Synge's lover brought to life

Review of Joseph O'Connor's latest novel

Joseph O’Connor’s eighth novel is also his most accomplished. In Ghost Light, the Dublin-born writer vividly re-imagines the controversial love affair between Irish playwright J.M. Synge and his much younger leading lady, Molly Allgood. Their secret affair once scandalized Dublin, which explains its enduring fascination. CAHIR O’DOHERTY talks to the best-selling author about writing what he himself happily calls his favorite book.

HISTORY records the bare facts of the love affair between Irish playwright J.M. Synge and his fiancé Molly Allgood -- it was brief, heartfelt and it ended badly.

Controversy dogged their dalliance from the start – judgmental Dubliners sniffed at the Anglo-Irish playwright in hot pursuit of a young actress from the Liberties. No good would come of it they predicted, and they were right.

The intensity of the public’s disapproval, which was as Protestant as it was Catholic, almost wiped the affair from the history books.  But doomed love affairs have a way of capturing the imagination of others long after even the main players have quit the stage.

As a boy growing in Dun Laoghaire, a suburb in south Dublin where Synge lived and wrote his most famous play The Playboy of the Western World, novelist Joseph O’Connor fell under the spell of this ancient affair and the two headstrong protagonists who had once lived it.

Every day O’Connor passed the run down house where Synge had lived -- and loved -- before dying at the age of 37 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was such a sad story, no matter how you looked at it.
O’Connor found he couldn’t let it go and we, the readers, are the beneficiaries -- Ghost Light (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the most interesting and distinctive novel by an Irish writer in years.
It’s not hard to understand the story’s appeal. Almost everyone has experienced a romance that soured and haunted your footsteps for years after.

But in fact, as O’Connor points out, it doesn’t even have to involve a lover at all -- relationships between peers, siblings or even colleagues can become so toxic and damaging it can take years (if ever) to undo the harm they cause. So there’s no question that dramatic entanglements have their own fascination.

“It’s a story that’s been with me since I was a child growing up in Dun Laoghaire,” O’Connor tells the Irish Voice. “My late mother, who died in 1985, was a great lover of books and the Irish inheritance in literature. She used to tell us as we passed the crumbling, slightly decrepit house where Synge has once lived with his mother, ‘That’s the room where he wrote The Playboy of the Western World.’ She told us Synge knew these streets that we were walking down.

“He walked on the same seafront where we’re going this morning and sometimes he would look out his window and see Dalkey quarry in the moonlight like we sometimes can.”

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