An exciting new voice in Irish literature

The Island Child Molly Aitken Penguin Random House

“Babies don’t have a choice about anything,” writes the Irish novelist Molly Aitken in The Island Child — an intriguing debut about motherhood, the trauma we inherit and the inescapability of fate. Set on an imagined island off Ireland’s west coast, in the mid-20th century, the novel tracks the development of the protagonist, Oona, from girlhood to motherhood: her harsh and tide-beaten early years, her ill-fated escape from the island and her eventual homecoming and redemption.

Born in 1991, Aitken is a direct contemporary of Sally Rooney. Both write well about sexual violence and women in psychological distress. The comparison, though, ends there. Aitken’s prose is more generous, more old-fashioned — than that of her fellow countrywoman, with none of the tart irony that has made Rooney a household name.

The Island Child leads us back to an older Ireland, one familiar as an archetype in much Irish storytelling, a place of curraghs, peat fires and a vengeful Catholic God. Women are bound to the hearth and cradle, “tied to the harbour of mothering,” Aitken writes. “Girls were drowned in the tides of birthing blood. Men fought to death on the sea, women in the home.” Gripped by a religious mania, Oona’s abusive mother is at once tormented and tormenting. The novel visits the sins of the mother upon her daughter, as a traumatized Oona neglects in turn her own child, Joyce.

The book begins and ends with a mother telling a daughter about a birth. Indeed, The Island Child bristles with stories throughout — we hear prophecies, old wives’ tales, creation stories, ballads. Biblical parables jostle with folklore. Aislinn, a wild English outsider, is at once “sea fairy” and Eve, both “heathen” and “forbidden fruit.” Greek myths loom large: the novel is a loose retelling of the Persephone myth, while a shipwreck brings an Odyssean stranger to shore.

Aitken also provides a companion text, a fairy tale told in episodes, scattered in between chapters, the details of which correspond roughly to events of the novel. This is atmospheric. But it’s also somewhat clumsy.

This is a wider concern. The novel suffers from narrative over-ambition. A second principal narrative, set in Canada 20 years later, lacks the immediacy of Oona’s childhood. The pacing is uneven, particularly toward the end of the novel, where two time frames race to resolve themselves into one another.

The joy of this book, though, is in Aitken’s prose, which is exquisite and with particular power when her characters are in extremis. There’s a lot to love about The Island Child. Aitken is an exciting new voice in Irish literature.