Ireland Unfree Will Never Be At Peace

Star of the Sea
by Joseph O'Connor
p. 2002

“And yet, could there be silence? What did silence mean? Could you allow yourself to say nothing at all to such things? To remain silent, in fact, was to say something powerful: that it never happened: that these people did not matter. They were not rich. They were not cultivated. They spoke no lines of elegant dialogue; many, in fact, did not speak at all. They died very quietly. They died in the dark. And the materials of fiction – bequests of fortunes, grand tours in Italy, balls at the palace – these people would not even know what those were. They had paid their betters’ accounts with the sweat of their servitude but that was the point where their purpose had ended. Their lives, their courtships, their families, their struggles; even their deaths, their terrible deaths – none of it mattered in even the tiniest way. They deserved no place in printed pages, in finely wrought novels intended for the civilised. They were simply not worth saying anything about.”

Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea became an overnight hit when it was published a little over a decade ago, a sprawling melodrama set against the backdrop of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. I included the above passage because it is the one that stood out to me most amidst the 400 pages O’Connor has provided for digestion. Though that is probably an inappropriate choice of words for a book primarily preoccupied with the topic of starvation, I think it’s nonetheless a fitting one, since there is an awful lot of material here to break down.

Star of the Sea took me awhile to get into, and—I have to admit—even at the height of its mystery I still couldn’t find myself enthralled or unable to put the book down. Period-driven melodrama isn’t exactly my forte, no matter how finely wrought the language is, and I found there to be a lot of filler in O’Connor’s story, probably to enshroud the mystery at the center of this novel—the murder of one of its central protagonists at the hands of another central character.

The entire history of each main protagonist is covered in extensive flashbacks, but half of the novel takes place in the present, aboard a ‘famine ship’ (the Star of the Sea), a passenger ship sailing for America carrying a great many poor and starving Irish who have given up everything they own for the passage, in the hopes of eking out a living in a new, potentially more promising landscape. The story is told from the point of view of an American author on board the Star, many years after the voyage, so we are allowed the full range of perspective—we know the hardships leading up to the voyage, the suffering aboard the ship, the many who never made it, and the disappointment felt by those who did make it, only to discover their coveted new life may not have been as forgiving as they’d hoped.

No character in Star of the Sea is entirely innocent, nor are they all thoroughly despicable. Even the most ‘villainous’ character has a well-drawn out history that makes you feel somewhat for his plight. My second favorite passage in the book comes from a chapter focused on a murderer and thief:

“The lexicon of crime became his favorite contemplation. The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. With rigour, with precision, and most of all with poetry, they had categorised the language of thievery into sub-species, like fossilised old deacons baptising butterflies. Every kind of robbery had a verb of its own. Breeds of embezzlement he never knew existed came to him first as beautiful words. Beak-hunting; bit-faking; blagging; bonneting; broading; bug-hunting; buttoning; buzzing; capering; playing the crooked cross; dipping; dragging; fawney-dropping; fine-wiring; flimping; flying the blue pigeon; gammoning; grifting; half-inching; hoisting; doing the kinchen-lay; legging; lifting; lurking; macing; minning; mizzling; mug-hunting; nailing; outsidering; palming; prigging; rollering; screwing; sharping; shuffling; smatter-hauling; sniding; toolering; vamping; yack-snatching and doing the ream flash pull. Stealing in London sounded like dancing and Mulvey danced his way through the town like a duke.”

The book has a preoccupation with the multivocality of words and of silences. Although a murder and the torrid past love affairs and tragic deaths that led up to it seem to guide the novel’s events, it is really the starvation—the pain of hunger and a slow, agonizing death—and the division of classes that possess O’Connor’s novel. The privileged British aristocracy rather expect to find desolation and hunger in third world countries. That it was happening in their own proverbial backyard was unthinkable, and so many of the rich simply turned a blind eye to the Irish famine. This story is an attempt to give a voice to those whom society deems invisible; and this is a universal phenomenon, something every society has experience with at one time or another.

Like many things wholly ‘Irish,’ Star of the Sea is quite heavy and a bit depressing, but never without a touch of wit to break the tension. I’ll wrap up this review by including my favorite quip here: “Lord Kingscourt said he would need a short time to discuss it with his wife. (His Ladyship, it appears, is the wearer of the britches.)"

