Donoghue stars with uncannily-timed pandemic novel
HISTORICAL FICTION The Pull of the Stars
Emma Donoghue Picador,
€14.99
TIMING, they say, is everything. Like the rest of us, Emma Donoghue beheld with a mixture of revulsion and fascination the 2008 Fritzl case and quickly set about fashioning that real-life horror story into her biggest international best-seller to date, Room.
Once again, she seems synced with the news cycle. The Pull of the Stars is a medical saga set during the flu pandemic of 1918 that would claim the lives of 3pc-6pc of humanity by the time it ran its course. Inspired by the centenary of this event, Donoghue set to work on a novel in October 2018. Two days after delivering her final draft, Covid-19 eerily shifted the globe off its axis.
As the publishing industry scrambled to push its release schedule back, Picador sensed this could be the only title by a best-selling author this year that might actually need to be brought forward. And there was no guarantee people in semi-lockdown would be in the mood for 300 pages about a society cowering from a viral threat it has yet to fully understand. But recent fiction charts show this novel riding high, as if there is, in fact, some comfort to be found in reading about a pandemic that the world managed to live through, and without modern medicine.
What Donoghue’s saga also has going for it is its maternity ward setting, a place where the push and pull of new life is the principal battlefield. Julia Power is a nurse in a Dublin city-centre hospital that is under-resourced. With her brother home from the trenches with severe mental scarring, she ventures out each day to a world where the “grippe” (from the Spanish for “grip”) is coursing through the community.
Straight away we are into wafts of dung and blood, and trams thronged with people hacking phlegm or recoiling in hope of avoidance. All around are government warnings in all-too-cute rhyming couplets (“Cover up each cough or sneeze… fools and traitors spread disease ”,“Ventilation and sanitation will be our nation’s salvation”).
Four colours mark out the stages between infection and death — red, brown, blue, black — and these make ominous chapter headings. In Julia’s ward are pregnant women who have presented with symptoms of this deadly threat, quarantined and under observation as their due dates approach. Two other women arrive at the ward, one on each side of Julia’s hierarchical chain.
Dr Kathleen Lynn is the only real-life character in the story and provides the tale with not only a figure to voice the Republican politics of the era (Lynn was vice president of Sinn Fein’s executive and its director of public health at the time of the novel’s setting) but also a woman in a position of authority. Julia struggles with the politics of this Easter Rising activist who has been released from custody to join the pandemic effort.
On the other side is Bridie Sweeney, a callow hospital volunteer sent by one of the sisters to assist Julia. Her learning curve is steep, and although Julia is our narrator,
Bridie feels like the conduit through which our own out-of-depth horror is channelled.
Horror of a robustly Gothic hue feels ever-present, even during a surprise romantic encounter late in the tale. It is no mistake that events are set during Halloween. We hear of anti-infection masks worn through streets and bodies blackened by illness staggering in the shadows. There are grotesque scenes of complicated (and tragic) childbirths, eye-rolling convulsions, and the archaic medicine of the era (heroin and cocaine concoctions, the stench of sterilising sulphur gas). And with the hearsay of the times come the witching suspicions, of things becoming unseated as nature reasserts itself on mankind.
The atmosphere, the finely researched detail of the setting, and Donoghue’s always excellent character voicing are the most gratifying ingredients here. But a personal arc for Julia that comes in the final act feels a little hurried, like an afterthought to what is ostensibly a saga of pre-modern medicine doing its best in a catastrophe.