Synge's lover brought to life

Review of Joseph O'Connor's latest novel

She knew, O’Connor says, that Synge had a secret love story in the last years of his life.
“He’d had this very tempestuous love affair with a young wan from the inner city of Dublin. That’s how they would have heard of it,” said O’Connor.

“My own parents came from Francis Street in Dublin. My grandparents would have known the world of Synge and Molly Allgood very well because they lived in it themselves. So the story has been with me for years.”

What has also been with O’Connor, and every Irish writer who has picked up a pen since Synge’s heyday, is the specter of the great Irish writers looking over his shoulder. In that sense Ghost Light acknowledges and ultimately leaves behind the mighty beauties of the Irish literary tradition.

Reading the book you get the sense of an imagination taking an inventory, for good and bad, before clearing the ground to move on. Ghost Light was written against the background of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, and in a way it’s also a record of the collapse of the Ireland once given to us by the Celtic Twilight.

We’re in new territory now, after all, so you can easily forgive O’Connor for taking liberties.

“The relationship between Synge and Molly illustrated so much about Ireland and England and Catholics and Protestants. But also about relationships between people of different social classes in Ireland,” O’Connor says.

“I wrote it against the background of the downturn in Ireland. I was writing about people who were inventing the kind of place that Ireland would be. And I think we have to do that again now, so in some ways it’s quite a contemporary book as well as being an historical one.”

But you don’t have to know anything about Synge or Molly or the famous people in their circle like Yeats and Lady Gregory to love the book.

“I think it’s really about the nature of love,” says O’Connor. “There’s this fantastic infatuation you feel when you fall in love with someone inappropriate. How great that is, but it’s also full of folly.

“And when you process your memories as you begin to age it becomes clear to you that maybe your mother was right that you wouldn’t end up with that person. So it’s about how we carry our ghosts too.”

In the same way that Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon are descendants of Synge’s tramp-on-the-make Christy Mahon, O’Connor’s Molly is another near vagrant with a name and a namesake in Irish literature. But harkening back to these characters gives O’Connor’s book a texture that clearly connects it to Irish tradition even as it moves beyond it.

Young Molly emerges as proud, spirited and beautiful -- but she’s also terrifically funny. She doesn’t care who anyone is.

“I like that about her,” says O’Connor. “She’s a rebel. I admire people who live by their own lights, and this is a woman who decided to live on her own terms.

​
Nster.com