It’s a wonderful oddity when a debut novel is truly uncategorisable, trailblazing with no comparisons readily available.
That’s exactly why like Catriona Shine’s Habitat is a joy to read, and even more so to see it published by an independent Irish press, Lilliput Press.
Lucy Caldwell called this novel 'strikingly original’, while Colin Walsh describes Shine’s Habitat as unlike anything else he’s ever read. I concur with these assessments.
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It’s part ecological thriller, part treatise on the concerns of living, from housing to interpersonal dramas lingering beneath the surface. It could be described too as a magic realist text.
This is a novel that allows the reader to sit at the table with its story, bringing their own perspectives and understanding.
But enough about the slipperiness of the genre, in essence Habitat is this: it is a seven perspectives story set inside two Oslo apartment blocks that disintegrate around the inhabitants. The flats begin to fragment around the tenants, as items go missing and appear in other units.
Shine is tapping into the zeitgeist here in Ireland, as for many people their tangible lived environments are nothing more than transient, without any security or stability through home ownership. It will ring true for many readers that a central allegory of housing insecurity plays out throughout Habitat. In one apartment, three generations of one family cram into the space, while in another an older woman downsizes to a smaller apartment.
Issues of space are key within this novel, in how they shift and contract. In one scene, tenants call their landlord, Gunnar, with cries for help, to complain about the disintegrating conditions, but, as will be a surprise to nobody who has ever rented, these calls fall on deaf ears.
But to say that this is a straightforward novel about the housing crisis would be to do it a disservice. Shine’s Habitat is a wonderfully strange story, in the highest complimentary sense.
Habitat is published by Lilliput Press
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