Strange Sally Diamond - Liz Nugent

If ever there was a book that wanted to be a cartwheel, this is that book. One minute the reader is firmly planted on the ground, aware of their surroundings, the next, the world has flipped over and you are reaching for the sky, trying to make sense of who the protagonist is and whether we like her or not.  In Strange Sally Diamond, Liz Nugent likes to strange-ify the world of the text, to make the strangeness of the title, not only refer to Sally herself, but also to the plot line. We are never really sure what will happen next and where the story is going, which is a delightful thing in a thriller.

From the very first sentence, this book will grip you. The character of Sally, who is one of the book’s narrators, is one of a kind. We are never quite sure what she will do next. Her inability to know when she has crossed the line of acceptable human behaviour engages and unnerves us. Just when we feel that she has acclimatised to the rhythms of everyday life, she hits out against the world, and it is only as the story unfolds that we learn why. 

I will not spoil the surprise of the novel here, never fear, but I will say that there are times in the book when we enter into the minds of unlikeable characters. It is uncomfortable and disorientating for the reader, which mirrors how Sally feels most of the time. This is the real brilliance of the text: Nugent forces the reader to feel like Sally, to cartwheel through the pages, never quiet sure when the horizon will flip once again and we will be left standing on our hands, trying to make sense of an upside down reality.

Set in a small town in Ireland, the book introduces us to a diverse cast of characters that reflects modern Ireland.  Yet there is something dark and corrupt lying just below the surface, with broken family relationships, untold secrets and  troubling memories bubbling up from childhood. As such, this book is rooted firmly in the Irish literary tradition, not a million miles away from the writings of Brian Moore or Edna O’Brien, heartbreakingly familiar to anyone who lived through the 1980s and ‘90s in Ireland.  We just know that the truth will rise to the surface, clawing its way into the light, like Yeats’s  slouching beast, its time come round at last. 

The senes in Ireland are paralleled with similar scenes in New Zealand, but where vast, open landscape conceals secrets of its own, mysteries that lie close to the surface, if anyone should care to seek them out. 

Strange Sally Diamond is as much a story about the workings of the human psyche as it is the goings on in a country village. And as such, this book tries to explore that things that make one person need to dominate another. What makes one human being feel the need to take full possession of another human being, so that one becomes the toy, a plaything for the other? And what is it in the human character that refuses such a yoke? These are the larger themes at work in Liz Nugent’s powerful, unforgettable book.

  Expect a quick ride through Sally’s strange world, I finished it in two sittings. But when you turn the final page, and land at last on your own two feet, do not be surprised if  you find, in the end, that the world never feels quite the same again. 

Michelle Burrowes