Newcomer Griffin's storytelling, while economical, is rich and evocative, and her deft pacing maintains suspense across several narrative arcs spanning multiple time lines. Her gift for characterization is so powerful that a commemorative coin becomes one of the book's most compelling characters. Most impressive, of course, is her creation of Maurice. His voice is credible, his story absorbing, and his humanity painfully familiar ... Highly recommended; this unforgettable first novel introduces Griffin as a writer to watch.
The ghosts of William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen hover over the meticulous, articulate prose, iterated in an almost standard Trevor-land locus of comfortable country hotel ... There is also a whiff of Wuthering Heights in the novel, peopled as it is with larger-than-life dark characters with a propensity for emotional and physical violence ... The history of neighbours and family embroiled in a web of guilt and envy, misunderstandings and lies, has an interestingly timeless feel to it, as if the author is letting us know that the trappings of life don’t really change very much that is elemental in human nature ... While there is limited description, a sense of place permeates the work ... The most impressive aspects of this first novel from the pen of prize-winning short-story writer Anne Griffin are its rich, flowing prose, its convincing voice, and its imaginative and clever structure. She has complete mastery of her quite complex plot, and manages to imbue her sizeable cast of diverse characters with life and energy.
As a novel whose central themes are grief, separation and mental illness it would be very easy for the writing to become bogged down in self-pity. Yet Maurice Hannigan emerges as an engaging, compassionate creation who seems fully aware that he conforms to a stereotype ... There is a pleasing clarity to Griffin’s five-act structure, in which the successive libations give rise to five fully realised individual works of fiction.
[Griffin] builds a remarkably rich sense of place, while also tracing the wider changes affecting Ireland ... Less convincing is the revenge motif threaded through the book ... Maurice is a lovingly rendered example of the current vogue for lonely characters who have fallen through the cracks, which might go some way to explaining all the excitement about the novel. But When All Is Said is not quite the 'rare jewel' promised, more a charming, if everyday, piece of quartz.
... moving ... When All Is Said is an accomplished debut, a sensitive, layered depiction of grief and regret. [Griffin's] sentences are often very sharp, and her pacing is excellent. Her final chapter is surprising and powerful.
This tell-all format from 'a slightly drunk old guy cornering the listener' can be predictable, but Griffin has twists up her sleeve in the plot to keep the reader going ... Told with tenderness and empathy for all of us as humans who must face our own demise, or the loss of a loved one to age, When All Is Said is the voice of an old man, looking back a at a life shaped in equal parts by love and revenge.
... satisfying ... Griffin... is an exciting new voice in Irish literature. Her versatility makes When All Is Said a pleasure to read. Maurice’s story is told with wry humor and pathos that avoids sentimentality, giving us a clear-eyed look at a man fumbling with a question we all must eventually face: What do you do with your life when all you have left are memories and regrets?
Some supporting characters in Maurice’s life are more vividly drawn than others, and his storytelling tends toward the meandering, but, in his defense, the tone never wavers over the course of five fine whisky-and-stout toasts, a credit to the steady thread of melancholy woven throughout ... Griffin’s portrait of an Irish octogenarian provides a stage for the exploration of guilt, regret, and loss, all in the course of one memorable night.
Satisfactory ... While the plot hinges heavily on coincidence, and the device of addressing an absent son feels extraneous, Maurice is a likable and complex character with a voice that readers will be drawn to. Maurice’s humor, his keen observations on class and family, and his colloquial language, as well as Griffin’s strong sense of place, create the feeling of a life connected to many others by strands of affection and hatred.
