[In the following negative review, Dallat criticizes the inaccurate details, unbelievable elements, and broad characterizations in The Gingerbread Woman.]

Jennifer Johnston's novels, and contemporary Irish writing generally, are replete with relationships which are dogged by differences of religion and culture. The Gingerbread Woman reverses expectations only in that it focuses on an encounter between a Southern Protestant and a Northern Catholic. The meeting, in the opening pages, between a young Glens of Antrim man, walking his dog on Killiney Hill, and a woman he believes is about to commit suicide, creates an awkward set of obligations and—avowedly non-sexual—affections, nimbly charted by Johnston over the next few days of their shared lives towards a resolution that is surprisingly credible.

Clara Barry and Laurence McGrane are opposites in every respect. The former's middle-class upbringing has given her access to international academia; she lectures on literature while singing Schubert and Verdi to herself, listening to Billie Holiday in the bath, collecting objets d'art, watching art-house movies and quoting whole Roger McGough poems to justify her mistrust of Freud. Open to the possibility of the occasional romance, she is currently recuperating from the medical consequences of an affair with a cynical womanizer which she is keen to forget. Lar McGrane is recently widowed, his wife, Caitlin, and child, Moya—as he gradually reveals to everyone but Clara—killed by an IRA bomb, a device familiar to Johnston's readers. Unlike Clara he refuses to forget.

While McGrane nurtures memory and hate by continually “talking to” the murdered Caitlin, Clara attempts to deal with her recent unpleasantness through novel-writing. This allows Johnston to interweave three narratives: Clara's first-person retelling, a third-person account of McGrane's story and Clara's breathless notes-for-a-novel chronology of her seduction by her Upper East-Side deceiver. The “novel” sections are interspersed with occasional interruptions from Clara's Apple Mac. (The device of having the “I” of the first-person narrative drop sporadically into lower case, due, apparently, to Clara's confused, post-operative state, fails; this would have been self-corrected by any up-to-date word-processor.)

However, Johnston is at her storytelling best in the Manhattan sequences and in her evocation of Clara's bourgeois Dublin world—mother obsessed with jam- and gingerbread-making and the friendly, fifty-something, family doctor waiting to make his move—a milieu equally distant from the author's earlier Ascendancy mansions and from William Trevor's poorer rural Protestants. As in many of Johnston's novels, however, skilled observation of behavioural nuance substitutes to a large extent for depth of character and complexity of plot.

While the basic premiss of the story runs counter to received notions, Johnston's fondness for stock characterization has not diminished. Following the dislike of Northerners apparent in the works of Yeats, Joyce, Bowen and O'Faolain, she portrays McGrane as backward-looking, dour, humourless and uncultured, someone who has rarely ventured out of Antrim and—with a suggestion of sexual repression—someone who has remained faithful to his first love, Caitlin. Clara, with all her advantages, is offensively dismissive of the troubled North and, despite her vocation as an Irish literary critic, has no interest in history or religion; together with her fondness for European culture and her mother's conserving activities, these are clichés of Southern middle-class Protestant life. And while the novel's grasp of the awkwardnesses of human contacts is never in doubt, too many details, such as the unconvincing age range of the characters, Caitlin's monologues and Clara's use of the phrase “dumb down,” do not ring true. Laurence McGrane would not be “Lar” in North Antrim; short forms such as Lar, Ger, Gar and Der, long popular in the South, have not yet taken on in towns “near Ballycastle.”

While fiction ought not, perhaps, to be judged on the finer details, novels which rely heavily on the relationship between character and locality have heightened obligations to accuracy. Equally unfortunate is the choice of “lecturer in Modern Irish Literature” as profession for a character who cannot spell the names of two of Ireland's leading twentieth-century writers. In other respects, however, The Gingerbread Woman is an engaging and accessible novel and those familiar with Jennifer Johnston's later writing will not be disappointed.