Eimear Ryan’s 2021 novel Holding Her Breath illustrates the futility of escaping your past. The book follows Beth Crowe, a first-year student at an unnamed university who the reader can only assume to be Trinity through clever hints. For instance, in the first pages, as Beth is swimming at the Sports Centre, just finishing out her hundred laps, it is gradually revealed that she is on a sports scholarship and has been granted a room at Goldsmith Hall, which “overlooks the climbing wall and its brightly coloured footholds”.
Beth’s relationship with the pool is already storied and fraught, and her swimming career plays a central role in the novel. Beth is returning to swimming following a mistake which led to her losing a chance at becoming an Olympian. Her return to the sport is anxiety-ridden and somewhat terrifying, as she becomes reacquainted with old friends and rivals. This anxiety of reentry, whether it be towards academics, sport or other activities, is an overarching theme of the book, and one that students can easily relate to, especially when starting their first year at a new university, as Beth herself is doing.
While Beth is entering university, she’s also grappling with the legacy of her late grandfather, who is the poet Benjamin Crowe. Beth is unabashedly not an English student, and the ghost of old Benjamin seemingly has no common ground upon which to haunt her. Unfortunately for Beth, her roommate, Sadie, is an English student, and she conspicuously has a copy of old Ben’s Selected Poems on her bookshelf. Benjamin Crowe seems to have made quite the splash. His work is shown to have been extremely pervasive, having inspired rock star suicide notes and being quoted by US politicians.
Ryan is able to subvert the expectations of another ‘Trinity literature’ novel by making Beth so much more involved in sport than she is in English. Only through her familial connection is Beth given reason to connect with literature, which makes the whole plot seem much less forced and more organic. Holding Her Breath isn’t a book about a student studying literature but a story concerning the struggle of finding your place in the world, neatly framed with an exploration of her grandfather’s poetry.
With Ben’s seemingly unending prevalence, Beth cannot escape her ancestry. In a way, Beth is able to connect with her long-dead grandfather and learn about the truth of his life, a privilege she was not afforded while he was alive because of his perennial popularity with the English department, among others. The novel is at its strongest when Beth is uncovering the truth of her grandfather’s past, a truth that simultaneously mirrors her own throughout the book. This pattern repeats throughout the book to great effect, with Beth’s life paralleling Ben’s. The recursive relationship between Ben and Beth’s lives illustrates a cycle of hereditary repetition that is so neatly contained that you can’t help but admire it.
Between Ben and Beth there is a unifying character: Justin Kelleher. Justin is a PhD English student and Ben Crowe enthusiast. In some ways he is the archetypal male manipulator that shows up so often in contemporary literature: he’s older, he’s scholarly, he’s at times extremely passionate – though this is just love bombing – and he has little regard for the consequences of his actions outside of his own gratification. Justin Kelleher is Don Draper with a slightly hunched back and glasses.
Justin Kelleher is also tied to Beth’s family. Years before the novel was set, Justin fruitlessly set out to retrieve Ben’s lost archive from Beth’s grandmother, Ben’s widow, Lydia. Though Justin was rebuffed, he finds a way into the family through Beth. As Beth’s relationship with Justin forms and grows, she begins to uncover more of the truth of her grandfather’s life and embarks on a journey through his past. Though Justin helps to start Beth’s journey into her family’s past, this journey becomes solely Beth’s and ultimately leads to personal development and self realisation for herself.
In Holding Her Breath, Ryan is able to successfully capture the feelings of confusion and misplacedness that accompany the start of university in a matter-of-fact, uncompromising style. Descriptions are sparse and pages are occasionally filled with sheer cliffs of dialogue that allow you to see into the characters’ minds. Ryan’s writing style complements the mystery of Ben’s life, the rising tension between Beth and Justin and Beth’s anxiety at her stunted swimming career. Though the intensity of the book’s plot occasionally wavers – sometimes I found myself wondering why I found myself so enthralled by the book – the dialogue and emotion of Ryan’s writing make it hard to pull yourself away. Holding Her Breath is a debut that shows that Ryan knows how to tie disparate, seemingly unrelated threads of a novel together into a perfect conclusion.
