Every character, major and minor, is touched by the twin enemies of war and flu. Power and McSweeney are Donoghue’s inventions.
She was arrested during the 1916 Easter Rising and in The Pull of the Stars is wanted by the police as a rebel. The third, Doctor Kathleen Lynn, is a real person, her history documented. The figure of three recurs – three beds, three days, three key characters. On the day the story stars, Julia’s only help comes from an untrained young volunteer, Bridie McSweeney, who acts as a runner to find doctor or orderly as required. Donoghue excels at the ordinary detail of Julia’s life, her journey to work, the arbitrary rules of the matron, the needs at home of her war-damaged soldier brother Tim who is now mute. Taking place over three days, Nurse Power arrives for work to find herself temporarily in charge. This is an at times breath-taking, touching and emotional novel that sucks you into a feverish dream so you want to read on and on. Both of these are unpredictable, killing at random, lasting longer than predicted and classless. All patients are pregnant and quarantined while the world is racked by war and influenza. Emma Donoghue’s latest novel The Pull of the Stars takes place almost exclusively in a cramped three-bed fever ward in an understaffed hospital. As a result, the entire narrative feels like a flu-induced dream-a prophetic one we should all heed, lest we slip back in time.In Dublin, 1918, it is a time of immense global and social change. She omits quotation marks from dialogue so that spoken words drift in between thoughts. The characters themselves in The Pull of the Stars are thinner than those in some of Donoghue’s past books, but the nonstop action of the maternity ward is so compelling that it hardly matters. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.” Ought you really get a say in the affairs of the United Kingdom unless you’re prepared to lay down your lives for the king?” Julia shoots back, “Look around you … This is where every nation draws its first breath. An orderly dismisses the idea of women’s right to vote: “Don’t pay the blood tax, though, do you? Not like we fellows do. This novel is not for the squeamish.)ĭonoghue emphasizes parallels between the women suffering in hospitals and their husbands and brothers suffering in the trenches.
(Donoghue clearly reveled in her research on early 20th century medicine.
The sickening prospect of a doctor sawing through a patient’s pubic bones during a delivery hangs over each woman who enters the ward. Lynn, their priorities lie with ensuring their patients’ abilities to bear more children, often at the expense of the health of women. On the rare occasions when male doctors do appear, away from the watchful eye of Dr.
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