Silence Under a Stone
Harriet Campbell is a young wife in the years after the Great War, living on the Ulster side of the border in a newly divided Ireland. She is married to a strict and harsh Presbyterian who becomes an Elder in their local church, Ballymount. They have a son, James, whom Harriet dotes upon, and jealously protects from their interfering Catholic housemaid, and from her husband who wants to toughen James up in a strict Protestant environment. But there are far more worries for Harriet as James grows into an adult, and circumstances are difficult for her.
The narrative is in Harriet’s first-person viewpoint, interspersed with her thoughts as she looks back upon her life in 1982, by then an old woman dying in a nursing home in Northern Ireland. It is a tale of religious intolerance, rigidity and an inability and unwillingness to forgive. Harriet herself had a strict religious upbringing that molded her character and gave her a foundation of intolerance and righteousness that lasted right up until her death. This is not a particularly profound or difficult book to read, though it is interesting and paced well, examining the horrors of religious bigotry. The narrative plods along somewhat, but it is ultimately a moving and rather chastening story.
