As Sally reassesses her life, she thinks back over her childhood with her unmarried, lonely and eventually suicidal mother (and no father). Now that her mother is dead, all she has is her grandfather, a Bishop. Sally begins to unravel the enigma that is her own identity.

There’s a mystery at the heart of Jennifer Johnston’s fourteenth novel, revealed in one character’s revelation which interrupts Sally’s first-person narration. That mystery isn’t too hard to guess – as it happens, one British TV drama series used a similar twist not very long ago, though that is no doubt coincidence. However, Johnston’s handling of this is exemplary, resulting in a fine balance between sympathy for a wrongdoer (while making clear that person’s weakness and attempts at self-justification) but not for a moment condoning the wrongdoing. ‘Grace and Truth’ is a deeply humane book.

Johnston was a late starter as a novelist, with her first novel, the excellent ‘The Captains and the Kings’, being published in 1972 when she was forty-two. Over the next three decades, she has refined her art and craft: not a single word is wasted, and what her novels lack in bulk – ‘Grace and Truth’ is around 58,000 words, a typical length for her – they make up for in depth. Many other novelists would expand this novel to twice its length (or be urged to by their publishers) but that would be to its detriment. As readers, we need the fine miniaturists – the ones who, in Jane Austen’s phrase, favour the half-inch of ivory – as well the expansive epicists. It’s a pleasure to read a novel that’s exactly the right length for its content. Johnston does expect some work from her readers, though there’s nothing obscure about her work for anyone who simply pays attention, and the spare but distinctive rhythms of her prose and dialogue are a delight. She also creates a sketch of a changing Ireland, now a prosperous member of the Eurozone, freeing itself from its earlier religious ties. The Irish Church will not take much comfort from this novel, nor are they meant to.

Now in her seventies, Jennifer Johnston is one of the finest novelists now active in the British Isles. ‘Grace and Truth’ shows her in fine form.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.