Review £14.99 pp215

Jennifer Johnston’s 14th novel opens with a swingeing scene of marital breakdown. Sally, a successful actress, arrives home “whacked” after a European tour in The Playboy of the Western World, to be told by her husband Charlie “I’m leaving you”.

She tells him to go — not tomorrow but instantly, tonight, pack up everything and get out. This is a first-person narrative, so we have only Sally’s clipped account, which is interwoven with bleak references to the circumstances of her past life: no father, the only child of a mother who committed suicide, refusing ever to divulge the name of Sally’s father. “I have never been lucky with men” is Sally’s wry comment. She is childless, and recognises that her constant putting-off of mother-hood is probably a factor in her husband’s discontent.

Two levels of time operate here — the few weeks that cover the action of the story, and the earlier decades that are revealed as it unfurls, the revelations of past distress. Grace and Truth is brief — a novella, perhaps, rather than a novel — and Sally’s narrative is one of staccato sentences, phrases and single words tripping down the page so that there is as much space as print. Somewhat strangely, this jumpy style also infects the confessional memoir that is eventually handed to Sally by her only relative. For there was, in fact, a man in her family — her grandfather, now a retired Church of Ireland bishop, whom she seldom sees and from whom her mother was estranged.

Devastated by the rift with her husband, Sally decides to visit the bishop, not seen since the time of her mother’s death, to which he appeared disconcertingly indifferent. Now, he is initially cold and rejecting, but, over time, grudgingly allows her to visit and, indeed, summons her to take him out for drives. And, at last, he opens up to her, admitting his loss of faith: “I realised that not only was there no God, but that we had invented Him to make sense of this mad world we live in.”

The Iraq war serves as the backdrop to Sally’s account of things — the television news punctuating each day with its images of death and destruction, the commentaries by Rageh Omaar and John Simpson and the rest of them. I wasn’t sure if this was in order to make a symbolic point about the apposition between private and public violence, or simply to place things within a particular time context. Either way, it sometimes seems too emphatic. Equally, there is a rather irritating symmetry drawn between Sally’s profession and her grandfather’s life of deception — a priest hawking wares in which he does not believe: both of them acting, role-playing. But, that said, the bishop is by far the more compelling character, and in the section given over to the memoir that he hands to Sally the novel acquires new depth.

It also, at this point, poses a problem for the reviewer: the bishop’s revelation of past events is shocking, and throws an entirely unexpected light on everything that has happened within this family. It would also be an act of reviewing vandalism to reveal it. This is a carefully crafted story, and the essence of its craft is the apparent opacity of the past — the way in which Sally’s life is skewed by her mother’s baffling behaviour — and the reader needs to share this bewilderment.

There is what seems to be a happy ending — or, rather, an ending of accommodations. I felt some doubts here: it feels a little too much like fictional order rather than the way in which people would really behave. But the structure is masterly, and the writing pungent.

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