Review: The Good People by Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent is one of my favourite authors. I’ve read all of her novels and her memoir. I love the way her writing seems to inhabit a time and place so completely that you can feel as though you are there. When you read her books you can see the world she describes, feel the damp air in your lungs, and experience the feelings and thoughts of the characters, right down to their bones. I saw her speak recently at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and she was just as lyrical and insightful in person as she is on the page.

But The Good People was, surprisingly, my least favourite of her books.

Set in rural Ireland in the 1820s, the story follows Nora, Mary, and Nance, whose lives become entangled through the care of a Nora's sickly young grandson, Micheal after Nora's husband unexpectedly passes away. Nora comes to believe that the “good people” (fairies) might be to blame for his condition, and the women take increasingly desperate steps to help him. 

Kent’s writing is, as always, richly atmospheric. She describes peat smoke curling from the hearth, mist hanging over green valleys, the smell and feeling of the wet and damp earth, and the rhythms of rural life in a way that feel so authentic that you can almost imagine that you are living them yourself. 

The book has a very slow pace which fits this setting. We experience the pace of a rural village in the Irish past and observe the seasonal change and the unchanging superstitious belieds of the community.  But for me, the pace felt a little too slow. I found myself skipping ahead a few pages here and there (and then sheepishly going back because guilt wouldn’t let me cheat properly). I didn’t connect deeply with any of the characters, which made the unhurried unfolding of events harder to settle into. In her other novels, I’ve always found a character or a thread of emotion that I have connected with. Here, I just didn't care as much as I needed to to remain in the story.

The ending also didn’t quite land for me. Without giving too much away, it felt oddly abrupt and left me feeling unsatisfied. That may well have been Kent’s intention, after all, the story is based on a real historical case, but I missed the sense of emotional connection that I’ve come to expect from her.

Still, even a Hannah Kent novel that doesn’t quite work for me is a novel worth reading. The writing alonehas the ability to embed you in a historical moment and I admire this so much in her books. If I had to summarise The Good People, I would say that it is a slow-burn immersion into a past world where folklore and reality blur, but for me it lacked the heartbeat that made Burial Rites and Devotion so unforgettable.

And now, having read all of Hannah Kent’s books, I’m left with the realisation that I’ll have to wait for her to write another before I can lose myself in her words again.