Haven by Emma Donoghue
Review by Cath Barton
A stranger arrives at the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóis on the banks of the river Sionan in the middle of Ireland. It is sometime in the seventh century, and the first fast-day after Easter. The visitor, Artt, has been travelling alone across ‘a pagan-gripped continent’, converting whole tribes to Christianity. That night he has a dream about an uninhabited island to which he is called by God to set up a monastic retreat, in the company of two others, an old monk and a young one. He recognises the two of them amongst the brotherhood: Cormac, a late convert, and Trian, given to the monastery at the age of thirteen.
Many of the goods packed by Cormac and Trian into one of the monastery’s two wooden boats are discarded by Artt before they leave; in the middle of the boat he places his holy chest, containing all he needs to celebrate Mass, two books and supplies to produce more.
Cormac sees it as an honour to be called, and for Trian the journey is an adventure; the younger man sets aside the doubts he has when Artt challenges the Abbot of the monastery about the rules of fasting, saying to himself ‘this Artt is a living saint, and can’t be wrong, can he?’ Here, perhaps, is the central question in the latest novel by Dublin-born author Emma Donoghue.
If there is anything in common between Haven and Donoghue’s multi-million seller Room (2010), it is the exploration of how human beings respond to extraordinary circumstances: something she achieves by acute observation and attention to (poignant) detail. So, for example, while Artt says he wishes to be Prior to the other two, and ‘first among equals’, he reacts with ‘an odd shiver of delight’ when Cormac and Trian ask if they can call him Father.
The trio set off down the river ‘in the first haze of Eastertide green’, but this is no resurrection dawn and the adventure is to be no idyll. The island that rises out of the Atlantic fog in front of them days later, the Great Skellig, is forbidding and sheer, ‘two broken fists of rock held up in prayer’. It is indeed uninhabited by humankind, but is home to what Cormac describes as ‘one great festivity of birds’. The birds will be central to the lives and survival of the monks over the coming months, but in ways which lead to incipient dissent between them.
Donoghue paints the island and the monks’ days of work and prayer in vivid strokes, images which embed themselves in the reader’s mind. Artt’s response to his own doubts and any questions raised by his companions is to cleave ever more strongly to work and prayer, calling them to the monastic offices through the days and nights. The tension between the outer world and the inner life pulls taut as a bowstring as the months go by and less and less is available in the way of food and fuel as people generally understand those things. Meanwhile the birds mate and raise their young. They are not afraid of those who have come to share their island, and for many of them it is to their cost.
Like the stories that Cormac recounts, Haven entertains and also makes its readers think afterwards about the issues it raises. This is the gift of the best novels. The title recalls Gerald Manley Hopkins’ Heaven-Haven: like the nun taking the veil in that poem, Artt has ‘asked to be where no storms come’ in a metaphysical sense. What though, does it mean to hold to the belief, as he does, that God will provide? At the end of their breeding season most of the birds leave the island, following their natural cycle. When, after a storm, Trian finds a dead kittiwake in the fescue grass, he thinks of its tiny life having been ‘lived according to God’s instructions’.
What, though, are God’s instructions for humankind? Haven is a book which makes you consider this, whatever your own faith or none. It also has a challenge at its climax for Artt, a truth he was not expecting, and neither was this reader, though it was prepared by the author; this is no cheap trick, but an important question. It is one as central to debate in the twenty-first century as it was back at the time of this story, and as real as the place from which these fictitious monks set sail and the island on which they seek refuge from the temptations of the world.