"Ireland unfree will never be at peace."

I couldn't stop thinking about my study abroad program in Ireland the entire time I was reading Star of the Sea. Probably this was because many of the characters hail from parts of Connemara, including Tully, the city my peers and I lived in for four months, and the descriptions still felt so familiar to me that I could understand the yearning the characters felt upon leaving. I had purchased O'Connor's novel while I lived there, but I held on to it, unread until recently. The above picture is one I took in Derry in 2004.

Little Miss Sociopath

Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood
p. 1996
 

Since being introduced to her by my favorite professor a few years back, Margaret Atwood is increasingly becoming one of my favorite authors. Alias Grace is further proof of this, a sprawling work of historical fiction that sticks with you a long time after you finish reading it.

Alias Grace is, for all intents and purposes, a work of fiction, but it is based rigidly in real events. It centers on the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his servant and lover, Nancy Montgomery, by the hands of two other servants, James McDermott and 15-year-old Grace Marks, ostensibly the protagonist of this novel, though her actual moral alignment is deliberately left ambiguous, just like the real outcome of the gruesome crime.

Atwood details the life of Grace from her humble beginnings, leading up to a series of meetings with the fictional Dr. Simon Jordan, a student of psychology who becomes Grace’s primary doctor in order to root out the truth of the crime and the girl’s true nature—victim or perpetrator. Grace relates to Jordan her entire history while she lives out her humble life as a servant to the governor of the penitentiary at which she has spent the better part of two decades. In the meantime, Jordan interacts with some of the other women in his life—his desperate, hapless landlord, a forward young admirer, his lonely mother and her choice for Simon’s prospective wife, while trying to sort out his increasingly inappropriate feelings for Grace and his opinion on her guilt.

I won’t lie; Alias Grace is a long novel, and it took me awhile to get into it, but there is something about Atwood’s writing that draws you in, lulls you into a sense of certainty about these characters that can easily be dashed in a few short words. She does a fantastic job not only of fictionalizing these very real people who lived and lusted so long ago but also of crafting a tale that is complete without ever revealing the truth—because who can know that, really, but the only survivor of the affair, Grace herself?

Indeed, we can’t ever know whether Grace was an unwitting victim wrapped up in events beyond her control, or a scheming seductress who orchestrated the whole thing, but Grace’s guilt is not really the point of this novel. Atwood’s real intentions are to get the reader to question their beliefs on whether or not Grace is capable of such a thing, and if not, why we think that way.

Atwood is a well-known feminist writer and it’s easy to see how Grace Marks could captivate her and inspire this work of realistic fiction. The events surrounding Grace’s life and incarceration are sensational, and the details of her conviction controversial. Could a young girl really be capable of such a heinous murder? Should Grace have paid more dearly for her crimes or did she deserve freedom? Atwood tells it in such a way that Grace seems simultaneously pitiable and suspicious. To date I cannot decide which way my opinion swings. On the one hand, it would be unfair to lock up someone swept into insurmountable events and young Grace was an easy target; on the other hand, Grace, in this story, comes off almost as a sociopath—emotionless, totally lacking in remorse—and if there is truth to this description, it’s easy to see why so many believed her to be every bit the celebrated murderess she was for three decades.

This is definitely a novel that prompts you to reconsider your beliefs on very relevant matters. Is it not more misogynistic to think that Grace could not possibly be guilty, simply because of her sex? Did the sweeping misconceptions about the virtue of the fairer sex, so prevalent in those times, get in the way of justice for Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery? And what is to be said of the fact that servant girl Nancy’s murder was not even tried in the wake of the conviction for Kinnear’s murder? Was it her gender or her stature that prevented justice for Nancy?

Atwood’s story is full of unreliable narratives, from Grace’s detailed but confusing firsthand account (her portion of the story lacks in punctuation, often making it difficult to discern what is being spoken or thought), to Simon Jordan’s general mistreatment of women and lust for Grace as a famed murderess, a kind of misogyny in its own right. Since we’ll never know the whole story, all we have are the bits and pieces. Atwood did her best assembling them, but even if the picture is completed, it will only tell a fraction of the story. It’s up to the reader to decide how to deconstruct the work of art from there.

Whores and Puppets--What's Not to Love?

Under the Poppy

by Kathe Koja
p. 2010 

“Any folk may be divided so, into those who play, and those who only watch.”

