The Red Mouth, the second novel by Sheila Armstrong, is a masterfully written work, rooted in the dark peat of the Irish bogland. It is a setting which has undergone significant change, in parallel with Ireland’s wider, national transition in recent years: the embrace of migratory, international workforces and under-taxed tech giants; the cold shoulder to peat turf-cutting, an old industry, once responsible for providing power to the country.
The bogs’ vital role in carbon capture is now recognised and the industrial burning of peat phased out, but domestic burning continues, an unbroken link to the country’s past. Certainly, they remain evocative and alive in the Irish imagination. Occasional finds, buried deep in the peatland, from corpses of prehistoric sacrificial victims to giant harvests of bog-butter, draw excited headlines and international attention.
Armstrong’s impeccably articulated narrative takes such finds as a starting point for a tale rooted in the past but alive with modern characters so compellingly penned that they feel like family members. Indeed, the author’s ability to find points of reference, of human connection between reader and subject, is remarkable. As history is dragged from the bottom of the bog, Armstrong’s cast of capably observed characters are drawn together, and the reader likewise pulled in.
