Tender by Belinda McKeon review – richly nuanced and utterly absorbing

In 1997 Catherine Reilly is in her first year studying English and art history at Trinity College Dublin. Living away from her home on a farm in County Longford for the first time, she meets the aspiring artist and fellow exile from rural Ireland James Flynn. While Catherine is tentative and lacking in confidence, James is flamboyant, knowledgeable and penetrating. With his mad red hair, thin lips and wrong kind of Doc Martens, James is not her idea of boyfriend material, but the two quickly become inseparable – best friends of the fiercest kind. McKeon takes a line from James Salter’s Light Years as her epigraph: “You know, you only have one friend like that; there can’t be two.”

At 18, Catherine is well aware of her own childishness, prone at times to petulance and giddiness. Her admiration for James is breathless and adolescent in tone: he is “brilliant” and “amazing”, a blast of fresh air after the whispering conservatism of her home, and the relentless self-consciousness and doubt of her first year at Trinity. It is a mark of the author’s achievement that the character of James goes some way towards living up to Catherine’s estimation, stepping off the page with his glinting comedy and his fond, gleeful kind of swearing.

After her arid upbringing, Catherine’s thirst for James and everything he represents is voracious. She envies flatmates for the schooldays they shared with him. She becomes increasingly proprietorial towards him: when he returns to Dublin after working in Berlin, she parades him before her friends as both trophy and shield.

McKeon explored the tension between traditional rural and educated urban Ireland powerfully in her acclaimed debut novel, Solace. Here Catherine’s housemate Amy jokes: “Nobody cares that you grew up on a farm. Anyone would think you’d crawled to college straight from the famine, the way you go on. Cows and tractors, for Christ’s sake. So what?” But in fact we hear relatively little about Catherine’s background. McKeon offers just a few memorable scenes of life in Longford: a confrontation between Catherine and her fearful, controlling parents; a night with the “clodhopper morons” down at the dire local nightclub; urgent advice from her hilarious Aunt Fidelma counselling Catherine to make the most of her freedom in Dublin: “When you’re my age you’ll know I wasn’t joking you. Ride. All. Around you.”

Many writers would be unable to resist mining this rich seam far more deeply, but McKeon is unswerving in her description of Catherine’s emotional journey and her relationship with James. Digressions and subplots are almost ruthlessly curtailed and suppressed. If reading Tender can at times feel a claustrophobic experience, it is deliberately so.

The novel is set predominantly in the late 90s, with the Celtic Tiger and the political negotiations in the North forming the background hum. There is no tritely reductive mirroring of a young woman’s move to the big city with Ireland’s own expanding outlook of the time, but there is a sense of change and emergence. The decriminalisation of same-sex sexual acts is a recent memory and the Good Friday Agreement marks a new phase in the country’s history.Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, written about Sylvia Plath, was also published in 1998, and as Catherine’s relationship with James becomes increasingly suffocating, she immerses herself in their troubles, claiming as her own Hughes’s line: “What happens in the heart simply happens.”

Tender charts the marshy territory of friendship, obsession and love, and offers no easy path. Catherine may lose her way with James, but her self‑deceit is never complete – she maintains a terrible awareness of what she is doing. McKeon’s immersive, unflinching yet humane portrait of Catherine makes Tender richly nuanced and utterly absorbing.

• Catherine O’Flynn’s The News Where You Are is published by Penguin. To order Tender for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.