It's Still March -- More on the Irish
Tana French's The Trespasser

I was recently with friends who, because some generations back their ancestors hailed from the green isle, are all about the Irish.  They’ve been to Ireland, celebrate every St. Patrick’s Day at a pub and have a fondness for Guinness.  So, I was surprised when I brought up Dublin writer Tana French and Jay commented that he didn’t like her and won’t read another book by her after reading one in which the murderer went free.  Fair enough.  I, however, have just finished French’s latest, The Trespasser, and my immediate response upon completion was to check the library availability for others by her that I haven’t already read.

The story is told in the voice of Antoinette Conway, a two year veteran on Dublin’s murder squad; the only woman in the 24 officer group, she is whip-smart, thorough, and tenacious, a detective with a strong closure record, yet she carries a huge chip on her shoulder to hide the sense of alienation she feels among her male peers.  The frequent victim of nasty jokes, she’s become hardened and brittle in the squad room, hating her colleagues while secretly wanting more than anything else to be one of the gang. 

As the novel begins, Antoinette and her partner Steve Moran are getting ready to come off night duty, grab some breakfast and get some sleep when they are handed a murder case.  Puzzled as to why the dayshift detectives haven’t been given the assignment, Antoinette feels further insult when a pompous, experienced older cop, Don Breslin, is charged with assisting their investigation.  The victim is a beautiful young woman, Aislin Murray, who looks like a Barbie doll.   She is found in her living room, dead apparently from a head wound when she fell into the hearth after being punched so hard in the face that her jaw is broken.  The table is set with candles and an open bottle of wine.  Dinner sits in pots and pans in the kitchen, although the stove and oven have been turned off.  There’s no evidence of forced entry and, oddly, the crime was called in the morning after it occurred.  The new boyfriend who was expected for dinner quickly becomes the main suspect and Breslin pressures Conway and Moran to arrest him, but the partners aren’t sure it all adds up and Conway racks her memory because she knows she has seen Aislin somewhere before. 

The interviews with witnesses and suspects are lengthy conversations.  In the hands of other writers, these could become tedious, but here they just feel real and it’s clear that each one is a piece of the puzzle falling into place.  The investigation keeps changing direction as Conway and Moran have to revise their theories.  Because it is told through Antoinette’s point of view, the reader is privy to her self-doubts and her fearful awareness of what it will cost her if she bungles the case.  These feelings, at times, are obstacles to her investigation, at other times, drives that propel her forward.  At one point, Breslin tells Conway that he isn’t interested in motive, that it doesn’t matter when you have evidence, but neither Conway nor French buy that argument.  The case, and indeed the novel, are as much about psychology as forensics:  the power of longing for love, the sometimes achingly palatable need to belong – these are forces that often defy reason. 

In Honor of St. Patrick’s Day:  

here’s to Ireland’s favorite son

My favorite poet to teach was for many years Seamus Heaney. His poetry was almost always focused on his Irish cultural heritage whether it was about the land and the countryside, Ireland’s Viking history, the Troubles, his own family or the bogs.  In an interview with Charlie Rose, Heaney described American history as wide; when one thinks America, one thinks of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, but Ireland’s history, he said, is vertical, deep down.  That idea is reflected in many different ways in his writing.  Perhaps his most famous poem (and the first he ever published) is “Digging,” in which he talks about his farmer father (“ The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft/Against the inside knee was levered firmly./He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep/To scatter new potatoes”), and his grandfather, who “cut more turf in a day/Than any other man on Toner's bog.”  Family and heritage are associated with the act of digging.  Heaney, himself, rejects this way of life, confessing, “But I've no spade to follow men like them./Between my finger and my thumb/

The squat pen rests. /I'll dig with it.”  Thus, he mines his memories of his childhood to create his verse.

Heaney’s bog series fascinates me the most because I had never heard of “bog bodies” – Iron Age people preserved like they died last week in the peat bogs of Northern Europe – until I read Heaney.  In “Bog Queen,” he assumes the voice of an ancient royal person, her rest interrupted by the slice of a farmer’s shovel:

I lay waiting     

between turf-face and demesne wall,

between heathery levels

and glass-toothed stone.

My body was Braille    

for the creeping influences:

dawn suns groped over my head

and cooled at my feet,

through my fabrics and skins

the seeps of winter digested me,   

the illiterate roots

pondered and died

in the cavings

of stomach and socket.

I lay waiting     

on the gravel bottom,

my brain darkening,

a jar of spawn

fermenting underground

dreams of Baltic amber.    

Bruised berries under my nails,

the vital hoard reducing

in the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,

gemstones dropped     

in the peat floe

like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier

wrinkling, dyed weaves

and Phoenician stitchwork   

retted on my breasts’

soft moraines.

I knew winter cold

like the nuzzle of fjords

at my thighs—     

the soaked fledge, the heavy

swaddle of hides.

My skull hibernated

in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.    

I was barbered

and stripped 

by a turf-cutter’s spade

who veiled me again

and packed comb softly    

between the stone jambs

at my head and my feet.

Till a peer’s wife bribed him.

The plait of my hair,

a slimy birth-cord     

of bog, had been cut

and I rose from the dark,

hacked bone, skull-ware,

frayed stitches, tufts,

small gleams on the bank.   

Again, history is found through the act of digging in the land.  

