I like to have a back-up book.  One big old trashy novel I haven’t read yet waiting for me on the bedroom bookshelf for a Dark Night of the Soul.  Usually it’s a nice Jilly C or a sports biography or some YA sci-fi but sometimes, if there’s a new one, it’s a Marian Keyes.  This is slightly self-defeating because actually if there’s one thing Marian Keyes specialises in it’s Dark Nights of the Soul, but she’s also very funny and you can get 200 pages into a Walsh Sister novel before you realise you’ve forgotten everything else.

About three years ago Keyes, one of the most successful commercial fiction writers in the world, admitted that she was suffering again with clinical depression.  This didn’t come as a huge shock to any of her devoted readers - Keyes began to write while struggling with alcoholism, a subject she covered brilliantly in 1998’s Rachel’s Holiday - but the way she spoke openly about it was pretty cool.  The new Marian Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close, is a ripper of a yarn about a missing boyband member but honestly it’s mostly also a very good book about depression.

Mercy Close is a Walsh Sister novel, (and anyone who read Anybody Out There? - the Walsh Novel about grief - knows those sisters have had a hard row to hoe) which means we get to spend some more time with Mammy Walsh.  Mammy Walsh, along with Mrs. Bennett, is one of the top two comic Mothers in Fiction*.  The heroine is her youngest daughter, Helen, and Helen is spiralling into the second big depressive episode of her life.  Keyes does so well with things like this.  Helen, a private detective, has lost her house to the recession and is beginning to struggle with eating and showering.  Driving to her parents house one evening, she sees vultures circling around a petrol station.  When it becomes apparent that the vultures are in fact seagulls, Helen knows she has to go to the doctor.  She spends the rest of the book going downhill, while remembering the last time this happened to her and trying to manage to fall as sensibly as she can.  

Perhaps the biggest triumph of Mercy Close is that Keyes offers no real solution to Helen’s illness.  Helen’s last stint in the psychiatric ward wasn’t a panacea but it stopped her killing herself.  Anti-depressants save her life but they don’t offer her the oblivion she really craves. A combination of gentle activity, family support and medication allow Helen fragile comfort and that, Keyes allows, is a fantastic triumph.  What I love most about the way Keyes does this is that despite Helen’s illness she remains completely and utterly part of the narrative.  We care that Helen is ok, but we also care what she does outside of her illness.  Helen is a talented, determined ill person, and she is allowed all of that at once.  It’s a brave and detailed bit of writing, as is most of Keys’s work, and we should all be grateful that Keyes herself has the support and determination to keep writing.  There are some very good jokes too.

 *just my opinion**

**my opinion is basically correct

UPDATE: I wrote this whole bloody post spelling the name of the author incorrectly.  Thank you Anna.  FFS.