When All Is Said

Thomas is the primary antagonist. He comes from the wealthy Dollard family who live in the big house where Maurice works as a child. His violence toward Maurice during this time impacts Maurice even in the present day, symbolizing how his actions shape Maurice’s character and life. Thomas’s own sister, Rachel, is afraid of him. However, though he is formative in Maurice’s life, Maurice is not important to Thomas on a personal level, although narratively Maurice has shaped his life by taking the coin. Thomas doesn’t recognize Maurice years later, while Maurice is deeply shaken by seeing him.

Thomas becomes a round character after the narrative shows the causes of his behavior and the violence he endures at his father’s hands. Hillary humanizes him to Maurice near the end of the novel, commenting that “no child deserves that” (239). His life is shaped by the actions of his parents and is trapped in the past, reflected in his obsession with looking for the coin and antiques more broadly. His death when he finally gets the coin symbolizes the emptiness of his tragedy: The object he thinks will save him instead kills him.

Emily is Thomas’s great-niece. She manages the hotel where Maurice spends his final evening, once the Dollards’ big house. She represents younger generations trying to move forward from the past, both from the actions of previous generations and the socio-economic circumstances of their families. She has a loving relationship with her parents; having left the area, she is drawn back in after her father dies and her mother is unable to cope. She sacrifices her previous life to return for their sake and take on the hotel as manager and part-owner, trapped back in the Dollards’ old house. However, she builds this into something she is proud of, feeling she has forged her own path. Maurice respects her tenacity and warmth and sees his daughter, Molly, in her. They build a relationship: They get each other a drink to comfort each other in difficult moments, discuss their shared past, and joke about Maurice behaving himself during the awards evening in the hotel. Seeing her as fully human allows Maurice to move past his grudge against the Dollard family and build something positive out of this part of his past as he leaves his share of the hotel to her.

Tony is Maurice’s big brother and is a formative presence in his younger years, remaining with him in spirit for his whole life after his death from tuberculosis. He gives Maurice the nickname “Big Man” ironically, as Maurice is very small as a child. However, it sticks, and Maurice grows tall and strong, suiting his nickname. This reflects that Tony has shaped Maurice’s character and sense of himself. As an adult, he still consults Tony about decisions, and he follows his advice to look Thomas in the eye when he confronts him years later. He imagines Tony’s pride in both his financial success and his revenge on Thomas. Tony has complete faith in Maurice as a child struggling with dyslexia in school, and when Thomas is cruel to him, giving Maurice faith in himself in adulthood and motivating him to succeed. However, Maurice associates the pain of Thomas’s physical violence with the pain of his family’s socio-economic helplessness when Tony is sick, and with Tony’s death, forming the strength of his hatred toward the Dollards and its underlying impact on him throughout his life.

Molly is Maurice’s daughter, who dies in the womb near the end of Sadie’s pregnancy and whose birth is induced. Although Maurice does not meet her alive, he describes her in great detail, both her physical appearance as a baby and her imagined appearance and personality had she survived. She remains a presence in his life with her own apparent personality, as Maurice sees and interacts with her often. She ages non-linearly, reflecting that she is not really living out her own life but appearing to Maurice as a companion. She is a projection of an idealized feminine child: She is beautiful, strong, self-sacrificing, and has an uncompromising sense of right and wrong, but she is also vulnerable and needs her father. She represents parts of Maurice that he struggles to engage with openly, such as tenderness and the ability to communicate as a parent, which he cannot manage with his living child, Kevin. Through her, he has a dialogue with his conscience: She reprimands him that the coin does not belong to him.

Noreen is Sadie’s beloved sister. She has an unspecified mental health condition and has lived in psychiatric hospitals for the entirety of her life though often spends time with Maurice and Sadie, staying with them at the weekends. Kevin gives her the name “No-No” when he is young, playing off her name and a common refrain they make to her, as she sometimes behaves in a volatile manner, running off or ransacking their house. This nickname combines the family’s affection for her with the chaos she brings to their lives.

Her catchphrase is “sparkle, sparkle” as she loves shiny things, especially coins. She builds up a huge collection of coins, which she keeps in jars. Her hoarding is paralleled by both Sadie (who squirrels away cash and saves whiskey boxes) and Maurice (who is driven to accumulate wealth), showing the commonality between them: Her behavior might be outside usual parameters but fundamentally their shared humanity gives them more in common. Noreen forces Maurice to reassess his values and place human connection over wealth. He often gifts her coins she takes a liking to, starting with a shilling on their first meeting, and culminating with the Edward VIII coin in their old age. Maurice bears witness to Sadie’s intense intertwined love and grief for her sister, reflecting, “Noreen was a woman forever on your mother’s conscience” (121).

Kevin is Maurice’s son, who is an adult with his own family in the narrative present. He is a journalist and lives in the United States. Maurice speaks to him throughout the novel, showing that he is the remaining focal point in Maurice’s life and the person who he wants to communicate with and share his story with. This also reflects that Maurice’s sense of future is also primarily in Kevin: He is the person he wants to pass the torch onto.

Kevin embodies the younger generations who Maurice feels are more comfortable with emotions than his generation and better equipped to communicate. Maurice remembers seeing Sadie talking to him as a four-year-old one day, telling him to love himself and try to understand himself. He finds this completely alien—“Love yourself? What a thought” (173)—reflecting the huge divide that he feels between him and his son. However, this quotation also shows Maurice’s admiration and love for Kevin: He sees him as a complete person who is more rounded than him.

