Having
really enjoyed Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites,
I was excited to read her second novel.
I was not disappointed.
The setting
is an isolated village in southwest Ireland in the mid-1820s. Nóra Leahy’s husband dies suddenly
leaving her the sole caregiver of their 4-year-old disabled grandson Micheál. The boy neither speaks nor
walks; he is described as not having “the full of his mind” and being “forever
awake and screaming” and looking like “a little bag of bones fit for a pauper’s
coffin.” Nóra hires Mary
Clifford, a young girl from a large, impoverished family, to help her with
Micheál’s care. Desperate to get help
for him, Nóra also goes to see Nance Roche, a
local healer who has experience with herbal remedies and who also knows how to
mitigate the mischief of the Good People, the fairies. Nance diagnoses Micheál as a
changeling, a fairy child, so she and Nóra set out to
banish the changeling and recover the human child.
The three
women (Nóra, Nance and Mary) are clearly delineated. The reader is given access to the thoughts
and feelings so their torment and confusion are obvious and their motivations
are clearly understood. Though they are
guilty of administering extremely harsh “remedies,” they are not totally
evil. Grieving, lonely, and exhausted, Nóra agrees to increasingly abusive treatments in the honest belief that
her grandson who could once talk and walk has been kidnapped by the
fairies. Good-hearted Mary bonds with
the child and becomes protective of him but she has no influence over Nóra who could dismiss her from a job which Mary needs to help her
destitute family. Nance who has always
lived on the margins has become more ostracized because of the local priest’s
sermonizing against paganism; if she is able to recover Micheál, she believes she will be able to dispel people’s doubts and
suspicions and restore people’s faith in her:
“If I can restore Micheál to Nóra then they
will see that there is no word of a lie in my dealings with them . . . they
will all return to me.” The title of the
novel may refer to the fairies but it can also be interpreted to refer to the
women who are good people driven by circumstances to take extreme measures.
Some
sympathy is felt for each of these women.
They are trapped in lives shaped by superstition. Poverty and ignorance are major factors in
their lives, and geography isolates them from the wider world. There is also an underlying misogyny; women
are often blamed for misfortune. Calamity
is not seen as random bad luck but an indication that proper rituals were not
followed. A woman who gives birth to a
stillborn child is blamed for not seeing the blacksmith “to blow the bellows”
and for being present at a funeral wake; Nóra is not the
only one to wonder what she did or didn’t do to deserve being made a
widow. Women who challenge expectations
are viewed with suspicion; they “are forced to the edges by their difference.” Nance lists the ways in which she is
different: “her ability in her
loneliness, in the absence of a husband, her crooked hands, her habit of
smoking, of drinking like a man.” A
neighbour points out that in the view of some people, Nance is guilty of a “great
crime”: “’She lives by the woods on her
own. That’s enough to set tongues going.’”
The novel
shows a conflict between different belief systems, specifically Christianity
and paganism. Folkloric beliefs are not
shown in a positive light but organized religion is also shown as flawed. Father Healy, the local priest, lacks
compassion. He seems to have no
understanding of the daily struggles and needs of ordinary people. He is described as “slack-jawed and slumped with
the spine of a scholar” and when Nóra asks him for help with her
grandson, he doesn’t even agree to pray for him and tells her callously, “’I
think perhaps that it is your duty to care for this child and do the best you
can.’” (Even a doctor offers no
aid: “’The boy is a cretin. There is nothing I can do.’”)
I found the
book emotionally draining. I felt
sympathy for each of the women though at times I was also very angry at
them. The actions of the priest and the
gossips in the village are upsetting. It
was disturbing to read how certain beliefs focus on assigning shame and
blame. I was also left feeling immensely
grateful for not living in such abject poverty and for not being as powerless
as these women. I think the novel will
haunt me for a while.
Though the book is not
an easy read, I highly recommend it.
It will not leave a reader untouched.
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