In an afterword to her imaginative and ambitious novel, Jacqueline O’Mahony writes that she was inspired to write it by the tragic story of the Famine Walk by the people of Doolough, Co Mayo in 1849 — one of the most callous injustices of the Great Famine. She is also interested in the Cayuse people of the Pacific Northwest, and in the celebrated fact that the Choctaw Nation donated money for Irish famine relief in 1847. Linking the history of indigenous American people with that of Ireland, if often idealised and sentimentalised, is understandable; some aspects of this novel even remind me of my own story, The Pale Gold of Alaska (although the similarity is no doubt coincidental).
O’Mahony’s protagonist, Honora O’Neill, a tough, enigmatic young woman with a taste for witchcraft, loses her husband and most of her family in the Doolough walk and emigrates to New York. There, she spends some time working as a servant girl and then moves to Bolt (a fictional town?) in Oregon with an unreliable friend, Mary (this journey of almost 3,000 miles, notoriously arduous in the 1850s, is not described at all, but perhaps that would be another story). In Bolt, Honora, now called Nell, is forced into prostitution but succeeds in escaping from that life.
The description of the famine sufferings in Ireland is harrowing, if lengthy. The main characters, complex Honora herself and the intriguing Mary, are well drawn; minor figures like the New York landlady, Miss Foster, and the delightfully ghastly pimp, Ignatius, are straight out of Oliver Twist, appropriate given the period involved. There is a fair amount of dry humour; dialogue is excellent, especially the conversations among the girls, and there are some lovely lyrical descriptions of landscape.
Some Irish phrases and words are used, which is gratifying, although inaccuracies, apparently inevitable in any English-language novel acknowledging that people in Ireland once spoke Irish, occur: the diacritic is simply ignored (not a fada in sight) and phrases such as A dhuine usaile are unfortunate. That’s not a problem which will bother most readers, though, and these cavils apart, this is an impressive and very readable novel.
- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer and critic. Her Selected Stories, with an introduction by Margaret Kelleher, will be published by Blackstaff in September
