Australian journalist Louise Milligan entered the world of crime fiction with a thriller called Pheasant’s Nest. That book revolves around a traumatic experience of journalist, Kate Delaney following her kidnapping. Delaney features again in Milligan’s second novel Shellybanks. This is a very different affair but one that cleverly manages to build from the main character’s trauma.
When Shellybanks opens, Kate Delaney and boyfriend Liam cut short their recuperation holiday in Greece after a call from her Irish aunt Dolores. In Dublin, Kate reconnects with her family but also slowly learns that her Aunt Dolores has her own history of trauma. The middle of the novel is Dolores’ story, a tragic one of her as a teenager and one based on actual practices of coercion, abuse and exploitation of teenagers in Ireland.
Shellybanks joins a host of recent books, such as Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, that have exposed the ways in which Irish teenagers were exploited in the second half of the twentieth century. In this case it is a cabal using the guise of religion to entice and then essentially enslave young girls. This makes the middle section of the novel in particular tough to read as Milligan details the way in which Dolores is separated from her family and trapped in a life that she did not choose. A practice that Milligan suggests, in the real world aswell, may still be occurring.
Louise Milligan is an investigative journalist as is her protagonist. And Shellybanks does have the feel of a piece of investigative journalism that has been lightly fictionalised. In doing so, Milligan does not try to answer every question that she raises. Some of the characters and their motivations are left deliberately vague. But by using fiction, Milligan is able to draw strong parallels between the lives and experiences of her characters and so deliver a darkly fascinating and emotionally resonant novel.
Shellybanks by Louise Milligan
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