Ducks in a Row (Reader Response 2)

I cannot begin to explain how much I enjoyed reading Danielle McLaughlin's In the Act of Falling.  From her stunningly real characters to her way of presenting the world around her, McLaughlin captured me from beginning to end.

What grabbed me most throughout the piece was the unabashed, but still understated Irishness of the piece.  McLaughlin made few references that would pinpoint the reader's attention to Ireland, but she captured a spirit that lingers in contemporary Irish fiction.  Having lived in Dublin, her descriptions of St. Stephen's Green and her description of their Portlaoise home brought me in and kept me grounded in my memory of living in Ireland, making the story feel so real.  I could picture myself walking past the LUAS stop, visiting the ducks and pigeons before my walk back to Rathmines. (I was surprised she never spoke of those pigeons - I swear they were horrifying most days.  And probably plagued, too.)

Her story, bringing in Bill's unemployment and their struggle following the crash in 2008 captured a hesitancy and fear that seems to envelop a lot of Irish life.  Having read works that preceded and followed the crash in either setting and composition, it is always intriguing to see how the economic climate affected this generation of literature, a change which McLaughlin wove into each aspect of their lives.  From the frivolity that marked the boom, seen in Bill's fancy shirt and their home, to the plummet which finds them struggling and living in a home which for all intents and purposes seems to just be another old Irish home falling apart and not much more livable than those abandoned in the 1960s.  In a way, it is another reminder of how their lives, and their family as a whole, is falling apart at the seams. 

And it seems like our narrator is the only one who knows.  Besides the last line, which hits us with the macabre tone McLaughlin uses throughout, the scene in St. Stephen's Green captured our narrator's place in the story, the knowing victim of an awful trap of a life.

If she hadn’t cut through the park yesterday morning, if she hadn’t taken lunch here today, she might even have thought, next time she visited, that they were the same ducks. There was trickery of a sort at work, a sleight of hand that suggested that the first ducks had never existed, and only she alone, in silent witness, knew better. 

The fixation with birds, and Finn's desire to catch them in the act of falling really piqued my interest, since I've always had a fascination with birds, though not nearly as macabre as in this story.  Still the fixation on death, with the birds being the harbingers of death, only made the piece fit better into the realm of contemporary Irish fiction, drawing on the theme to grapple with the internal problems of the family and the narrator's own insecurity and anxieties.  Is the story dark? Yes.  Is Finn's attempted dissection of a 'plagued' bird borderline terrifying?  Without a doubt.  Did I love every second I spent reading this story?  Absolutely.  

And now I miss Dublin all the more for it.