Reading Harold Fry first will allow this deeply emotional novel to resonate more fully.
Joyce (Perfect, 2014, etc.) offers an introspective follow-up to her 2012 breakout debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.
Queenie Hennessy has entered St. Bernadine’s Hospice in northeast England. Cancer has destroyed her throat and jaw, and now she awaits death among "rejects, you might say...and it was a relief, a blessed relief." Word comes that a friend, Harold Fry, has learned of her illness. He intends to walk from Kingsbridge, 600 miles away. Harold wants Queenie to wait for him. What follows is a history of their fractured friendship, with her confession as the narrative’s heart. Decades prior, when the two worked together, Queenie fell in love with Harold but never revealed her feelings. "I loved your voice, your walk, your marriage, your hands, your zigzag socks...for God’s sake, everything about you." Harold had a brilliant son, David, a troubled young man—"For all his selfishness, he was as astute as a knife"—whom Queenie attempted to help. "I had promised myself that I would be a bridge between you and your son, and I was out of my depth." David committed suicide. In Queenie’s meditative memories—"There is a huge story ahead of me, and the truth is so complicated"—her remembrance of unrequited love is shared with a sometimes-funny, sometimes-sad reflection on life’s bitter end. Any pathos is mostly subsumed by wry humor and clarity regarding life’s foibles, the story ending with a beautiful twist reminding us we all journey through life as lonely, sometimes-inarticulate pilgrims.
Reading Harold Fry first will allow this deeply emotional novel to resonate more fully.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9667-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.
The heart-expanding extremes of life—first love and last rites—are experienced by an unsettled young Dubliner spending one exceptional spring in a small Irish village.
Christy McMahon “walked this line between the comic and the poignant,” and so does Williams (History of the Rain, 2014, etc.) in his latest novel, another long, affectionate, meandering story, this one devoted to the small rural community of Faha, which is about to change forever with the coming of electricity to the parish. Delighting in the eccentricities of speech, behavior, and attitude of the local characters, Williams spins a tale of life lessons and loves new and old, as observed from the perspective of Noel Crowe, 17 when the book’s events take place, some six decades older as he narrates them. Noel’s home is in Dublin, where he was training to become a Catholic priest, but he's lost his faith and retreated to the home of his grandparents Doady and Ganga in Faha. Easter is coming, and the weather—normally infinite varieties of rain—turns sunny as electrical workers cover the countryside, erecting poles and connecting wires. Christy, a member of the electrical workforce, comes to lodge alongside Noel in Doady and Ganga's garret but has another motive: He’s here to find and seek forgiveness from the woman he abandoned at the altar 50 years earlier. While tracing this quest, Williams sets Noel on his own love trajectory as he falls first for one, then all of the daughters of the local doctor. These interactions are framed against a portrait of village life—the church, the Gaelic football, the music, the alcohol—and its personalities. Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity.
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-420-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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