|
Journey of an Irish Soul
My Dream of You
by Nuala O'Faolain.
Riverhead Books, 2001. 500 pages.
Reviewed by Barbara O'Donnell
Reading Nuala O'Faolain's novel My Dream of You is like taking a ride on a merry-go-round. You know the experience -- sitting on a pretty painted horse, grasping the brass pole, going up and down and around in a circle at the same time. Looking out, you see a kaleidoscopic world of images and colors swirl by. You are in a moment of total motion, and there is no way to unify the images and colors. They are beautiful fragments which, once the ride stops, form an unforgettable feeling of flight forestalled, and you climb down, dizzy and exhilarated. That is how I felt when I reached page 500 and closed O'Faolain's book.
Through the swirl of emotions, experiences, personalities, and tantalizing mystery that make up My Dream of You, there is one thing we know for certain. Kathleen deBurca, the book's 49-year-old Irish narrator, is interested in passion.
I was interested, always, in any story about passion, so I was interested in Mrs. Talbot and William Mullan. I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: everything fell into place around it. Even before I started mooching around after boys when I was fourteen, I'd understood, watching my mother, that passion was the name of the thing she was pursuing, as she trawled through novel after novel.
Kathleen, long absent from her native Ireland, returns to investigate a mid-nineteenth-century adultery and divorce case. She has possessed copies of documents about the case for thirty years, fascinated by its bare facts: Marianne Talbot, the wife of an English landowner, Richard Talbot, was sued for divorce in the English Parliament because she had a sexual affair with William Mullan, a groom on the Talbot estate in Ireland.
The alleged affair and subsequent divorce took place during An Gorta Mor, the Great Famine in Ireland. O'Faolain is at her best describing what the famine meant to the tenants, townspeople, and English gentry. Her protagonist, Kathleen, is deeply interested in relationships among people during the famine. It is, in fact, the only thing that seems to interest her about her native land.
Kathleen had left Ireland when she was twenty, giving up a scholarship at Trinity College to work as a hotel maid and barmaid in London, while going to school at night to earn a journalism degree. She eventually landed a job as a travel writer for TravelWrite, part of the NewsWrite Syndicate. Despite decades of worldwide travel to marvelous places, Kathleen's life has been dry and devoid of passion. She is purposely estranged from her culture and family and allows herself to become disconnected for long periods of time from her best friend, Carolyn. She puts herself through dismal, humiliating one-night stands with men for whom she has no feelings, and lives with the constant feeling that she, being Irish, is somehow unworthy of the English world in which she has chosen to live and work.
After winning a lifetime achievement award for travel writing, Kathleen decides to quit her job, return to Ireland, and investigate the Talbot case. For Kathleen, this is a story of passion worth investigating, and she intends to write a book about it.
Accurate information about what really happened between Marianne Talbot and William Mullan, and why Richard Talbot divorced his wife, proves to be elusive, and Kathleen must imagine the story playing one way and then another. Diametrically opposed stories, based on educated speculation, play out in her imagination during her research. But My Dream of You is about all kinds of passion, not just that of Marianne and William. It seems that all of the characters in the book are defined by their resonance on a sort of "passion scale": Kathleen's mother having obligatory Sunday afternoon sex, remaining indifferent to her children, and losing herself in romance novels and booze until and baby and a cancer, together in her womb, kill her; the determination of Kathleen's sister, self-exiled in New York, to succeed; the compassion of Kathleen's sister-in-law for her husband, Kathleen's alcoholic brother; Kathleen's misplaced passions, and those of her friend Carolyn and her boss Alex; Kathleen's understated love and passion for her gay friend Jimmy; the devotion and concern of an elderly innkeeper, Bertie, for Miss Leech, an elderly librarian; Miss Leech's dedication to her profession and her personal code of conduct; and the fleeting passion Kathleen finds with Shay, a married Irish expatriate who comes to Ireland frequently on family business.
This kaleidoscope of intense people, in all their humanity, swirls around and around until the novel's final page. Kathleen has reconciled a great deal of her personal past and the historical past of the Ireland from which she fled so many years before. Her search for the truth about the Talbot affair reflects Kathleen's inner search for truth in her beliefs, her unresolved family and cultural issues, and her behaviors. In the end, we see how she has gained much peace of mind and wisdom about the nature of passion once it is set apart from romantic illusions, and we understand that her journey to understand herself in relation to her Irish soul has only just begun.
Barbara O'Donnell teaches writing at California State University, Sacramento, and is an elementary school principal. She is the founder of Pusheen Press, which carries on the Celtic tradition in the arts of storytelling and writing.
|
