The Reckoning

Successful author and journalist Lina Rose is in her seventies when she decides to write to her only daughter, Diane. She had given Diane up for adoption when the daughter was around 18 months old. This decision, though, was not made under duress from any third party. Lina did it because she wanted a new life, a different life, a life that couldn’t possibly include a child. Unforgivable, isn’t it? And Diane has not forgiven her.
But as Lina’s life unfolds, through her collection of letters to her daughter, it becomes apparent that judgement is something best left to the gods. A life so scarred by both world wars, as Lina’s was and as many others’ must have been, is not one that can be rightly gauged through a relatively peaceful – if uneasy - 21st century lens. Like the lame excuse proffered after an unfunny punchline, it would seem that “you had to be there”. And one of the many strengths of this astonishing novel is just how accurately Clár Ni Chonghaile recounts the horrors of “being there”, whether in the trenches of the Great War or in Caen during WWII.
There are so many written testaments of the suffering endured by the soldiers ensnared in the thick of both world wars. Not so much has been written about those women left behind to pick up the impossibly smashed pieces. Lina is one of those left behind, and while her husband does return from Caen, he is utterly destroyed. Just as her father returned from the Somme, traumatized into almost complete silence. When even further heartbreak ensues, Lina realizes that if she is to survive at all, she must first surrender her child.
Now an old woman, Lina knows it’s not long until her own day of reckoning and, acutely aware that her daughter has not forgiven her, she feels she must write an explanation. But is it possible to explain a life? With clear-eyed honesty, and many regrets, she traces the sequence of events, big and small, that amounted to her life both before and after her daughter’s adoption. Written with such a skilled, elegant pen and avoiding even the tiniest trace of maudlin sentimentality, this novel is right up there with Testament of Youth and Sophie’s Choice and deserves spectacular success.