It is the players at the heart of Kathe Koja’s sweeping period drama, Under the Poppy, a novel which takes you on an engrossing—at times, dizzying—trek through 19^th century Brussels’ sensual underground. It’s the type of story that ends where it starts but leaves no character unmoved.

The titular ‘Poppy’ is Koja’s novel is a brothel masquerading as a theater—or perhaps a theater masquerading as a brothel, depending on who you ask—in 1870s Brussels, under its proprietress, cruel and lonely Decca, and the owner, mysterious and stoic Mr. Rupert Bok. The whore of the Poppy offer the usual services, but they also offer an opportunity of theatricality, playing to their clients’ fantasies by acting them out in elaborate and rousing plays. But to say the whores of the Poppy take center stage would be erroneous; this is first and foremost the story of Rupert and Istvan—the latter being Decca’s wandering rogue brother, puppeteer, player, enigma, and Rupert’s lover and first true companion, who shows up at the Poppy in the midst of an encroaching war they want no part of. It is Istvan’s return they sets in motion the series of events that would alter everyone under the Poppy.

Under the Poppy’s romantic, flowing dialogue invokes sharp imagery in the reader’s eye; it is, at times, almost like a stream of consciousness, stringing you along until you almost lose yourself in the flow. Koja’s narrative technique is curiously divided, split up into unnamed chapters that are occasionally centered on breaking down a single character in first-person, or are unassigned third-person narratives. Decca, Rupert and Istvan have no attributed chapters of their own, but this story no less revolves around them. In the end, this whole world is Rupert and Istvan’s stage; the others are simply allowed to play on it for a time.

It is no surprise, then, that Istvan’s puppets—or les mecs, as he calls them—play parts almost as important as the human characters do. Istvan is no saint, but he’s a powerful character, both in impact and actions. He is the prescient rogue, moving people about and manipulating them like the world is his personal stage. Prior to coming to the Poppy and reuniting with his childhood companion, Rupert, and treacherous sister, Decca, Istvan was a wanderer and a successful puppeteer. He goes by many names throughout the novel—Hanzel, Dusan, M. Dieudonne, Fox—to name just a few, and constantly wears masks, both literal and figurative. One gets the sense that he is the truest version of himself when he is with Rupert, his anchor and his weakness, just as Istvan is Rupert’s weakness. The two have an unspeakable bond, together since they were boys, roaming the streets and performing shows with the puppets they created together. As they got older, circumstances and Decca’s deception born of jealousy drives them apart, but time and again they are inevitably drawn to one another.

There is a strong artistic presence in Koja’s novel, as these characters constantly dance around the conflict between love and war. The characters are at war with one another while a literal war is creeping in around them and threatening their very existence. The only thing that can save them—indeed, the only thing that seems to bring anyone cheer in these dreary days—is the stage, Istvan’s plays and puppets, an escape from reality for others but to Istvan, the only life he knows. A peripheral character, a master of the stage, says it best in his narrative: “You see, that hunger inside us, that ambition, or whatever you may choose to call is, is a compass really, a compass of true desire. And if you will be happy, you must follow that desire, no matter which way the needle points.”

As the story progresses, most of the characters are discarded, unfortunately, but their replacements bring their own intrigue. Even the Poppy itself is forgotten, which is a shame but understandable, for the stage is ever shifting, just like the theme. Koja’s novel never does what you expect it to do, which makes it all that much more absorbing. The scenery may change but the focus stays the same, as Rupert and Istvan continue to enter in and out of each other’s orbit. Istvan is a presence that is constantly felt, because you know that he is never far. He would never let go of his mecs, his play-acting, or his itinerant ways, so long as he still lacks his true desire. It is a testament to any man’s inability to deny his baser desires, be they sexual or otherwise. “All that moves requires a hand,” Istvan says to a progeny of his, and it sets the tone for the entire novel, for no person is without that inner compass that guides them, but it is much better to be the master than the puppet.

Koja is currently adapting her novel to a stage format for the Detroit Opera House, set for a 2012 release, and there could not be a better method of presentation for this story. Under the Poppy was destined for the stage, from the very first rumblings of its love affair with the medium on the page. There are plenty of opportunities for song and dance, fun and excitement, and certainly a bit of titillation. It will be interesting to see how well the story plays out off the page.