Paul Behan | Staff Writer
A bit of a whirlwind: that’s my first impression of actress, playwright and author Elske Rahill. Her eyes twinkle and her voice is the honeyed tone of a mother. I’m meeting Elske and baby Brocc to discuss Between Dog & Wolf, her debut novel which is being published by Lilliput Press. We sit the chamber of the GMB, alone and out of the rain, and we talk.
The prologue gets me. It really gets me. It’s how she wants you to read the book. Her words hang on the page, straining forward, to create this beautiful, stark mother and child moment. Almost poetry, it’s reminiscent of Eavan Boland. It surrounds you with one moment, something you’ve never felt before because it’s only on this page. From page one she had me.
Her words hang on the page, straining forward, to create this beautiful, stark mother and child moment
“What inspires me to write generally are things that are hard to articulate, do you know what I mean, you realise something and you understand what’s happening but how do you articulate it? Sometimes the only way is through a story”. The story in question is a love story. It’s not really one story, it’s more like reality; we don’t ever get up, do something and go to bed. Rahill paints a thousand tiny pictures and crafts them together into a stunning, thought provoking piece. She didn’t start with a story, she started with characters, a vignette of a man watching porn. It’s a piece about parents and children and love and fucking and gender. It’s a piece about being broken and lost and beautiful. We all struggle to connect and that struggle is essentially what we see on the page. The characters can only ever connect in moments. She explains this as isolation. If you’ve ever felt alone in a crowd, like the key without a lock, that’s what these relationships convey. The empty try to be full. Rahill paints that feeling on the page because we can’t say it aloud.
This is a sexually charged book. According to Rahill: “Sex is political to an extent. It’s not just sex ever.” From start to end, sex and the body tell the story. We see insecurities and intimacy and power. Sex is interpersonal power for Rahill. She sees the evolving nature of what is sexually attractive as proof of a cultural element in sex. How can something stop being sexy if it’s all physical? This cultural influence aggresses through the book as our characters are defined by and defy their gender roles, their innermost conflict is expressed through their sexual desires. Rahill sees a truth in sex, an expression of humanity that we allow to be warped by cultural norms. There’s a passage in the book, our male lead does something for the first time since childhood, he stands before a mirror and tucks his genitalia between his legs. There’s a shame hanging in the scene. The sex worries Rahill, it’s the only way she could tell the story but she also worries about it being distracting. She can’t understand the shock it’s garnered because she’s says there’s nothing shocking left in normal sex. She didn’t write to arouse her reader, she wrote to evoke something more important.
“Sex is political to an extent. It’s not just sex ever.”
This book is also a social commentary. It’s a story set in oppression by gender roles and our patriarchal society. The book revolves around characters’ relationships with their mothers because for Rahill the patriarchy is about fear of the mother figure. Misogyny arises from guilt and confusion and hurt from a missed connection. Between Dog & Wolf charts a relationship of sexual control between the male lead and one of the female leads. This isn’t a man-hating book. The men aren’t monsters or unlikeable, just men struggling to be a masculine ideal. The key maternal figures, though not bad, are a product of this system. In this book patriarchy is a game we all play but there are no winners. The beauty of Rahill’s picture is in its raw, ugly darkness. To look at it is to gaze on someone you know, people you know, things you know but have found hard to express.
for Rahill the patriarchy is about fear of the mother figure
We talk about the major criticism of the book. People don’t like the characters. It’s a cast of broken dolls, all cruel in their own way and all kind in their own way. I didn’t dislike any of them but I didn’t get attached to any of them. “I just think that’s what people are like”. They’re so wonderfully human because they’re so flawed and unable to relate to each other. It’s striking because it makes you think about reality of being so in your own head and never in anyone else’s, our fatal inability to understand anyone around us. There is no perfection, everyone is flawed in this book. Everyone is human in this book.
Her next book is about inherited pain and inherited problems across generations. There’s no sex so far, she tells me so with a smile of worry. Elske has finished this story. She hope’s it’s a positive book, one of redemption. I think it is. I think that through all the darkness you find something a little bit special. You get to know someone you’ve already met a hundred times.
Between Dog & Wolf (Lilliput Press) is available at all good booksellers now [€12.99]. Students can order the book on the Lilliput website and get free delivery if they quote their student numbers in the order. Thanks to Aifric Ni Chriodain, baby Brock and most of all to the very striking Elske Rahill.
