The Edward VIII gold sovereign has legendary status among coin enthusiasts for two reasons. Firstly, the infamously vain king broke with protocol by refusing to be depicted facing towards the right, believing his left to be his better side. Then due to his abdication, the coin never actually entered into circulation, becoming known as “the coinage that never was”. In 2014 an Edward VIII sovereign broke records for a British coin, selling at auction for £516,000.
It is not clear how many of these sovereigns were actually minted, though one of them – of rather shady provenance – turns up in Anne Griffin’s impressively confident debut novel, in the unlikely environs of a dairy farm in the Irish village of Rainsford, County Meath. Reputedly won in a poker game from one of Edward VIII’s footmen, the coin has become the prized possession of the local landowner, Hugh Dollard, a notorious drunkard and bully.
Young farm labourer Maurice Hannigan has suffered repeated violence and abuse at the hands of his employer and his equally vindictive son, Thomas. When the precious coin is mislaid in a family argument, Maurice unthinkingly pockets it. “If I’d known back then how that decision of mine ruined the lives inside that house for generations to come,” he recalls, “I wonder would I have walked on, stepping over its pull, its power? But all I knew then was revenge.”
The legacy of the coin, and its curse, is related by the now 84-year-old Maurice, sitting at the bar of the former Dollard residence, which has since been converted into a hotel. Over the course of a single evening in 2014, Maurice lines up five drinks and proposes a toast for each, instigating extended internal monologues dedicated to the five individuals who have most closely shaped his life and experience.
The first toast is raised to Maurice’s elder brother Tony, whom he idolised but who died of consumption at an early age. The second monologue is dedicated to Maurice’s stillborn daughter Molly, and the third to his disturbed sister-in-law Noreen, considered in the language of the time to be suffering from “melancholy” and committed to an asylum. The fourth toast goes to Maurice’s only surviving child, Kevin, who left rural Meath to pursue a journalistic career in America; before he finally raises a glass to his beloved wife Sadie, whose death two years ago is still raw in his memory.
Griffin’s novel was apparently inspired by a chance encounter in a hotel bar with an elderly man who confided that he worked in the building as a boy and that he expected the night to be his last. As a novel whose central themes are grief, separation and mental illness it would be very easy for the writing to become bogged down in self-pity. Yet Maurice Hannigan emerges as an engaging, compassionate creation who seems fully aware that he conforms to a stereotype: “As for Irish men, I’ve news for you. It’s worse as you get older. It’s like we tunnel ourselves deeper into our aloneness. Solving our problems on our own. Men, sitting alone at bars going over and over the same old territory in their heads.”
There is a pleasing clarity to Griffin’s five-act structure, in which the successive libations give rise to five fully realised individual works of fiction. Particularly affecting is the gulf of separation that opens up between the barely literate Maurice and his journalist son, divided both by education and the Atlantic. And there’s an aching poignancy to his recollection of the stillborn Molly, “who I met 49 years ago only once and only for 15 minutes. But she has lived in this dilapidated heart of mine ever since.”
The individual narratives are neatly tied together by the talismanic presence of the stolen coin, whose loss signals a reversal in the Dollards’ fortunes matched by Hannigan’s inexorable rise. Thomas Dollard’s monomaniacal obsession with recovering his missing treasure culminates in a deliciously absurd encounter in the hotel bar with the childlike Noreen, whose kleptomaniac attraction towards shiny objects makes no discrimination between a couple of shillings and a numismatic marvel worth over half a million pounds.
Above all, one senses the void left by Sadie, to whom Maurice’s devotion was matched only by his meanness. There’s a telling episode in which Maurice, now the principal landowner in the county, denies his wife the indulgence of a scoop of ice-cream with her pudding. But it encapsulates the spirit of a forgivable, flawed narrator left alone at the bar to count the accumulated regrets of a profound love that was always imperfectly expressed: “There was a love,” he admits, “but of the Irish kind, reserved and embarrassed by its own humanity.”
• When All Is Said is published by Sceptre. To order a copy for £11.43 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
