'The Walking People' starts splendidly, with the story of Johanna and Greta Cahill, who grow up in a poor Irish farming family in Ballyroan, a hamlet in Galway. As children, Johanna (who is beautiful, spirited and capable) and Greta (the dreamer, nicknamed 'the goose' for her short-sighted peering at people until she gets glasses) befriend Michael Ward, a tinker's son from an Irish traveller family, after his mother dies. As the years pass hard times hit the Cahill family - the girls' father is killed while poaching salmon from the local river, two of their brothers go to Australia, and they struggle to keep the farm going and find work. Johanna finds herself and Greta jobs in a hotel in the local town, Conch; there Johanna befriends an American guest, and becomes fixated on the idea of moving to the USA. Meanwhile Michael has decided to abandon the wandering life, and fetches up in Ballyroan, where the girls' mother Lily all but adopts him as a son. When Johanna and Greta lose their jobs, Lily decides that all three must try their luck in America. On board ship, the predictable happens between Michael and Johanna. Settled in Ireland, with Michael working as an odd-jobs man, Johanna pregnant and Greta working in a department store, the three look set for a future with Michael and Johanna married, and Greta as a perpetual 'maiden sister' keeping house. Only it doesn't quite work out that way...
Up to this point, I was really enjoying the book - I loved all the descriptions of the Irish traveller families, and of rural Irish farming life, and found the characters, if not defined in great psychological depth, interesting and appealing. But once the Cahill sisters and Michael are settled in America, the story begins to lose its way, and become implausible. I could believe in Johanna's post-natal depression, but not in her running away to Chicago (not if she was that depressed). Exactly what Michael felt about both sisters, and whether he really did love Greta best or was just saying so, was never made clear. And once Johanna had gone, the novel became very pedestrian - simply lots of day to day observations of the family as Michael worked at a hard and boring job as a New York construction worker, Greta worked at a boring job in a department store, as both worried about whether daughter Julia should know the secret of her birth and as the other children grew up fairly unremarkably, playing with Barbie dolls, watching television and eating take-aways on the weekend. It all gets very dull, to be honest, and the big revelation about Julia is frustratingly low key when it eventually comes. The novel even really loses its Irish flavour - Michael and Greta just become 'drudges', slaving away at their New York jobs, with no interest, and less and less sense of their pasts. And the end - relying yet again on a main character getting Alzheimer's, as so many family sagas do (so many indeed that you'd think the whole population rather than 1 in four develop the disease) was plain depressing. And to be honest in terms of psychology there were problems from quite early on - why Michael left the traveller community was never properly explained, nor why Greta never seemed to get homesick in the US.
The early bits about the traveller community convince me that Mary Beth Keane is a writer of great promise - but for me it never really came to enough in this book.
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