Jacqueline O'Mahony

This plot’s preamble begins in 19th-century Oregon, but quickly pivots to a prior time in Ireland during the famine of 1847. It shares the true story of an entire starving village traveling to its British landlord begging for food. Sadly, the landlord refuses succor, and the entire town dies beside a nearby lake. In O’Mahony’s tale, only one person survives, and utterly alone in the world, Honora immediately determines to move west to America in search of some semblance of a better life.

She arrives in New York, but does not find immediate freedom. Indeed, she finds that working as a maidservant and serving at the whim of a classist master aren’t much different than being a landlord’s vassal. She escapes and moves to Ireland, only to find herself imprisoned by more destructive circumstances. She is young, beautiful, and having never known real love, easily exploited.

Before reading O’Mahony’s tale, I was aware of the great Irish famine of 1847, but I was not aware of the historical tale of Doolough, Ireland. In a society like that of the United States, pro-British narratives still prevail in many places over accurate Irish narratives, and O’Mahony rightly sheds light on history to compel human compassion. Later in the novel, she intertwines the Irish’s story with that of an Indigenous American tribe in the American Northwest.

At times, this story falls into some cliched plot sequences, especially about those of western mining towns. I would have liked to have read more imaginative plot action there. However, the Irish side of the tale, which O’Mahony relates as if it were well-known in her family, was completely new to me. Not having lived in Irish sections of the U.S., I’m grateful to have learned such history. People who are survivors themselves – or those who love survivor stories – will find much to relate to in this tale since it taps so deeply into human suffering. Despite many efforts, those tales continue today. It reminds us that harrowing circumstances, despite many pitfalls, can be overcome.… (més)

Set in the rural south of Ireland, partly in 1919 during the early days of the Irish War of Independence and partly in 2019 (a full hundred years later), O’Mahony’s novel initially masquerades as a mix of family saga, historical, and psychological fiction. It is soon enough revealed to be a combination of mildly cheesy historical romance and unconvincing mid-life-crisis narrative about a woman with infertility and marital problems.

The novel opens in 1919, with the O’Donovan family in their farmhouse kitchen awaiting a group of young volunteer Irish “freedom fighters”—led by the dashing Padraic O’Riada—whom they have agreed to shelter from the Black and Tans, constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary, most of whom have been recruited from England to suppress the IRA. Nineteen-year-old Hannah, the eldest O’Donovan daughter and her father’s favourite, is sympathetic to the cause and the likely reason he’s agreed to allow these fugitives into the house at all.

Once the men are ensconced in the secret attic room, it is Hannah who brings them their meal and tells them what to do when the Tans make an earlier-than-expected raid. On first encountering him, Hannah experiences a powerful attraction to the striking O’Riada. After the Tans’ attack leaves the young woman roughed-up and bleeding and her father badly injured with multiple fractures and blind in one eye, she walks outside to meet O'Riada The two have a rapturous tumble in the grass; O'Riada makes promises to Hannah, which she clings to, especially after discovering—Surprise! Surprise!—that she is pregnant. Need I add that at that time a pregnancy out of wedlock usually meant an Irish woman was cast out of the family; she and her baby were often institutionalized apart from each other? The priests oversaw the whole operation. There will be further trouble between O'Riada and the Tans on the O’Donovan farm, an armed conflict in which Hannah, an excellent shot, will play a pivotal role. She and the rest of the family will become the stuff of local legend.

For most of the book, chapters alternate between Hannah’s story (the better one by far, for what it’s worth) and that of Ellen, her 21st-century Irish-born descendent, a beauty columnist with a large British newspaper. Ellen lives in luxury in London with her wealthy, handsome, and increasingly distant husband, Simon. Now thirty-eight (twice Hannah’s age), Ellen has had several miscarriages and, recently, a stillbirth. When she’s not lamenting her lost youth and beauty, obsessing about her thick legs and clutching at her abdominal fat, she engages in interior moan-ologues about having had a Mammy who didn’t love her, no friends, and a mocking, disdainful husband. She alternates between histrionics—wanting “to run around the fields pulling her clothes off” in an act of defiance against the “tight little box of explaining herself to Simon”—and passivity: wishing she could just fade away into the earth. At first, I believed she was in Ireland to commit suicide, but, no, she’s apparently learned that the O’Donovan farm is on the market. She seems to be possessed of the odd notion that purchasing it, on her unloving husband’s dime, will restore her to psychological health. While staying at a hotel not far from the ancestral home, she does learn a fair bit about the O’Donovans from the locals, including a surprising secret that has personal relevance. Hannah is, in fact, her great-grandmother, not Eily—Hannah’s sister On the whole, however, unlike the character herself, Ellen’s story is remarkably thin so thin, in fact, that the author resorts to adding some drama to it by submitting her protagonist to a ridiculously rendered scene of attempted rape by a real estate agent—after which Ellen drives back to the hotel in her voluminous black knickers. She’s less concerned about having been attacked than about a hotel employee seeing her large knickered bottom.

In case you haven’t noticed, I didn’t get on with this book. The problems came thick and fast, starting on page 3, when Ellen notices, while driving, that her breasts are “sitting on the high mound of her stomach.” But wait; it gets worse: those breasts “begin nuzzling each other like little overfed animals.” I could go on . . .

I’m sure there are some great novels about Irish War of Independence, and I bet there area few good ones about the stories old houses could tell. This, alas, is not one of them.… (més)