The Rachel Incident

when an author is let off the leash

You will know Caroline O’Donoghue from her excellent podcast series Sentimental Garbage and the associated mini-series Sentimental in the City, where she dissects various aspects of Sex And The City with Dolly Alderton.

O’Donoghue’s new novel, The Rachel Incident, is about a young woman, (the titular Rachel), caught up in a modern love-triangle-ish thing in 2010 Cork. The first dramatic moment comes so quickly in the book and it’s so unexpected that anything else I say will ruin it. The book examines Irish identity, which is interesting in the way that any subject is interesting if you are interesting about it, and it’s about feeling a bit untethered and being young and callow but nevertheless expected to operate in an adult world.

The Rachel Incident is not O’Donoghue’s first novel - I have read the others and they are all great - but this is the first book where I feel her true voice and personality really comes through. It’s a great voice, very strong and uncompromising. Not scared of looking or sounding cruel or ugly, but with a great deal of compassion and moral compass, too.

Just for example, in one scene Rachel, who is very tall and feels occasionally resentful of petite women, doubles down on a vow to seduce a woman’s husband because she (the wife) has the audacity to get on her tiptoes in order to kiss her burly husband, thereby emphasising her teeny-tininess.

This, from Rachel’s POV:

“Fuck you, I thought. I’m going to shag your husband just for that.”

It’s pretty monstrous. And I loved it. I am not tall, but I resonate hard with that feeling that Rachel has, that some woman who has an attribute that you want but don’t have, is just FLAUNTING it at you. It’s like me with very tanned women, or women with elegant fingers.

I feel very strongly that most authors don’t allow their female leads to have this sort of grey-area morality: they can only be two-dimensional representations of a type. Just nice, nice, nice all the time, or a bit prickly and therefore slightly “broken”. And that’s disappointing because it’s so very dull. So un-relatable.

O’Donoghue always writes without platitude, cliché or melodrama and it is such a welcome relief from most of contemporary fiction, which tends towards soupy word-salad. Normally I can’t stand nostalgia or coming-of-age novels because they are nauseating and solipsistic, but The Rachel Incident is so peppery and accurate that I must now reach for an awful cliché myself and say that I couldn’t put it down.

Which was so dumb! Because now I’ve got nothing to read again.