Donoghue delivered the final draft to her publishers this past March, just as a stunned world was taking in the enormity of the coronavirus crisis. No two ways about it, I found those scenes harrowing, but I expect I was supposed to, and they masterfully convey the hardship of the era.Readers are awaiting novels of the pandemic, and Emma Donoghue just may have stumbled into writing one of the first.Īs Donoghue explains in the author's note to her new novel, The Pull of the Stars, she began writing the story in 2018, inspired by the centenary of the Spanish Flu pandemic.
It is the strength of the central character – front-line workers were heroes then, as they are now - and Donoghue's marvellous writing which carry the novel, however, and I'm glad I overcame my initial spinelessness.
Nothing is held back in detailing the mechanics of how we come into this world, and, as a pathetic and squeamish weakling of a man, I have to admit that I had to put the book down and walk off a few times. Nurse Julia Power works in an understaffed maternity ward that must deal as best it can with infected, expectant mothers.
The rebellion has left the city like a “great mouth holed with missing teeth” although the town’s modern inhabitants, and readers in general, will most certainly recognise something in wall-mounted warnings that advise citizens to “lie down for a fortnight” or “if in doubt, don’t stir out” and it’s difficult to suppress a wry grin when faced with the declaration that “the government has the situation well in hand.” The paranoia that ensues when someone expectorates on public transport will be familiar to all of us too. That being said, the publishers knew a good thing when it dropped in their lap, for this is the only release I know of that was actually brought forward in 2020. What’ll really spin your head is Donoghue’s assertion that she began the novel in 2018, prompted by the centenary of the great flu, and had the final draft in with the publishers while COVID-19 was still a distance from the front pages.
The longer the current 'emergency' drags on, the more timely Donoghue’s novel, set in the post-rising Dublin of 1918, beset, as is the rest of the world, by the Spanish flu pandemic, becomes.
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