Emma Donoghue’s novels are always worth checking out and quickly immerse you into all sorts of situations and topics. I loved Akin and was fascinated by Haven, but The Pull of the Stars is one of the most intense stories I’ve read in a while. Perhaps it is due to the short time-frame of the narrative, and its setting shortly before the Armistice of 1918. We’re in a struggling Dublin hospital where thirty-year-old nurse Julia Power is assigned to a tiny maternity ward for women infected with the Spanish Flu.
Julia is suddenly given the charge of the day shift for the three bed ward, a former storage room, taking over from the stern nun working through the night. The hospital is woefully understaffed and undersupplied, but Julia has good midwifery skills. A helper, Bridie Sweeney, is sent from a kind of convent workhouse and finally a doctor, Kathleen Lynn, who while being extremely caring and experienced, is wanted by the police for her involvement with Sinn Fein.
Over the four chapters, named for the four colours a flu victim’s skin turns, from early fever through to oxygen deprivation and even death, the reader is given a nail-biting ride into complications of childbirth. There are some pretty grisly details, and I confess to being somewhat squeamish when it comes to descriptions of operations, but this kept me reading, the life and death situations surrounding the women’s care quite fascinating.
Could she be hungry for her breakfast? Unlikely, in her state; patients with serious flu cases had no appetite. Haggard at thirty-three years old, pale but for those flame-red cheeks, her belly a hard hill. Eleven previous deliveries, it said on Ita Noonan’s chart, seven children still living, and this twelfth birth not expected for another two and a half months. (Since Mrs. Noonan had been able to tell us nothing about when she might have conceived or when she’d felt the quickening, Sister Finnegan had had to make a stab at the due date based on the height of the uterus.)
My job wasn’t to cure all Ita Noonan’s ills but to bring her safe through his particular calamity, I reminded myself, to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life.
Poverty is described in all its forms here, made all the worse by the war. We learn of the harsh social cost of carrying a child out of wedlock – we’ve all heard about the convent laundries – but the orphanages seem to be just as bad. Young Bridie is an orphanage girl, not sure of her age – “about 22” – undernourished and unpaid. For all that, she’s eager to help and enjoys the work, is kindly with the women in the ward and strikes up a friendship with Julia.
At home Julia has a brother, who has never spoken since returning from war service, the two making an odd sort of couple, Julia earning a living, Tim keeping the house and making meals. Talk of women’s suffrage and the division of opinion about the Easter Rising hover in the background. The character of Kathleen Lynn is based on a real person, and in the book she inspires Julia to think about political issues differently.
This is a dramatic and intense read about friendship in the face of adversity, changing political and social times, a microcosm that tells so much about the wider picture. I loved the book, though it was tough-going at times with the harsh realities of birth trauma and fever as grim as any battle story. In fact the two are compared more than once in the book. For all that there is a positive ending that gives you a glimpse of hope, so don’t let me put you off – this is such a brilliant story – a five-star read from me.
Judith McKinnon 