FICTION: Where No Storms ComeBy John F Deane, The Blackstaff Press, 258pp. €9.99
THE TITLE of John F Deane's new novel is taken from the beautiful short poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called Heaven-Haven. The phrase comes in the second stanza, when the nun/narrator tells us: "And I have asked to be / Where no storms come, / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, / And out of the swing of the sea."
The novel explores the attraction towards the religious life for two young Irish protagonists, Dorothy and Patrick. I found myself reminded again and again of Kate O'Brien's elegant (and banned) masterpiece, The Land of Spices, another novel taking its title from a poem.
Deane's writing here is clearly influenced by other Irish novels and stories – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some of the short stories of John McGahern and Sean O'Faolain – and his writing draws on the cadences and the careful, unhurried narrative detailing of these earlier works to good effect.
He situates this exploration of religious vocation within the context of Irish adolescence, and interweaves the story of Dorothy Lohan, the only child of a well-to-do farming family, with that of Patrick Brennan, another only child, and the son of a much poorer neighbouring family.
The novel is set on a small island off the west coast of Ireland; the time, never directly named, seems to be somewhere in the decade or so after the end of the second World War. There is a timelessness about the novel that makes it a slow and pleasantly relaxed read, the rhythms of country life observed with a quiet, confident lyricism by the young protagonists, religious and spiritual inner conflicts intermingled with observation of the changing seasons and with the teaching and reading of poetry.
This inner world is paralleled with the texture of the natural world, and much of the strength of this novel lies in these poetic moments of observation, the idea of the interior life of the young characters nourished by their sense of the landscape around them.
The everyday life of the religious community is central to the novel, in particular Patrick’s seminary and Dorothy’s convent, and here and there Deane captures quiet yet crucial moments of epiphany, as, for example when Patrick’s mother falls in the snow on the way to early Mass on Christmas morning: “It was the sound her body made against the ground, that thump against the hard earth along with the cry that entered into Patrick’s soul and made him shiver with a kind of world-sadness he would never after be able to shake off.”
OCCASIONALLY I found some moments in the narrative to be a little overemphasised, as when Patrick stands up for a classmate who is being bullied, but other moments stood out with a kind of measured clarity. The best example comes at a wake when Dorothy sees her friend Nuala, another novice from her convent, lying dead in her coffin, and takes hold of her lost friend’s hand. “She was startled at the coldness of the flesh and hurt by the hardness of the skin. She closed her eyes, bowed her head as if in prayer. But no words came to her. Nothing, save for a strong resentment, and a terror for herself, a horror that she, too, would one day lie like this, cold, absent and other.”
Patrick’s parallel moment of crisis in his vocation is similarly well handled, and, in this particular imagined world, it seems as if issues of obedience and faith were the more pressing and problematic moments for the aspiring nuns and priests rather than any intense struggle with chastity.
The novel sustains its tone of quiet observation throughout and suggests other, more secular forms of spiritual belief, but I did find some of the final moments a little too direct in terms of social commentary, in particular where Dorothy, now a contented and serene old woman, looks in wonder at the building work for expensive new summer houses being carried out in the field across the road from her home, a familiar world being remade for vast sums of money – “Men in daffodil-yellow hats moved about like robots, carrying wooden planks, they were the earth shakers, the world movers. Dorothy shook her head slowly; she was not sure if this was stitching or unstitching of the world.”
Overall, this is a clear, well-realised novel with a confident sense of its place within Irish fiction.
Eibhear Walshe lectures in the school of English at University College Cork
