captivated by their otherworldly beauty, Seamus Heaney wrote some of his finest poetry about bogs – and the bodies discovered, perfectly preserved, in their eerie depths.
Sheila Armstrong’s exquisite second novel, The Red Mouth, also centres around two bog discoveries: the “monstrous, bog-black antler” of a great Irish elk, and the mutilated body of a girl who comes to be known as Belroe Woman. From here we follow the intersecting lives of those haunted, both literally and figuratively, by these excavations and the uncanny landscape that yielded them.
There is Patch, a recently returned émigré nursing a bone-aching loneliness, which is tempered only by the rescue dog that leads him to the antler in the earth. And there is Maeve, a socially anxious scientist sent to conduct environmental assessments of the bog, only to find there a “seeping dread, the dull acceptance of death”. Decades previously, Tomás, a turf-cutter, is trying to support his young family even as the march of progress threatens his way of life. He meets Professor Liam Fleming, an archaeologist whose relentless obsession with Belroe Woman comes to define his career, while the women around him – his estranged partner, his troubled young daughters – fall apart.
Armstrong’s acclaimed debut novel, 2023’s Falling Animals, also began with two discoveries – first a dead seal, then a dead man on a beach in County Sligo – before expanding outwards, each of its 18 chapters told from a different point of view. In The Red Mouth, we keep circling the same characters over time: troubled young daughters become troubled adults; Belroe Woman becomes a museum exhibit and a symbol of an Irish history that may or may not exist; bog becomes managed wilderness becomes national park.
Time is a preoccupation for the characters too. Tomás, for example, muses on the word “development”, since “surely the development has already taken place, over hundreds of thousands of years, the press and formation of the blanket of peat across a rock singing to itself in the middle of the Atlantic”. And yet, Tomás also finds himself returning to Fleming’s mantra that “there are no experts in this, only us, only now”. This tension between the ancient past and one’s immediate present sits at the heart of today’s climate conversations – and indeed, much of today’s climate fiction. How can we foster an appreciation for deep geological time while also recognising the particular urgency of our current, catastrophic moment?
In the hands of another novelist such concerns could become abstract or heavy-handed, but the remarkable strength of Armstrong’s writing ensures this is never the case. Out on the bog we find “quiet green matrices of sphagnum” and “grown-over sods arranged in uneven mounds that mimic the droppings of some great beast”; above is the “twisting sherbet sky” and “the buttery August light”. The prose throughout is peppered with scientific terms, ancient folklore and snippets of the Irish language.
This vivid lyricism calls to mind other Irish writers such as Paul Lynch or Sara Baume (Patch and his dog, in particular, echo Baume’s gorgeous debut Spill Simmer Falter Wither). Looking farther afield, the reading experience resembles that of Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, where another handful of individual lives and private concerns are set against a vast and sublime beauty – only this time we are not up in the heavens, but down in the dirt. Just as with Harvey’s novel, some readers of The Red Mouth might bemoan the lack of dialogue or explicit plot. There are no big epiphanies: time unfolds in quiet increments; new losses are accrued; mysteries are set up only to remain unanswered. However, as Brigit, one of Fleming’s daughters, comes to realise, such is life: “things happen, one after the other, 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, such uncertainty, so exquisitely rendered, is more than enough to sustain us to the end.
