Summary: A powerful and timely novel of violence and its apologists.

Wendy Erskine developed her deserved literary reputation with her mastery of the short story form. In those she showed a remarkable ability to help the reader understand even the most unpleasant-seeming of her characters, and an eerie talent for convincingly rendering those diverse voices. 

It is a delight to see that those traits are all still present and correct in The Benefactors, Erskine’s first novel, an exploration of four families in Belfast drawn together by an act of violence. 

To say too much more would be, I feel, unfair to the book, which allows its compelling plot to emerge from the cacophonous voices of its characters as they reflect on their seemingly ordinary, imperfect lives. But it is a dreadfully timely work coming, as it does, in the midst of what seems like a pandemic of violence against women and girls in the North of Ireland. 

Like her earlier short stories, Erskine shows a deep appreciation of Belfast’s pitch black humour. She also shows a considerable generosity of spirit in trying to understand rather than judge her characters, as they themselves struggle to understand their own lives in which the banal has been shattered by the hideous.

Paradoxically perhaps, in telling her story in the way she choses, Erskine confronts the reader all the more powerfully with an insight on how the toleration of grotesquely unacceptable behaviour in the name of love and family, allows the poison to spread.

The Benefactors is an important book, exquisitely written. It should be recommended reading in all the schools of Ireland.