Maurice and Kevin’s differences manifest in their different lives and cultures: While Kevin lives in America and loves books and writing, Maurice’s connection to Ireland is a definitive part of him, with his cultural mannerisms and his love of the land and the outdoors. However, Griffin includes details that show their shared qualities. Both make lists; both value success and material gain in their different fields; and both express their care for each other by trying to pay for dinner. Kevin visits Maurice often despite the journey and doggedly makes conversation, showing that he cares for Maurice as much as Maurice cares for him.

In the first part of the chapter on Sadie, Griffin plays into the archetype of the romantic love interest: Maurice describes an idealized picture of their courtship, recalling first kisses and going to dances. He uses poetic, heightened language to describe her beauty when they first meet. However, Griffin ensures she is a fully rounded character and explores the complex reality of her relationship with Maurice over many years. Sadie is present in every chapter of the novel, not just the one focusing on her, showing that she cannot be contained in a single story but rather infiltrates Maurice’s whole life. Griffin includes details about her that Maurice didn’t know while she was alive: For example, he finds that she has kept all the boxes of the whiskeys Kevin has given him over the years and that she has squirreled away about £7,000 in cash in her belongings. Griffin leaves the significance of these things ambiguous to both Maurice and the reader, which ensures that Sadie is presented not just as an extension of him but as a person in his own right who has existed outside of his experience of her.

Maurice is enchanted by Sadie’s beauty but also her warmth and mischievous humor. She is loving and adores Noreen, spending her life trying to be a good sister. She is proactive in her desire for children, leading Maurice through consulting the doctors and trying again after Molly. Sadie, like Maurice, often struggles to communicate, which he thinks is due to their cultural background and family upbringing. However, she is expressive and supportive of their son, Kevin. Near the end of her life, she asserts herself against his policy of not having tea when out of the house, as it’s cheaper at home: She insists on an Earl Grey and a dessert. Maurice’s life is shaped by their relationship, and he dies by suicide rather than living without her. Through his self-awareness as he reminisces, Maurice highlights that this relationship is seen through his eyes: “[W]e were good […] solid and steady. At least that’s how it felt for me. I never asked her, mind” (20). However, the narrative illustrates their companionship throughout the novel, as they bicker about the everyday, support each other in hard moments, and find humor together, suggesting that their love and affection are mutual.

The Dollard family are wealthy landowners who Maurice feels are his enemies. Hugh and Amelia Dollard are married and have two children. However, the eldest, Thomas, is the son of Hugh’s brother, with whom Amelia had a pre-marital affair, and their daughter, Rachel, is the product of an occasion when Hugh got drunk, implying sexual violence. Hugh is consumed by bitterness about the affair, which he violently takes out on Thomas, eventually disinheriting him. He is cruel to the staff, and Amelia is dismissive and indifferent, not allowing Maurice’s mother time off when Tony is sick but interrupting the funeral so that she can demonstrate faux sympathy.

The socio-economic fortunes of the family decline, partly driven by Thomas’s desperation to find the coin in the hopes of creating a good relationship with Hugh. Multiple generations of the family have tried to leave but have been drawn back in: Rachel; her daughter, Hillary; Hillary’s husband, Jason; and their daughter, Emily. Hillary tells Maurice that everyone in the house was always desperately unhappy, their family shaped by secrets and bitterness.

Aside from Tony, Maurice’s family also consists of his father and mother, and two sisters, Jenny and May. Griffin shows Maurice’s mother’s warm, vivacious character, which is suppressed by her circumstances and Tony’s death. She sings and laughs walking across the fields to work and encourages Maurice to join in but becomes meek in the Dollards’ house and sinks into silence after Tony’s death. When Maurice brings Sadie home, she hardly engages, afterward wanting to talk about the hypothetical reality of Tony courting someone; this parallels Maurice, who thinks of Molly for all of Kevin’s milestones and grows distant after her death. Griffin shows the all-consuming grief of child loss that persists for both Maurice and his mother, suggesting that her ways of coping have been passed on to Maurice. Maurice also takes on parts of his father, who has the ambition to achieve financial success through the land and who has great adaptability, such as turning to dairy when that industry starts to grow, which Maurice admires.

Griffin also uses Jenny and May to show the isolation that structural economic problems can bring. Though Maurice is closer to Tony, they all band together when Tony is sick, and Jenny and May are important in warmly welcoming Sadie into the family when their mother is distant. However, they are largely absent from Maurice’s recollections as both emigrated to England to seek work, reducing Maurice’s familial circle. This reflects a reality for many Irish families during this time and the preceding century.

Svetlana is the bartender in the hotel in the present day. Her character roots Maurice and the narrative into the present between his recollections. Griffin presents her as a firm but warm person: She warily puts his whiskey behind the bar for him and chases him down when he forgets to take it, sharing a joke with him about the music. Maurice admires her competent work behind the bar and finds her disconnect from Irish culture gently amusing when she asks him how to serve his drink and doesn’t know the dish he refers to. She is from Latvia, showing the shifting socio-economic circumstances in Ireland—where his sisters and son emigrated away, she has come here for work. Her presence at the thriving hotel suggests optimism for the future of the town: This is now a place people want to come to.