JESS KIDD The Hoarder. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson

The Hoarder is a thoroughly satisfying mystery story with its vibrant characterisation and richly descriptive prose.

Maud Drennan is a care worker who has been sent to manage Cathal Flood, an elderly giant of a man who lives in a decaying and cluttered mansion called Bridlemere. He is a hoarder, an artist and very, very eccentric. He also seems rather threatening. He hoards secrets as well as things. There is a wall of National Geographics in the house – beyond which Maud is forbidden to go – as well as cleverly detailed detritus:

I try not to look at the details but some little thing always catches my eye. A dead mouse coiled in a teacup, a headless ceramic dray horse, a mannequin’s pink severed limb: that sort of thing.

Maud herself speaks with a concatenation of saintly ghosts, or perhaps ghostly saints, so she is also somewhat eccentric.

The story concerns two mysterious matters which come to involve her, one as a participant and one as a fairly reluctant detective, but its real charm is the cascade of wonderful poetic description that flows throughout, and which carries a distinct Irish lilt:

Even the cloakroom in Mr Flood’s straight-up, falling down, Gothic crap heap is on a grand scale. Part-ballroom, part-cave, with a great black marble horse trough of a sink and wall sconces three feet high topped with whipped glass flames. An antiquated tin cistern roosts high above a monumental throne – a masterpiece in crenulated ceramic. The colour palette of this room is unremittingly unwholesome: the paintwork is lurid sphagnum and the tiles are veined the blue-black-green of an overripe cheese.

It is in this cloakroom that Maud discovers a photograph of a boy and a girl that chills: the girl has had her face burnt out. The image provides the basis for the search on which Maud embarks, leading to an investigation of Cathal’s family – his wife Mary and son Gabriel – as well as the faceless child. Another photograph, treasured by Maud, of her and her sister Deirdre on a beach, introduces Maud’s own mystery: Deirdre disappeared after a visit to this beach with her boyfriend:

My sister said that when the tide was out you could walk all the way to America; the waves pulled back that far. So far that the starfish forgot there was ever an ocean and stiffened with dismay. So far that the seaweed wept itself dry on the rocks with nostalgia.

The novel is complex and always buoyed along by evocative prose. Maud is helped and advised by her landlady Renata, a spectacular transvestite who fears to leave the house but engages in imaginative detecting vicariously through Maud:

Even when she’s smiling Renata has a formidable look about her, despite her gentle Aquarian soul. Her cheekbones are brutal, and her dark eyes, an unexpected gift to her mother from a Portuguese sailor, have a simmering tarry depth. In Renata’s eyes there is the creak and pitch of a thousand ships and the moon on the water and the song of a sad drunken deckhand.

Maud talks with her saints. Saints Dymphna, Rita, Valentine, George and Monica make occasional appearances and sometimes offer advice. They are really not much use but provide a spooky ambience. She diligently pursues the cause of the burnt-out photograph and is led astray by one of the characters, although helped by many others. Her own story provides another framing device which rounds out her life and character.

I am so enamoured of the richly descriptive prose that I am tempted to continue to offer further quotes but I will just say that this is a thoroughly satisfying mystery story with vibrant characterisation and the wonderfully creative Jess Kidd’s stunningly good writing.

Jess Kidd The Hoarder Canongate 2018 PB 352pp $27.99

Folly Gleeson was a lecturer in Communication Studies. At present she enjoys her book club and reading history and fiction.

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Tags: Jess | Kidd