One of my favorite Heaney poems, like “Digging,” speaks to his boyhood, the idea of going deep within the earth, and the act of writing poetry.  “Personal Helicon” – the title refers to Mt. Helicon in ancient Greece, the home of the muses – gives us the youthful Heaney peering down into wells, around the countryside, a metaphor here for memories. In some, he sees partial reflections of himself, in others long roots and soft mulch.  He speaks of loving “the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells/ Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.”  In the last stanza, Heaney connects this memories to his poetry: “Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,/ To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring/ Is beneath all adult dignity. /I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” 

Heaney died in 2013 and in his later years, you could see him looking back down those wells of memory with perhaps some lamentation.  One of my other favorites is “In the Attic,” in which Heaney uses allusions to Treasure Island to connect childhood memories and old age. 

i

Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the cross-trees

Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him

But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out

Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals-

And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead

Appears to rise again. . . “But he was dead enough,”

The story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

ii

A birch tree planted twenty years ago

Comes between the Irish Sea and me

At the attic skylight, a man marooned

In his own loft, a boy

Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,

Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,

Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most

Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

iii

Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma

Of hallway linoleum, Grandfather now appears,

His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen

They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier

For the matinee I’ve just come back from.

“And Isaac Hands,” he asks.  “Was Isaac in it?”

His memory of the name awaver, too,

His mistake perpetual, once and for all,

Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

iv

As I age and blank on names,

As my uncertainty on stairs

Is more and more the lightheadedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,

As the memorable bottoms out

Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still

That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt

As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

Heaney explained in the Rose interview that the Irish view poetry very differently from Americans. Poems are printed in The Irish Times, he said.  The prime minister would be reading his poetry.  What a lovely thought, particularly in these dark times.  We could do with a little less tweeting and a little more poetry. 

Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder:  

a compelling novel with large questions

In her second novel, Emma Donoghue returns to familiar territory:  an innocent child whose worldview has been sharply skewed by evil adults and a young woman who is desperately seeking escape for the child and herself.  In her debut novel, Room, the narrator is five-year old Jack who has spent his entire existence in “Room,” an 11 X 11 shed with steel walls and bars on the one window, a skylight.  Jack is the product of Ma, the young college student who is kidnapped, held and repeatedly raped, and the abductor whom Jack refers to as “Old Nick.”  As Jack grows up, he asks more questions about a world he has never experienced and Ma becomes increasingly determined to figure out how to liberate herself and her child from this nightmare.  Because the novel is seen through Jack’s eyes, the reader is treated to a strange perspective, a world-view that is skewed by limited exposure to other people, nature, and pretty much anything not in the room or in books.

Set in the 1850’s in a small village in Ireland, The Wonder also features a child, 11- year old Anna O’Donnell, the daughter of poor farming parents, who believes that she is living on manna from Heaven.  The word on the street is that Anna has not accepted food or drink in four months – since the day of her confirmation – and a committee of townspeople have hired two nurses to participate in a round-the-clock watch for two weeks to determine the veracity of Anna’s claim and the possibility of a saint in their midst.  The narrator is Lib Wright, a young widow and a nursing disciple of the famous Florence Nightingale whom she frequently quotes when in doubt about what action to take.  She is hired by the committee to pair with an Irish nun who also has a nursing background to rotate through 8- hour shifts for a period of two weeks at the O’Donnell’s cottage.  Lib is a woman of science and immediately views her mission as one of exposure; the child cannot possibly be living without food and Lib is determined to reveal whoever is perpetrating this hoax. She is initially steely and cold in her treatment of the family, desiring to keep a professional distance and casting suspicion on all.  Her initial examination of Anna surprisingly reveals a somewhat healthy child, however there are certain indications that while Anna has probably been eating, she hasn’t gotten enough.

It doesn’t take long for Lib to become fond of her young charge who is inherently cheerful, thoughtful and bright.  At the same time, Lib is troubled by Anna’s resistance to any nourishment and her insistence that her fast is part of “God’s plan.”  The longer Lib is there, the worse Anna’s condition grows and Lib realizes that her very presence must be preventing the secretive feeding that had been taking place.  She becomes increasing desperate to convince others – Anna’s parents, the nun, the village doctor, the village priest, and a Dublin journalist in town to cover the story – that Anna is not a saint, but a starving little girl.  The family and townspeople, however, view Lib as a snobbish, English outsider and are (overly?) eager for her to witness a true miracle in their impoverished backwater. 

There are a number of twists to the story as Lib, part-nurse, part-detective makes discoveries, turning the novel into a mystery of sorts. The situation, seen through her worldly eyes rather than those of Anna, perpetuates the mystery behind the child’s choices and the acquiescence of those around her. Catholicism and religious doctrine do not come off well here.  Lib, for both personal and professional reasons, rejects the “It’s God’s will” beliefs of the fatalistic Irish.  It seems a cop-out to insist on Divine will when it comes to clearly avoidable suffering and death, and Donoghue suggests a certain evil human nature hiding behind a façade of dogma.

At the heart of the novel are some significant questions.  As posed by reviewer Sarah Lyall in her September 16, 2016 review of the novel in the New York Times: What does it mean to give up the most basic human need in the service of something greater than yourself? Is it an admirable stand, or an abomination? And if you’re an outsider presiding over someone not-eating himself into oblivion, do you have the right, or the obligation, to intervene?  As with Room, The Wonder is about moral responsibility for someone other than yourself, and the courage it takes against great odds to protect another.