Book review: A novel of ideas that engages the reader on many levels

The Alternatives exudes confidence. Perhaps that comes with simply being Caoilinn Hughes’ third novel — her first, 2018’s Orchid and the Wasp, drew inevitable Sally Rooney comparisons.

Here we get long sections, pages and pages, about geology (“Who remembers the Geologic Time Scale from the lab?”), a little about phenomenology (“The third element of Heidegger’s care structure is existentiality”), and plenty about politics (“There’s a region of Belgium that has a permanent, randomly selected body called a citizens’ council that sits alongside their elected chamber”) and food provenance too.

It takes confidence to thread these throughout the story and trust that the reader will come with you.

We get all these lofty ideas because The Alternatives follows four sisters, Olwen, Rhona, Maeve, and Nell, all of whom have PhDs but no husbands, and find themselves estranged.

Like The Green Road by Anne Enright, family events force them back together in one place, to see how different they are now in their separate lives and parse whether they can still co-exist.

The impetus for all this is that Olwen, the eldest sister, has gone missing. She’d lived in Galway where she taught geology to unimpressed students, and had walked out on her partner and his two children without warning.

Now no one knows where she is though she had sent one reassuring text: “Had to take off. Sorry. I’m as safe as I ever was. Don’t come looking for me.” 

Their parents had died when they were all between 12 and 17 — revelations about their deaths are spotted throughout the story. 

Olwen, on turning 18, became their legal guardian. Her walking out, walking away from her life, is her relinquishing these caring roles thrust on her some two decades previously.

Rhona, meanwhile, is a political science professor at Trinity College Dublin, with aspirations to go much further in her career. In her early 20s, ever the mercenary, she had proposed selling the family home — what is ‘family’ when there’s no home calling them back together? 

Maeve is a cookbook author who blew up on Instagram for her transatlantic live clips with youngest sister Nell, a philosophy professor in the US. 

All four are going through something themselves — and Olwen’s disappearance is the catalyst for them to upend their own lives to go look for her. 

It’s not a difficult search: Rhona, who seems more concerned about work in her neighbourhood on seawall defences, coincidentally has a well-heeled neighbour “with all the gadgets” who’s able to locate her. So the sisters pack into a car and head to Leitrim for her.

Hughes’ confidence is on display again during the first meeting between the four sisters as she upends the form from prose to playscript. There are familiar familial asides, snide remarks, and heightened voices as they all try to make sense of the situation and each other. 

It plays out again later in the book at a local pub, with a barman who uses words like ‘abstemious’.  He is one of a number of secondary characters who get minor roles throughout The Alternatives. 

In Rhona’s life, there is Beatriz, an intern who is living with her because she can’t afford another place in Dublin, and whose story is perhaps the most dramatic in the book, involving a conference in South America that goes awry. Alas, that storyline peters out. 

Maeve, meanwhile, is wondering if her roommate on her houseboat might be something more.

Hughes’ writing is humorous — sitting at the bar in Leitrim are “a pair of men an anthropologist couldn’t carbon-date” — and impressive; Maeve’s cheffing attracts the attention of a room, “with a sort of bovine curiosity and gastrological suspense”.

There are a lot of characters and relationships to keep track of in The Alternatives. And though perhaps bloated and sometimes meandering — indeed, it seems to lack direction as it goes on — it’s engaging and impressive.