Lola Lydon Character Analysis: The Sister Behind the Wedding

Overview

Lola Lydon is Eileen Lydon’s older sister by three years. She appears in the novel primarily through Eileen’s memories and the events surrounding her wedding to Matthew. Unlike the central quartet—Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon—Lola represents a more conventional life path: marriage, family, and local rootedness. Her wedding in Chapter 23 (Chapter 25 in the outline) serves as a narrative fulcrum, forcing Eileen to confront her feelings for Simon and the distance between her own aspirations and Lola’s choices.

Plot Role

Lola’s primary function is to catalyze Eileen’s emotional arc. The wedding preparations and the ceremony itself bring together the main characters and expose unresolved tensions. Eileen’s interactions with her mother Mary and with Simon during the wedding weekend push her toward a moment of reckoning. Lola is also a constant background presence in Eileen’s childhood flashbacks, where she is portrayed as “sturdy, brave, mischievous” while Eileen was “anxious and often ill.” Their childhood narrative games—with Lola as the chief improviser—established a dynamic of dominance and dependence that persists into adulthood.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Lola is pragmatic and socially adept. She pursues a traditional wedding with evident satisfaction: on the day she appears “stately and magnificent in white, radiant with the realisation of cherished plans.” She also shows a playful, teasing side when she texts Eileen about “cake tasting” and jokes about Eileen’s mystery date being a serial killer. Beneath the surface, however, she carries old grievances. On the wedding morning, the two sisters “looked at one another, aggrieved, guilty, mistrustful, contrite.” This moment reveals that their bond is complicated by years of rivalry and misunderstanding.

Lola’s actions in childhood—locking Eileen in a bathroom and later blaming her for the resulting ban on friends—demonstrate a capacity for casual cruelty. As adults, she maintains a guarded affection; she asks about Eileen’s love life but also accepts her sister’s evasions without pushing hard. Her decision to marry Matthew suggests a desire for stability and social approval, a contrast to Eileen’s intellectual uncertainties.

Chronological Arc

Lola’s arc is largely glimpsed through memory and present‑day events. In childhood (ages ending around 12), she is the fearless leader who eventually moves on to a new school and new friends, leaving Eileen isolated. In the novel’s present, she is planning a wedding. The key moments: she texts Eileen about the cake tasting, she asks whether Eileen will bring a date, and finally the wedding day itself. After the wedding, she recedes from the narrative; the later chapters focus on Alice, Eileen, and Simon. There is no explicit scene of Lola after the wedding, but her presence lingers in the new equilibrium among the surviving relationships.

Relationships

• With Eileen: This is the most developed relationship. It spans competition, protection, resentment, and reluctant solidarity. On the wedding morning, they share a memory of childhood—paddling in the sea, being carried by their father—that momentarily dissolves their tension. Eileen helps Lola with her hair and makeup, and Lola asks her opinion. Yet the chapter also shows them “loving and hating one another,” a testament to the ambivalence that defines their bond.

• With Simon: Lola knew Simon as a boy when he helped on the family farm. She calls him a “mouse” when he shows fear during a forest story, and later, when Eileen admits she was fond of Simon, Lola says, “Don’t be creepy.” She is aware of the romantic history between Eileen and Simon, and her wedding provides the setting where their long‑deferred connection can finally surface.

• With her parents: Lola’s mother Mary often mediates between the sisters. In a phone call, Eileen complains that Mary takes Lola’s side when Lola loses her temper. Mary herself admits she is a “failure” for trying to balance both daughters. Lola’s father Pat is more distant, but on the wedding day he reflects on the strangeness of his wife’s pregnancy with Lola.

Key Decisions and Consequences

Lola’s central decision is to marry Matthew. The consequence for the plot is that the wedding gathers all characters, leading to a charged evening and, eventually, Eileen and Simon’s reconciliation. On a personal level, Lola chooses a conventional path that contrasts with Eileen’s unsettled life, reinforcing the theme of divergent futures within a single family. The wedding also allows Lola to momentarily step out of her role as the competent, dismissive older sister and show vulnerability—she asks Eileen, “Well?” as if seeking approval.

Theme and Symbol Connections

• Love and vulnerability: Lola’s wedding is a symbol of public, sanctioned love, set against the private, uncertain love between Eileen and Simon. The ceremony includes the biblical verse “O my dove … let me see your face, let me hear your voice,” which emphasizes the theme of revealing one’s true self.

• Friendship and isolation: Lola’s early exclusion of Eileen from her new social circle contributes to Eileen’s loneliness, a pattern that echoes Eileen’s later struggle with intimacy.

• Class and capitalism: Lola’s choices are rooted in a middle‑class, small‑town life, while Alice and Eileen move in more cosmopolitan, intellectually elite circles. The wedding itself—catering, dress, church—represents economic and social norms that the other characters question.

• Crisis and meaning: In a novel filled with ecological and political anxiety, Lola’s wedding offers a moment of personal meaning. Eileen, thinking of her childhood games during the ceremony, wonders whether imagination is something she lacks. Lola, by contrast, appears fully present in her “realisation of cherished plans.” This dichotomy points to the broader tension between private fulfillment and public despair.

Five Book‑Specific Questions and Answers

1. What does Lola do to Eileen when their group of friends is about 12 years old?
   Lola and her new friends locked Eileen in the upstairs bathroom for twenty minutes as a joke. Their father later banned Lola’s friends from visiting, and Lola blamed Eileen.

2. How does Lola react when Eileen tells her she is seeing a tall man?
   Lola teases her by asking if the man is a serial killer, then says, “Still if he’s 6’3 I suppose it’s swings and roundabouts.”

3. What do the sisters remember together on the morning of Lola’s wedding?
   Lola remembers paddling in the sea at Strandhill or Rosses Point, falling, swallowing seawater, and being carried up the beach by her father. Eileen remembers Lola’s make‑believe games of hidden kingdoms and their fictional world.

4. What does Lola say to Simon in the forest when he expresses reluctance to hear a gruesome story?
   She calls him a mouse. He answers that if it comes to that, he is a bit of a mouse. Lola then says, “You’re like Eileen.”

5. At the end of the wedding ceremony, where does Eileen see Simon, and how do they look at each other?
   She sees him standing at the church door watching her. They look at one another for a long moment without moving or speaking, “and in the soil of that look many years were buried.”

For deeper context, see the novel overview, explore the love and vulnerability theme, or read the ending explained.