Soldier Sailor: 'One of the finest novels published this year' The Sunday Times

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If Kilroy’s novel ended here, it would have done more than enough to locate her among the ranks of motherhood’s laureates alongside the likes of Helen Simpson, Rachel Cusk and Sarah Moss. But it doesn’t. The final section expands – abruptly, beautifully, agonisingly – to grapple with the true existential crisis at the heart of motherhood: the understanding, born with the baby, that we’re all time’s prisoners and “it will do us in in the end”. We crawl out, ultimately, from the chaos of early motherhood, but the love continues to obliterate us. “I wasn’t scared of dying until you were born,” Soldier says towards the novel’s close. Forget the sleepless nights; that’s the real horror, right there. Well, Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another's arms. The Earth rotates beneath us and all is well, for now... The mother narrating the story is the Soldier of the title, knee-deep in the trenches and operating purely in survival mode, and Sailor is her boy child. I like that their actual names are withheld; this provides them with a universality that suggests that their experience is not unique to them but a common one. I am tired. I am lonely. I have found myself mired in resentment in this new life, become a person I don’t wish to be, feeling constant guilt for not feeling constant gratitude for the blessing that is my child. I do feel constant gratitude: I adore my child. But I am tired. I am lonely. I am lost.” In Soldier Sailor she joins the litany of literary mothers who interrogate this, armed with a writer’s tools – language, intelligence and empathy – to illuminate the daunting task at hand, the all-consuming love, the sudden willingness to kill for their child. "I swear every woman in my position feels the same", her unnamed narrator says at the novel’s start.

Kilroy may not have published a novel in a decade but she did not entirely disappear from the literary scene. In 2015, Claire Kilroy published an essay in the Irish arts anthology Winter Papers, F for Phone, in which she described how the birth of her son, Lawrence, three years earlier had robbed her of the ability to write: “Writing used to be the answer to all my problems – it enabled me to make something out of the bad things in my life, to use them – but now I can no longer write. So I can no longer fix my life.”Kilroy’s writing style- her choice of beautiful words, the intensity and beauty of description of love for another person, for ever, for their whole life, was truly uplifting. I suspect that the beauty of the finale was all the greater because it marked such a contrast with the unremitting sense of despair that preceded it. I recommend this to every mother and every father, but I worry that it might have the unintentional effect of wiping out the human race should it be placed in the hands of those who haven't made up their minds about parenthood (or marriage) yet. Every woman on earth will identify with this book. Every man will learn something urgent to his betterment. It sings with great authority about the wretched entrapment and molecular joy of motherhood...a radiant and fearless work of universal import" The Sailor of the title is the baby, while Soldier is the mother, one of the “infancy infantry” performing the thankless daily drill of raising the next generation, “struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own”. Reading Soldier Sailor is an intense experience, but an immensely rewarding one. It is full of heightened, hard-won emotions articulated with a rare eloquence. “Love will sluice over you like sunlight,” Soldier tells her son. The novel is dedicated to her father Jim, who was a very hands-on dad, and to her friend and fellow writer Sarah Bannan, head of literature at the Arts Council, whose son Ruairi tragically died in February.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway,” wrote Cyril Connolly. It’s a quotation that the novelist Claire Kilroy may well have reflected on over the years. It was imperative to me that something as epic as this be fashioned into a fictional narrative. A lot of writers turn to nonfiction and I didn’t want to do that. The imagination is linked to freedom, the immortality of art, to quote Nabokov. Art has always been the escape hatch if you’re of my vintage. I had to take risks but it did rescue me and it has rescued me again. In many ways not too much happens plot wise we simply hear Soldier’s thoughts about the early years of her son's life but this book never stops being engaging. In fact despite what could have been some heavy themes there’s a lightness and humour to parts of this. Although having said that it is also a very well done examination of motherhood within the context of patriarchy. How to sum this up? Brilliant, just brilliant! I loved this book so much. As a mother it was so utterly relatable. The intensity and relentlessness of the early days of motherhood was perfectly captured. The dark thoughts, the exhaustion, the loneliness, the feeling of being lost in a new role that is much more consuming than you expected it to be.There is a visceral quality to Kilroy’s writing; she captures the epic magnitude of mother love – the terrible, mind-bending realisation that you will one day be separated by death – and the grinding drudgery of just getting through the days. That she can render new what has been so often documented is testament to the originality of her prose, which she makes appear effortless: “You tore off your bib and cast it to the floor like a man quitting his job”; “Little kids bolted around in all directions, their skulls narrowly missing one another. It was the Hadron Collider in there.” The Ineos football family, a brood with branches in France and Switzerland, has lately been a little concerned about the neighbours. It’s not so much they are too noisy, it’s just that as Nice and Lausanne-Sport peer through the net curtains, they worry that the folk next door might be putting on a better show. Manchester United know the feeling. Nice, the Cote d’Azur... The Ineos football family, a brood with branches in France and Switzerland, has lately been a... The Ineos football family, a brood with branches in France and Switzerland, has lately been a... So I played for my father another concerto, though he was never one for sitting still in a chair. He would make an exception for me, though, his firstborn. He would see the progress I have made.” Sailor is a handful in the same way that any baby or toddler is. Their existence and demands are endless. Soldier’s husband is busy at work, distinctly absent in caring for their child, so she feels isolated and alone in this new, intense way of life.