In 2015, Claire Kilroy published an essay in the Irish arts anthology Winter Papers, F for Phone, in which she described how the birth of her son, Lawrence, three years earlier had robbed her of the ability to write: “Writing used to be the answer to all my problems – it enabled me to make something out of the bad things in my life, to use them – but now I can no longer write. So I can no longer fix my life.”
Finally, after an 11-year gap since her last book, she has found a way to use those “angry few years”, transmuting them into the tour-de-force of her fifth novel. Soldier Sailor is an astonishing high-wire act: a narrative at once raw and polished, brutally funny and quietly devastating, every sentence a precision-guided missile to the undefended core of any reader who has endured the dislocation of early motherhood. And it is specifically “motherhood”; the battle-scarred Soldier of the title is the unnamed female narrator who discovers, on becoming a mother, that the equality she thought she shared with her husband was only a veneer. “I was just a woman! How had this not registered before? A woman was of less value in society than a man.” She resents him for being able to maintain his life outside the confines of child rearing. “Which is not to say that your father was my world, but that he was free to roam in my world, which we should now call his world, or perhaps the world, an adult place from which I’d been banished. Now I lived in your world. It was small.”
