Saint of Lost Things by Tish Delaney: The Troubles are over, the troubles just begun

“I was never designed to be all alone. I was one of a pair. I had a brother. What had happened to him?” Early in The Saint of Lost Things, Tish Delaney’s striking second novel, we discover Lindy Morris embarking on a quest. Rural west Tyrone, and a black evening — and Lindy is rooting through a purloined biscuit tin stuffed with documents containing evidence of lives once lived. She needs help to make sense of her own life while she still can: too much of it has already been sliced away.

For this is a novel much concerned with excision. Whole wedges of Lindy’s familial hinterland are absent — and such relationships as remain are a distinct source of ambivalence. She has previously sought escape and freedom in a vividly evoked London of the 1980s, only to be yanked back to Tyrone; here, while she retains her spark and spirit, she is viewed as a kind of provocation. She ekes out an existence with her difficult aunt Bell (they each own half a name, and half a life) in a situation initially framed in comic terms — but gradually we come a dawning realisation of the full complexity of the situation, and of the power exercised by freedom-killing influences in family and community.

Delaney’s first novel, Before My Actual Heart Breaks, explored the environs of a lightly fictionalised Castlederg, and of destinies shaped by the Troubles. This new novel is set in the same isolated terrain, but now the tone has darkened, and an abused and unstable natural world is unable to provide solace. The landscape of the protagonist’s home comes powerfully to life: looming alien spruce forests, peat-dark rivers, and the bog water that wells close to Lindy and Bell’s shoddily built house.

In this story, political violence has receded into the background, but it has clearly been replaced by insidious societal and family pressure — and we begin to see that Lindy’s true quest is to conquer the potent impact of exile and chronic isolation. What’s more, she may triumph in her zestful search for knowledge, for in creating a protagonist who is steely against the odds, Delaney shows deftly that our dreams need never abandon us, even in the face of brutality and abjection.