The Red Mouth by Sheila Armstrong: Uncovering the past

Given how much I enjoyed both her short story collection, How to Gut a Fish, and her debut novel, Falling Animals, you’d think I’d jump at the change to read Sheila Armstrong’s The Red Mouth, but the blurb’s hints of otherworldliness, curses and strange magnetism put me off. Fortunately, the supernatural strand proved to be overplayed. Spanning fifty years, Armstrong’s novel follows four people whose lives are influenced by the discovery of the Belroe Woman in an Irish peat bog in the 1970s.

She is curled into the shape of a question mark, brow towards the sky, pinned down by ancient hazel rods to keep her from floating up. 

When Patch unearths a pair of enormous antlers, he becomes obsessed with this strange find, choosing not to report it to the authorities. Since the banning of peat-harvesting and the discovery of a preserved corpse, the bog has become a nature reserve where Tomás works as a ranger. It was Tomás who helped Liam Fleming with the discovery which made his name in the 1970s, using the peat cutting skills that were soon to become redundant. Fleming brought his two young children with him, looked after by Tomás’s exasperated wife. Quiet and withdrawn, eight-year-old Brigit was very different from her younger, tempestuous sister, given to nightmares of the Belroe Woman. As their father grew in professional stature, Brigit and Laoise move away from the life Brigit remembers when she visits the National Museum’s new installation celebrating her father’s work and legacy, now housing a reconstruction of a stag using Patch’s antlers. Maeve’s contribution has been the research into new finds using the contacts from her environmental studies, a contribution that may foster a newfound if frail confidence.

A hare is watching her, its side-facing eye jerking up and down and left to right. It notices her noticing it, and even that gentle attention is enough: it explodes into motion and melts immediately into the grey-gold background.

Armstrong’s novel follows an annual cycle, introducing each month with a strikingly lyrical description of the season. Her narrative switches between the four main protagonists, unfolding their back stories within the framework of the peat bog excavations. Each of the characters is changed by the discoveries, from Tomás who fell into the burial chamber at an early age not knowing what it could be to Liam who becomes a celebrity academic, from Patch whose find eventually pulls him out of his depression to Brigit, whose life is marked by her father’s passion for his work which came at a cost to his children. It’s a ripple effect that brought to mind Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 as I read it, as did Armstrong’s gorgeous, poetic descriptions of the natural world, almost hallucinatory in the final section.

Bloomsbury Books: London 9781526691125 240 pages Hardback