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A review by siria
The Pull of the Stars: A Novel by Emma Donoghue
2.25
The Pull of the Stars is set over three days in a small ward in a maternity hospital in Dublin—from context clues I'm guessing it's supposed to be the Rotunda—in late 1918. The First World War is in its final weeks, but the deadly flu pandemic is just getting going.
Though marketed as literary fiction, this read like Maeve Binchy writing a novelisation of an episode of Call the Midwife: all sentimentality and symphysiotomies. Emma Donoghue clearly did a lot of research on early 20th-century Ireland in general and midwifery techniques in particular for this book, but she neither wore that research lightly nor conveyed it fluidly to the reader.
Take for example how Donoghue introduces Kathleen Lynn (per the blurb, one of the book's major characters but really much more of a featured role):
Though marketed as literary fiction, this read like Maeve Binchy writing a novelisation of an episode of Call the Midwife: all sentimentality and symphysiotomies. Emma Donoghue clearly did a lot of research on early 20th-century Ireland in general and midwifery techniques in particular for this book, but she neither wore that research lightly nor conveyed it fluidly to the reader.
Take for example how Donoghue introduces Kathleen Lynn (per the blurb, one of the book's major characters but really much more of a featured role):
Groyne, any word of when we can expect to see this new doctor?
Ah, the lady rebel! [...] He asked, Haven't you heard of her?
You're implying she's one of the Sinn Féiners?
(The Gaelic phrase meant us-aloners. They went around ranting that home rule wouldn't be enough now; nothing would content them but a breakaway republic.)
Implying nothing, Groyne told me. Miss Lynn's a vicar's daughter from Mayo gone astray—a socialist, suffragette, anarchist firebrand!
At best you could describe this kind of exposition as efficient, but even then it's clunky. Like who is that parenthetical for? Why would anyone in 1910s Ireland pause to clarify who SF are in their internal monologue? Surely if Donoghue was worried that she'd have readers who wouldn't know anything about this time and place, there were ways she could convey context in a subtler and more nuanced way.
When typing up that excerpt, by the way, I didn't forget to include the punctuation for the dialogue—that was a deliberate choice on Donoghue's part. Every time I realised part way through a sentence that I'd mistaken dialogue for prose, or mentally attributed a sentence to the wrong speaker, I had to start it again and felt irritated every time.
A wasted premise.