The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus (review)

In Claire Keegan’s “long short story” Foster (2008), the unnamed child protagonist-narrator is temporarily displaced to the home of distant relatives to ease the burden of her feckless father and pregnant mother who are overrun with other children to care for.1 In an early scene, the narrator’s new foster mother, Mrs. Kinsella, gives the child a bath. The child thinks, “Her hands are like my mother’s hands, but there is something else in them, too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place and new words are needed” (Keegan 2008: 18). Though Keegan’s text is not mentioned in The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020), the child protagonist’s “loss for words” in this intimate scene recalls the experiences of so many of the child characters at the center of the fictions in Joseph Valente’s and Margot Gayle Backus’s study: an inability to put into words something they have witnessed or endured. In the foreword to The Child Sex Scandal, the widely known Irish cultural critic Fintan O’Toole discusses the role of writing in the process of uncovering things that are unspeakable, particularly when those things involve children. O’Toole explains that “in life, much of what children know is communicated between them only in quiet speech—the unspeakable is really the unwritable. In art, it is writing that occupies the place of this speech, that broaches, more or less explicitly, what is not being said, either by the young characters themselves or by the world around them” (xiv). Listening closely to “what is not being said” is the impetus for this study, and Backus and Valente—two key players in the field of Irish literary studies—attempt to unearth the “unspeakable” narratives of child sexual abuse in a selection of twentiethand twenty-first-century short stories and novels by some of Ireland’s most studied writers.