A review by serendipitysbooks
Haven by Emma Donoghue

dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

 Skellig Michael is stark and austere, a seemingly uninhabitable rock off the coast of Ireland where a monastery was established sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries. A lightly fictionalised version of that island is the setting for Haven, in which Emma Donoghue imagines the establishment of a monastery by just three men - Artt, a learned and strict priest, and two monks selected by him. Cormac is an older man who came to the monastery late in life after a colourful life blighted by personal losses, while Trian is a mere youth and more than a little awkward who was placed in the monastery by his parents when he was 13. Haven is a slow moving novel with little in the way of plot - plenty of details about killing birds for food, constructing buildings and a large cross with rock, and copying manuscripts. The real interest for me lay with the three men, seeing their personalities reveal themselves as they adapted to their spartan existence, witnessing their different understandings of their faith, and most especially seeing the relationships between the three play out. I especially enjoyed seeing Cormac and Trian support each other against the puritanical, sometimes cruel, and often impractical Artt. I also loved the atmosphere Donoghue brought to life on the page - claustrophobic, sometimes tense, isolated, unwelcoming, inhospitable, plus the feeling of always being judged and found lacking.

This won’t be a book for every reader and I did have some quibbles, including a gender related plot point that was introduced late in the novel but never fully developed. But, somewhat to my surprise, I’ve recently enjoyed a few quiet, literary historical novels centred around characters exploration and expression of faith - so long as they don’t strike me as prosletising. I can now add Haven to that list. 
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