It is not difficult to see that Kathleen, the Irishness in her peeping out at odd times in her routine life, has had a difficult childhood. These facts, however, come out in bits and pieces throughout the book, finally coming together at the end, where her entire life stands revealed at last. She has arrived at the village of Ballygall where the story was buried, and begins her research into the circumstances. She also begins to write a rosy account of the affair, romanticizing it until the tale develops a twist which causes her to drop the project entirely.
While in Ireland, she finally forces herself to visit the family she had abandoned. Coming home, after decades of avoidance, all the old hurts and heartbreaks surface afresh. She is wealthy now and she feels the only way she can make up for the neglect of her brother, young when she had left him with their father, was by showering money to help him out. Her callousness and selfishness, as her sister-in-law views it, leads to further complications as her brother's drinking habit is exacerbated. The true extent of the difficulty of Irish life is made clear with incidents like these. Kathleen realizes that while she may have rabbitted herself away all these years, she has still not grown up sufficiently to think or care about others. Her visit to Ireland proves to be an eye-opener to her and she wills herself to change, sloughing off the old issues of insecurity and brashness. She is finally ready to put down roots.
There were some flat areas in the book; most of all, the half-attempted historic account that Kathleen tries to write. Compelled by her own family's history, the confusion she felt after she ran away from Dublin to a country where she herself would've been considered alien had she not made herself scarce enough to blend in, she makes some accurate observations about the story:
There could hardly have been two people less likely to be drawn to each other than an Anglo-Irish Landlord's wife and an Irish servant ... from a powerful culture which had at its very core the defining of the other as alien. But they sloughed off those cultures to reach out to each other. They didn't even have a native language in common, yet they pierced through layers of custom and dared every sanction, impelled by the need within desire to express itself.
Kathleen is a woman of many contradictions. She may have shunned all passion from her own life --
What if I have to go the whole way to the grave without ever making love again?
-- but she can't help but be riveted by passion in other people's lives.
All the more because it was a journey I had failed to make, I believed that the body was the way to the heart, and the heart was the way to the soul. When I told the story of William Mullan and Marianne Talbot, I would be preaching that belief.
She wonders, decades later as she recalls her parents' marriage (her mother having died a painful death from cancer of the womb while pregnant with yet another child, denied morphine because she was a Catholic and morphine would harm the fetus, which caused Kathleen to run away from home forever in a fit of anger against her father):
What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime?
... though silence must add intensity to your intimate moments, it must also shrivel your soul to lie beside someone who doesn't talk to you.
Her own life has become a carefully-built vacuum. As a young girl, she has seen the vast loveless silence that lay between her father and mother, all the more painful when she remembered how her mother was a romantic at heart, watching romantic movies and dreaming of such a life herself. This vision has haunted Kathleen all her life and has forced her to question her own belief of men and family life, she having shunned the first, her body having shun the possiblity of the second. She is forced to wonder if she is ever capable of living a normal life ever, especially when she comes across an unexpected possiblity of love in the form of the man she meets serendipitously on a ferry; a married man who genuinely offers to take care of her for the rest of her life if she would stay nearby where he can reach her now and then. She is tempted by the offer, imagining a house of her own and waiting for him to visit her, while she goes about the necessities of life. But she has changed; the new Kathleen contemplates this life of waiting with misgivings. With her final decision, we can see that her journey to self-discovery is complete.
For all its minor flaws, this book is a novel of epic proportions, very intelligent and searching in some of its observations, despite its tendency to ramble around in places. The author very poignantly reveals the painfulness of the Irish famine and its aftermath, the depths to which the population had sunk during this period. The pain here is very real and can be felt through the entire book. The slowness of the book's beginning pages is more than made up for by these revelations that are peppered throughout the narrative. Kathleen is more mature than she gives herself credit for. Her sense of insecurity at the person she is, both physically and spiritually, reveals itself throughout, although we can see that the people who meet her view her as a beautiful and accomplished person. Kathleen still feels, past the age of 50 years, that she has a lot of growing to do. Her introspection makes the book real and human. The author's own voice can be heard behind Kathleen's persona in these places; it is a wonderful experience to see through the author's eyes as to how people have had to cope during such a difficult and perhaps avoidable situation such as the Famine. In addition, the author makes it clear that however much one tries to run away from the past, only by returning to it and facing it head-on can a resolution be found, allowing one to discover and nurture oneself. People continue to grow from within, whatever the age. Somehow that is comforting to know.
An utterly compelling and intelligent novel, it is sprinkled all over with wonderfully memorable paragraphs and sparks of intelligent speculations. I will need to re-read this book at intervals if I am lucky enough get my hands on it again in the future. Perhaps each year or decade that I turn older, there will be something new offered up by this book, some deeper meaning to be gleaned, something to chew on with the new understanding that only age can bring. I look forward to re-experiencing this book.
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