A timely commentary
The Pull of the Stars
Emma Donoghue
Harpercollins
True to form, London, Ont., novelist Emma Donoghue writes, once again, in the moment. Her terse take on the influenza pandemic of 1918, as played out in a beleaguered Dublin hospital, touches all bases — set against a backdrop of linseed poultices, swabs, frantic hand washing, quarantine and bouts with death.
Donoghue places her cluster of characters in the maternity/ fever ward of a down-at-theheels Irish hospital ill-equipped to handle the conflicting demands of childbirth (premature and otherwise) and the creeping plague. It is a heady mix and one Donoghue stirs and shakes with trademark aplomb.
At the story’s centre is 30-yearold Julia Power, a hard-working nurse caught up in the ills that befall her patients and the clogging of familiar routines in her workplace. And it’s not just the hospital that is affected, she reminds herself: “The whole country. As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs.”
Some think, Julia muses, the malady is merely “a figment of the collective imagination.” Others see it as a spinoff of the Great War, “a side effect of four years of slaughter, a poison brewed in the trenches or spread by all this hurly-burly and milling about across the globe.”
When Julia arrives for work from her crowded tram ride, she learns flu patient Eileen Devine has died overnight, while Ita Noonan, racked with fever and about to give birth, is struggling to stay alive.
As well, Delia Garrett, a snobbish Protestant surrounded by unsympathetic Roman Catholics, is caught in the torturous grip of a premature labour that is left to Julia to manage. When the result is a stillbirth, disbelief and anger ensue.
Meanwhile, 17-year-old Mary O’rahilly — tiny, delicate, fearful — is also on the brink of giving birth.
The ill-informed teenager expects her baby to emerge from her navel. And Honor White, ill and consumed with pain, believes the world’s suffering is a punishment from God for the sin of waging war. Her damaged newborn son will soon test Julia’s resolve.
Into this mix of suffering and confusion appears Donoghue’s best-drawn character, Bridie Sweeney, a young, malnourished hospital volunteer whose cheerful, errand-running presence helps save Julia’s sanity. When Bridie first appears, in a thin coat and broken-down shoes, Julia notes that in normal times the hospital’s matron would have shown her the door.
The Pull of the Stars is not an easy read. It takes place in a crowded hospital rife with blood and gore, with moaning and wailing, but, in the end, with resignation and resilience. Donoghue is nothing if not graphic as her agitated women, trapped in pain-consumed bodies, cry out for relief. No detail is left undescribed as Julia ministers to her patients and readers may begin to feel they are perusing a medical textbook.
As always, Donoghue catches the reader’s attention. Her look at both unforeseen plague and the dangerous rituals of childbirth is riveting and moving. In her disturbing but thought-provoking tale, hope and empathy appear in unexpected ways as patients and nurses alter each other’s lives.
The Pull of the Stars takes its place with Room, The Wonder and Akin, all recent Donoghue fiction that reflect with nuance on issues of the day.
Nancy Schiefer is a London freelance writer.