Tara Road by Maeve Binch

Maeve Binchy, Tara Road

The discussion about Tara Road focused mainly on four points: Characters; quality of writing; what value there might be in reading a well-told story with bad morals; and whether we would recommend it to other people. It’s only fair to say that opinions on all four points were very diverse! What follows is a bit of a summary, leaving out all the debating.

The characters provided plenty to talk about: everybody disliked and despised Danny Lynch for his all-round cheating – basically the person he was in love with was himself –, and Rosemary Ryan for pretending to be Ria’s friend while having an ongoing affair with her husband; it was hard to understand how anyone could be so steely and selfish.

Some people thought Ria was excellently drawn and others felt she was too naïve to be true; it was noticeable that the house-swap enabled her to change conclusively and face life in a way she had never done before.

For more than one reader, the catastrophically inappropriate schoolboy Brian was a favourite. Colm Barry was intended to be a sympathetic and attractive character, but there was too much missing that one would want to know about him, as though time or space constraints had forced the author to leave, or cut, parts of the story out.

At least one reader felt that all the older-generation Irishwomen – Nora Johnson, Danny’s mother, Martin Moran’s mother – were depicted as poor-spirited and bitter. We talked about that generation of Irish people – women – in Catholic parishes in England: a generation of talented women, hard workers, unbelievably generous with their time and efforts, who have found that there is no-one to take over from them because their children, the next generation, are totally different and have no intention of following in their footsteps in any way at all.

The question arose of why Danny turned out the way he did: was it because his parents seemed incapable of family relationships and had no “parenting skills” whatsoever, and so he had had no proper family upbringing?

It was felt by some that the characters were shallow stereotypes, a neatly-chosen range of stock figures with which to decorate the stage, and that there was simply not enough depth in them to make a satisfying read.

The quality of writing: like all Binchy novels it’s popular fiction. It makes exciting reading, and Binchy manages to keep all the characters before our eyes, with short episodes, conversations and events, moving rapidly from one to another all the time. 

The introduction of Marilyn, and her story, halfway through the book, is very well done indeed by means of the telephone conversation.

The mirroring between Ria and Marilyn is too obviously contrived for art: each simultaneously goes through a sense of anger towards the other, and then each simultaneously discovers a highly significant fact about the other’s life, which she realises she can never tell the other about; each then reacts by feeling protective and positive towards the other.

On the other hand, there are sentences here and there throughout the book where the reader feels, “She just dashed this down meaning to go back and write it properly later, but then forgot…” Plus what we said about   the character of Colm Barry above.

Why read a book like this – easy reading, good story, about people with really bad morals? For people who read it uncritically, just for entertainment, there is a lot in it that would be really harmful, simply because it presents really wrong choices and situations as ordinary – the way everyone lives, the things everyone does. So people are helped to accept and do these things themselves and never see anything wrong with them. That is the way immoral literature, at the highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow levels, has been working for the last century or so, and has done a huge amount of harm to society.

But if you read Maeve Binchy critically, it can, we thought, be very useful too. In the first place, it helps to put ourselves in the places of the many people we know who do live in that way and understand where they are at. Secondly, you can ask yourself, “At this point, this person made a really bad choice. What would have been a good choice for him or her to make? What could have helped him or her to make it? What would have been some likely results?” A very useful exercise indeed in many ways!

Would we recommend this book to anyone else, and if so, to whom and what for? It turned out that none of us would recommend it just as a good read. It would be an entertaining and relaxing book to read, for instance, while convalescing - but there are plenty of other books which are equally entertaining, more relaxing, better written, and without the unpleasantness of this one. It has its usefulness only as a critical teaching tool in the right hands.