emma donoghue the pull of the stars review

There is also a subplot featuring a doctor on the run from police, but this fails to really go anywhere. The effect of so much blood and guts is quite deadening, and lessens the impact of the final tragedy in the book. Nurse Power reflects on war neurosis and “the Englishwoman who lost her mind in an air raid and decapitated her child”. Poverty and flu are not the only cause of pain, of course – the first world war is still going on during the three days of the novel’s action. Attending the postmortem of a mother who died before her baby could be born, Nurse Power gazes at the foetus: “I wept for him, and his mother on the slab, and his five brothers and sisters gone before him, and the seven orphaned ones, and their bereft father.” This may simply have been the state of things, but Donoghue appears at pains to ensure the reader never forgets about grief and suffering. Where the novel falls down is in Donoghue’s weakness for lurid melodrama. She has said she wanted to give the dialogue a “hallucinatory effect”, and it certainly conjures up Nurse Power’s exhaustion. Nurse Power has been sent a young volunteer helper for the day, Bridie Sweeney, who is so ignorant she is astonished to feel a baby moving inside its mother’s body: “I thought it only came to life once it was out,” she admits.ĭonoghue has abandoned quotation marks in this book. There is tenderness and even beauty amid the horror, as nurses manoeuvre the expectant mothers into bizarre positions to accelerate labour and thus save lives. The first part of the story takes place over 14 hours as women weakened by flu contort themselves in labour. Donoghue’s prose is visceral, and the sense of peril in the cramped, tiny ward is compelling. After only four short sentences, we can already smell the “dung and blood” of the Dublin streets as nurse Julia Power cycles to work at an understaffed hospital in the city centre.

As anyone who has read Donoghue’s internationally bestselling novel Room – i nspired by the grotesque Josef Fritzl case – will know, she is quick to draw the reader in.

Emma donoghue the pull of the stars review