|
The Coin in the Well
Nory Ryan's Song
by Patricia Reilly Giff.
Delacorte Press, 2000. 150 pages.
Reviewed by Barbara O'Donnell
An Gorta Mor -- the Great Hunger: something never discussed in so many Irish immigrant families. No stories handed down about An Gorta Mor, no honor for the survivors of An Gorta Mor, only a blank silence, and by the fourth or fifth generation everything lost except a last name and a hankering to know. Who was my family? Where did they come from? Why did they come? Tracing back the names and dates on tombstones and in an old family Bible, and reading old census reports, I discovered the date of my people's immigration to be approximately 1848, the height of An Gorta Mor. And so I am especially interested in the Irish immigrant experience of this period, and I looked forward to reading Patricia Reilly Giff's novel set at the start of the Irish famine.
Giff, too, has a vested interest in the famine. As she says of the famine in the novel's afterword: "It reminds us that many of us are Americans because of that time: the potatoes turning black in the fields, the indifferent English government, enough food to feed double the population going out from the land and across the sea; a desperate people." Giff cites the numbers as well. One million out of a population of eight million died of starvation, three million left the country, and a hundred thousand of the latter died en route.
Descended from famine-time immigrants, Giff yearned to hear the stories. Despite being told, "You don't want to know," she did want to know, and in numerous trips to Ireland she uncovered more and more of the history of An Gorta Mor. The story of Nory Ryan emerged from Giff's searchings.
The novel opens as twelve-year-old Nory, the narrator, shares dulse -- salty, sweet seaweed -- with her neighbor and friend Sean Red Mallon, as they sit beside Patrick's Well on the cliffs overlooking the sea somewhere on the West Coast of Ireland. Even before the first of the potatoes are blackened by blight, the theme of hunger surfaces. Nory eats the dulse and says, "I was so hungry." The children then witness the destruction of a neighbor's cottage, at the hands of the landlord's men, for nonpayment of rent. The children understand all too well what is happening -- that Cat Neely and her widowed mother are being turned out, and that their own families might well be next. Rents are due, last year's harvest is running out, and the only hope for the people is the potato harvest about to begin. Potatoes will sustain the people as they work off debts to the landlord, or labor at other tasks to bring in rent money (Nory's father, for instance, is gone, working on a commercial fishing boat out of Galway, and the Mallon boys fish for sustenance out of their currach in the abundant sea -- until the landlord takes their currach in lieu of rent).
Nory's immediate desire, though, is to save the Neely's home. If she only had a gold coin to pay the Neely's debt! And she knows where to find one. The old woman, Anna Donnelly, the healer, the witch, has a gold coin, and frightened as she is of Anna, Nory is willing to indenture herself to the old woman for the loan of the coin. But Nory is too late to save Cat Neely and her mother, and after being frightened by the bailiff, Nory runs back to Patrick's Well with the coin and inadvertently drops it into the bottomless well.
For centuries people have been offering coins to Patrick's Well to ask for his favor and blessings. "But not many people had coins to drop into the well," Nory has observed. With the coin gone, all is lost -- or is it? Is the coin that sinks into the water lost, or is it a powerful prayer for the survival of Nory's family and neighbors?
Giff's book reveals An Gorta Mor in the most personal way as we live with Nory Ryan and feel her hunger and desperation to survive each day. As her family and neighbors leave to find food, work, and passage to America, Nory finds the courage to do the unthinkable in order to survive. She climbs down over the cliffs, suspended by a rope, to collect the eggs of sea birds. Others have lost their lives doing the same, but Nory's great drive to live another day and keep others alive as well is absolutely fierce.
Nory Ryan's Song is a fast-forward "learn" about the history, sociology, and psychology of the period of the Irish famine. It is excellent fiction as well. I found myself weeping with outrage and sympathy at the horror of Nory's experience -- and the experience of millions like her, in her own day and today, wherever people are hungry. But that gold coin lost in the waters of Patrick's Well is an image that I can't forget, as I can't forget the voice of Nory Ryan and her abiding love for her family and neighbors, revealed in her great determination to survive. Patricia Reilly Giff and I are here in America in 2001 because we had great-great-grandmothers like Nory Ryan.
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.
|
