A DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE STORY Confinement, family and the environment in Emma Donoghue’s Haven
successfully herding and trading on the Skelligs. I wanted instead to imagine a first attempt, an interesting failure – how fast could things go wrong, as a lesson in how not to settle an island. The archeological report was extremely useful in telling me how rash and perverse it would have been to found an ultra-isolationist retreat without keeping those life-saving links to the rest of the world.” For Donoghue, her fascination with the Skelligs began with a boat trip around the islands and, remarkably, she reports that the whole storyline – the three monks, the single summer and the final denouement – came to her all as a piece on that boat trip. The plot is very simple, but it is the richness of depth and colour in the characterization, and the depiction of the religious context, that make this an immersive read. Donoghue makes it clear that both her fascination with and much of her ability to enter so convincingly into the lives of these three 7th-century monks stems from her background and Catholic upbringing. “I remain fascinated by all that’s beautiful to me in that heritage – the mysticism, the art, the music, the obsession with preserving and handing down Scripture, the sense of every tiny action of your day having some effect on the eternal destiny of your soul. But equally fascinated by the aspects of that tradition that appall me: the built-in misogyny and ascetic hostility to the body, authoritarianism, the emphasis on punishment and obedience.”
Best known for her adult fiction, Emma Donoghue is a versatile and prolific author, whose fiction crosses many genres and for which she has won numerous awards. She has written for adults and children; fiction and non-fiction; contemporary and historical novels; and for stage, screen and radio; and moves, seemingly effortlessly, between them. So it was with anticipation of a very good read that I dived into a copy of her latest novel Haven. I wasn’t disappointed. Haven (Little, Brown; HarperAvenue; Picador UK, 2022) is set in Ireland in the 7th century and is a re-imagining of the first settlement of the Great Skellig – Skellig Michael – the larger of a pair of rocky outcrops off Ireland’s Atlantic coast. There is a tradition of monks on Skellig Michael from around this period, and though no details remain, archaeological evidence indicates they kept sheep, goats, and pigs and traded with the mainland for firewood, grain, and wine. The lack of documentary evidence of the first monastic settlement is a gift to an historical novelist, one which Donoghue exploits fully, choosing to present a purely fictional account distinctly different from that suggested by the archaeological record. She explained her rationale: “Archeological evidence usually speaks of lasting patterns rather than brief ones – the report tells us about centuries of monks
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FEATURES | Issue 101, August 2022
It is one thing to be fascinated by the religious “mindset”, another to be able to evoke it so compellingly. Many historical fiction writers say it is one of the hardest aspects of previous centuries to capture. For Donoghue, getting the “mindset” right is far more important than food or clothes and, aside from her deeply engrained knowledge of the Bible, stemming from her childhood, she read and re-read Scripture searching for appropriate quotations. Donoghue terms herself a “lapsed academic”, who thrives on having a lot of real historical and textual source material on which to base her fiction. Hence her rigorous research is unsurprising; what is more impressive is the way she seamlessly blends in the biblical quotations, the monastic prayers, and the stories of the saints, which form such a large proportion of the text, in order to enhance the story and develop the characters. Several key themes struck me forcibly while reading Haven, including the impact of isolation and confinement. While Donoghue recognises that these themes have become leitmotifs of her work, for her it is less a matter of the theme itself than a practical matter of literary technique. She explains: “Bringing the ‘walls’ in increases the emotional temperature between characters. And it makes my job as a world-builder so much easier if it’s a small world and I know every inch of it.” Artt, the leader of the three monks, follows a religious principle way past the point of sanity, and the results of that idealistic obsession is a major driver of the plot. Donoghue highlights two other main themes – firstly the issue of the environment: “Because the monks are the first humans to land on the Great Skellig, their story is a kind of parable about what we do to the places we live.” Secondly, and importantly for Donoghue, the issue of family and parenthood. “Everything I’ve written over the last almost twenty
