Hagstones, Muireann says part way through Sinéad Gleeson’s debut novel, aren’t just “battered stones with holes in them… they’re lucky”. Nell, to whom Muireann has presented the stone, collects them. “If you look through the hole,” Nell explains, “you’re meant to see a different view of the world.”
Like its namesake, Hagstone also offers a new perspective, one where the natural world is all powerful and art is of utmost importance. Our protagonist, Nell, is an artist whose work is often in conversation with natural phenomena – light, tides or the movement of waves on the sand. She lives off the west coast of Ireland on an isolated island whose inhabitants live alongside the supernatural. Its eeriest feature is “the sound”, the strange murmurings that the island emits at unpredictable moments, or, as Nell sees it, “the thrum that thwarted the place”. Not everybody hears “the sound” – and no one has ever worked out why.
During the course of the novel Nell becomes involved with two men: Cleary, who goes to work at sea for weeks at a time, and Nick, a famous American actor who has moved to the island with a movie project in mind. But this novel is most interested in women’s lives, and at its intriguing heart are the Iníons (a word that comes from Old Irish, meaning the daughters), a reclusive group of women who live a self-sustaining life at Rathglas, an old convent. When Nell is invited to produce an art piece chronicling the Iníons’ history, she gets to know the women and why they fled the outside world. Contrary to what the mainstream press says, they are not a “cabal of man-haters” or a “crazed cult who dance naked, smeared in seaweed paste and period blood”. Their life is much simpler: they have sought “exile as a kind of self-preservation”. But as Nell spends more time among the Iníons, she learns that their sanctuary is not quite that.
Gleeson is also the author of a prize-winning essay collection, Constellations, and in Hagstone she distils thought-provoking ideas about art, solitude and the supernatural into short, crisp sentences. This simplicity makes her occasional use of a poetic image (“The inky water moves in pleats”, “ideas like dodgems, colliding in her head”) all the more sublime. To what extent is solitude an act of resistance, Gleeson asks, and how can we better tune into our natural environments? For a novel so full of myth, Hagstone is wonderfully wise.
Ellen Peirson-Hagger is assistant culture editor at the New Statesman
• Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
