The pull of the plough and the stars A brand new novel from Irish born writer Emma Donoghue has been fast-tracked for publication because of the COVID-19 crisis. There are strong parallels between the subject of her latest offering, a historical novel called The Pull of the Stars, and the events of today. “I started The Pull of the Stars last year to coincide with centenary of 1918 Spanish flu and I had just finished it when Covid hit, so it couldn’t be stranger,” she told RTE presenter Miriam O’Callaghan during an interview on RTE Radio 1 on May 3. “I didn’t think you would be trying to sell anything in this climate but the publisher said now is time to bring it out if we wait until next year everyone might be sick of the subject,” she added. “But one thing I like about this book is its all about nurses and doctors and the incredible people who get up every morning and walk into danger day after day when most of us are huddling away from it.” The Pull of the Stars is set in the maternity ward of a fictional Dublin hospital in 1918 at the height of the Great Flu and is a story about finding light in darkness according to its author. The promotional blurb describes it thus: “Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders — Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.” Donoghue describes it as a largely fictional novel but two important aspects of it are true to life. The medical
material described in the book is well researched and verified by experts, but perhaps even more importantly the character of Dr Kathleen Lynn is based on her historical figure. “I’m casting her as a doctor brought in temporarily and most of the hospital staff are going “who’s that weirdo?”, with the police after her as a member of the SF executive, and they would have seen her as a complete trouble maker in that she was a suffragette and socialist wanting to make a better world and she clashed with the hierarchy, they saw her as an interfering Protestant”. Donoghue said she was an advanced public health figure who campaigned against TB and malnutrition but she was also a Sinn Fein leader in the 1916 Rising. “She also set up the children’s hospital St Ultan’s (in Charlemont Street, near the Grand Canal) at a time when most hospitals wouldn’t take in the children of the poor. So her career intersects the Womens Movement, the Labour Movement, the Republican Movement and wanted a state that would cherish all our children equally. “She’s an extraordinary figure and I’ve been very interested in the new campaign to have the new children’s hospital (in Dublin) named after her, I couldn’t imagine a better way to name it.” The RTE presenter asked her why she chose to set a story about the Spanish Flu, a worldwide pandemic that claimed 2 to 3% of the world’s population - in Dublin. If most people at the time wondered what “those eejits” were doing in the 1916 Rising a few years later, they were voting for Sinn Fein. “There was an astonishing cultural shift in those years and via Kathleen Lynn I decided to look at it in terms of injustice, this Ireland they had was clearly an unjust country where the slum life in Dublin was described as the Calcutta of Europe. The maternal and child death rates in Ireland at the time, Ireland was really struggling by any measures. I could quite imagine idealists like Kathleen Lynn even though I’m a doctor I have to turn to the gun to make some difference to my poor country.” The author highlighted the invaluable role played by medics then and now. “We can very actively treat things now we can analyse a virus but they didn’t know what a virus
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