Review: The Good Mistress, by Anne Tiernan

Grief has an unusual way of binding people together. The Good Mistress, the second novel from Irish-New Zealand writer Anne Tiernan, examines messy relationships and fraught family dynamics in a small Irish town.

The novel opens with the funeral of the enigmatic Rory, and unfolds through the perspectives of three different women: the wife, the mistress, and the childhood friend. Each has their own story, their own viewpoint, but one thing in common: none of them could help but be drawn to dark, moody, beautiful Rory.

Juliet—single mother, retail worker, and part-time life model, has a ‘recklessness combined with brokenness proving lethal’. Living in Auckland with daughter Ruby, she has returned to Ireland, ostensibly to care for her mother who has terminal cancer—but also to attend Rory’s funeral. With her life split between the two countries, she believes ‘she’ll always be cleaved in two.’ Like Tiernan’s first novel, The Last Days of Joy, the comparisons between Ireland and New Zealand are rich and regular. For Juliet, Auckland is ‘more vibrant’, with ‘a constant need for busyness’. But she also misses the ‘quiet Irish scenes: the patchwork of fields, the tangle of hedges, the rusting iron gates’, as well as the ‘long Irish twilights’. Wherever she goes, Juliet has a sense ‘of being apart from everyone’. Her affair with Rory runs deep and over many years, and her enchantment with him follows her everywhere—even through death.

‘Pretty and wholesome’ Erica is Rory’s widow, a woman who, from the outside, appeared picture-perfect, with a ‘Stepford wife’ image, the perfect marriage, the sprawling mansion. But Erica hates her ‘big ungainly house’, her husband had a mistress, and she’s hiding an alcohol problem. She is both destroyed and fascinated by Rory’s infidelity and the wounds that seeped through their marriage.

Maeve, who has ‘clever, distracted eyes that land briefly then flit away, like that’s all she needs to get the measure of you’, is a crime writer struggling with the next book in her bestselling series. Maeve’s marriage is saddled with resentment, parenting her teenage sons is increasingly difficult, and she finds herself ‘in a near constant sweaty state, a low-level bewilderment and rage.’ On top of all this, she is caring for her mother who has dementia, watching her slip away, where even the good days bring an unwelcome ‘awareness of exactly what’s being lost.’

Rory’s death propels the collision of these three women, and each must reckon not only with each other, but with their grief, their secrets, and the complexities in their own lives. The novel spends much of its time in the past, which is perhaps the most compelling arc of the narrative. Maeve, Juliet, Rory, and their friend Dan were inseparable as teenagers—and what happened to drive them apart is revealed with skillful pacing.

The Good Mistress explores an array of issues, including grief, dementia, alcoholism, menopause, and misogyny. In the present day, there are stale marriages, mid-life crises, unrequited love and desire. In the past, the pain of being young is mined deeply, as are the effects of lugging our trauma through the rest of our lives. The prose is measured and descriptive, leading the reader through with thoughtful precision. Like her debut, Tiernan juxtaposes the characters’ points-of-view, highlighting the presumptions and judgements we make about other people. 

At its heart, The Good Mistress is both a love story and a story of friendship. It tells of many different experiences of love: complex love that lasts a lifetime, love that is never quite requited, love that fails, love that fades, friendships that bend and fray. Because, as in life, these characters are both sympathetic and flawed. No one is simply ‘good’ in this novel, and that is a very good thing. Reviewed by Clare Travaglia