[In the following review, Singmaster offers a mixed assessment of The Invisible Worm, noting that the novel does not live up to its full potential.]

Jennifer Johnston's latest novel, The Invisible Worm, though set in Ireland like all her novels, appears at first to be an apolitical tale of a beautiful, neurotic middle-aged woman. Laura Quinlan, married to the endearingly feckless Maurice, is the product of an uneasy alliance between an eccentric Anglo-Irish mother and a much-respected politician, a member of Ireland's New Nobility whose funeral takes place in the opening pages. In contrast to most of Johnston's earlier novels, Ireland's Troubles, whether past or present, play no part in the plot. Yet there are indications that this tale of private agony is, on another level, a metaphor for the uncertain fate of Ireland's scholarly traditions and Anglo-Irish cultural heritage in the wake of her violent recent history. Laura, childless and the last in a line of well-heeled woman mill-owners, embodies a dying breed: county and Protestant, she possesses “that mythological edge … over everyone else. The glamour of being an endangered species.”

The setting is familiar: a rambling house cluttered with inherited bric-à-brac (a glass cabinet containing medals and miniatures, precious porcelain, the silver-backed hairbrush), rhododendrons running wild in the garden, a nearby beach. Much given to staring out of windows, Laura wrestles with the burden of the past: “I believe in continuity, the handing down of secrets; I want someone else to hear the whispers, the breaths from the past, as I have always done. … I am the curator of my ancestor's folly.” More specifically, she is haunted by events in her own past from which she has been fleeing since adolescence.

The flashbacks—to a house by the sea, a passionate yachtswoman (Laura's mother), an abandoned summerhouse and a final conflagration—make the echoes of Manderley hard to ignore. Like Rebecca, this novel is a thriller, with incest in place of infidelity and manslaughter. This is handled with boldness and compassion.

Maurice is a charming bounder who dotes on his wife (he addresses her as “dote”), tends her when she is ill, and deserts her without a qualm the, moment she is back on her feet. Intelligent, successful and fun-loving, Maurice represents the new Irish. He is not a man given to indulging in flights of fancy; he considers the past a waste of time; he admires women like Sandra Mooney, his latest conquest, “A whizzer. Nice, though, and going places.” Compared with other marriages in Johnston's novels, the Quinlans' is idyllic.

A less satisfactory character is Dominic, a spoiled priest and a Classics teacher (saint and scholar), who strikes-up an unlikely relationship with Laura, half-romantic, half-companionable. Each recognizes that the other is “peculiar” and there are parallels in their histories. If Laura is barren, Dominic is a homeless wanderer—a dismal creature in Maurice's estimation. Both are misfits in tough, go-getting modern Ireland.

The mannered style of The Invisible Worm mirrors the disintegration of Laura's world. Her memory works like a kaleidoscope, “repatterning, retricking the past.” When she feels strong she makes lists. “Cuff links: gold, silver, some with woven initials, some with polished stones.” When she becomes ill, her grasp on reality falters, things start to fall apart: the past overlaps the present: first voice shifts to third voice; snatches of songs, the liturgy, passages from the book she is reading (Love in the Time of Cholera) interweave with the action, and narrative and dialogue are broken up, sometimes to dotty effect.

The most substantial character in the novel should be Laura's dead father, the senator, a vain man, a peacock, flamboyant, energetic, powerful. Despite the accumulation of adjectives, and the sharply focused glimpses of him closeted with colleagues, picking Laura up from a party, bringing acquaintances back to the house for tea, he remains a vague figure. It is the penalty paid for the author's pointillist method; a rougher brush was needed to capture this big man. Perhaps this is also the explanation for a lurking dissatisfaction with The Invisible Worm as a whole: its teasing slightness. Whether read as thriller, psychological case-study, or nationalist metaphor it remains a tightly scrolled bud which fails to mature into a fully blown rose.