Review of Books

A selection of recently published books of Irish and Irish-American interest

Ghost Light
    There may be no finer Irish writer of historical fiction than Joseph O’Connor. Author of the equally beloved and acclaimed novels Star of the Sea (2003) and Redemption Falls (2007), O’Connor approaches his genre and the pages of Irish history with unsurpassed depth and, for this reader at least, the perfect amount of artistic liberty necessary for reaching the emotional – if not always factual –  truth of the past.
    In Ghost Light, O’Connor’s seventh novel, he turns his attention from emigration and the famine (the topics explored in his last two books) to the well-known but little documented relationship between the Irish playwright John Millington Synge (writer of The Playboy of the Western World and founder, with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre) and the actress Molly Allgood (stage name Marie O’Neill). For various reasons, ranging from differences in class, religion and age to Synge’s failing health, their relationship was essentially doomed from the start. But in O’Connor’s rendering of 1907 Edwardian Dublin, the time they do spend together deeply affects Synge’s work and Molly’s life (it is said that the role of Playboy’s Pegeen Mike, which Allgood originated, was influenced largely by the time Synge spent with her).     
    Readers access these years in Dublin through the memories of a now older, poorer Molly, just getting by in a dark 1952 London. O’Connor portrays his protagonist with compassion and honesty throughout all her ruminations, which take place over the course of one day, as Molly slowly makes her way through London to a rare job opportunity: the part of an old Irish woman in a BBC Radio reading of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. O’Connor makes unexpected shifts in narration, switching suddenly from addressing Molly in the second person to describing her in the third. Though initially somewhat disorienting, this choice is ultimately a powerful one, mirroring Molly’s alternating focus on her present circumstances and her deep nostalgia.
    In the “Acknowledgments and Caveat” section that follows the close of the novel, O’Connor freely and somewhat apologetically admits “most events in this book never happened at all.” He then adds that “certain biographers may want to beat me with a turf shovel.” It seems unlikely, though, that O’Connor will suffer the same fate as Old Mahon in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. Rather, I believe that readers will be immediately drawn in by O’Connor’s rendering of this fascinating pair.
    – Sheila Langan (256 pages / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / $24)

Memoir

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