Review: 'Bliss Montage'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Bliss Montage
By Ling Ma
Literary Fiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Who are we, really? Are we destined to bear the dreams and sins of our families, of our home countries, of our newly adopted homelands? Are we worthy of happiness? What is a facade and what is reality?

These themes are essential to the stories in Ling Ma's new story collection, Bliss Montage. They are sometimes fantastical, sometimes grounded so thoroughly in family that the narrators feel trapped or weighed down. In all of them, the female narrator seeks a way to do more than endure. 

The opening story, Los Angeles, gives the reader a sense of what to expect throughout the collection. A woman, married to a wealthy man, spends her days with 100 ex-boyfriends who live in a wing of their huge home. They go for drives, for shopping, for being out and about aimlessly. When her husband returns home from work, they fly up north for a fancy dinner, then return home, often after their young children have fallen asleep. The husband only speaks in dollar signs.

Two of the wife's ex-boyfriends are opposites, and the ones that mean the most to her. Adam abused her, Aaron loved her. "The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don't always know that you're wounded until you receive the salve." It's an idea that surfaces in different ways in the various stories. What do we deserve? When certain events happen, as they seem to inevitably do, how do we respond? Is there a way to outfox destiny?

The story ends with an attempt to catch up to the past, to capture it. In the following story, Oranges, that is what happens. Coming to grips with having been abused is treated in a realistic, searching fashion as far as the tone of the narrator's journey in catching up to her past. In the end, one character is trapped within themselves while the other goes forward.

The story G, the name of drug that makes its user disappear and able to wander freely, is about working to be oneself while anchored by a childhood friend, anchored to their Chinese-Amerian neighborhood where they were firmly anchored by their mothers. It is a tour de force in how the past can define a person, and how a person can feel unseen.

Do you now how easily the world yields to you when you move through it in an invisibility cocoon? No one looks at you, no one assess you.

That would be a dream come true for the narrator and her childhood friend. The idea is tied to the way the narrator, Bea (which can literally be Be in this story), became herself as her friend Bonnie spent hours of their childhood finding out what Bea thinks and feels. "It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someeone's gaze."

The transformations to come in the story are completed rooted in identity and being seen.

Another take on these ideas is presented in Returning, in which a young Chinese-Amerian wife goes back with her husband to his mid-European country for a traditional festival that is meant to be life-changing. Her husband talks in his college classes about fiction and identity:

Fiction can be a space for the alternate self ... It often serves as a fantasy space for our other selves.

While his book is a successful novel called Homecoming, the narrator's old college friend has published a graphic novel called Arrival Fallacy, a science fiction tale in which explorers return decades after they have been forgotten. The two stories merge in the trip back to the husband's homeland. The narrator's own novel, Two Weeks, is more about stasis after a missed connection and a plan falls apart. It's not surprising to wonder how that, too, is connected to this story in which it is presented.

There is a similar feeling in Office Hours, in which a college student becomes a professor and inherits her old professor's office. There is a passageway to a different world there, much like Narnia. As she begins to explore this other world, and delivers lectures about the journey in The Wizard of Oz, there is an undercurrent of what kind of life she really wanted to live. As her professor once said:

It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.

That is a core concept to the fantasy elements and situations in the stories of Bliss Montage. What is real, what should be real, what do we really want? The yearning is explicitly present in the final story, Tomorrow. Another Chinese-American woman is in stasis again with a job, an ex-boyfriend and a baby coming. A baby with an arm already out of the womb. But whether it's because the baby is already itching to get out into the world or not at home in his first home is unsure, just as so many protagonists in these stories are unsure of where they want to belong.

The penultimate story, Peking Duck, is a meditation on the power of mothers to play a role in their children's lives well past the time they grow up. Although it is tied to the immigrant story of the narrator's family, it is not limited. Like all the stories here, this tale involves making stories one's own story, even if they first were heard from others. The connections are strong as chains, sometimes lighter than feathrers and even occasionally softer than silk.

Review: 'The Book of Goose'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Book of Goose
By Yiyun Li
Literary Fiction
Picador

A young woman who grew up in poverty in post-WWII France marries an American and quietly raises chickens and geese in the States. She recently receives word that her childhood best friend has died in childbirth, the same as her friend's older sister. Although the woman, Agnes, is not yet middle aged, her account is as someone whose life has already been lived.

This story of mine expired when I heard of Fabienne's death.

That's because Agnes and her friend, Fabienne, once pulled off what could be seen as a remarkable act of creativity or a stunt with malicious overtones that got away from them. Fabienne was the stronger personality. She was always poking and prodding people. She would do things to people and animals to see their reactions. When not tending to her father's livestock and her motherless brothers, she ran wild. She was not loved, except by Agnes.

After the postmaster's wife dies, the poetry-loving man is on his own. Fabienne decides to poke and prod, so she and Agnes visit him every evening. Eventually, they show him the stories that Fabienne has dictated to Agnes, who writes down the tales of dead children. Devaux, when he reads the stories each night, calls them macabre, puerile, morbid, unbalanced, and waits with greed for each new one. 

He knows they are Fabienne's stories, and the two of them frequently spar. When she declares the stories are done, he dictates some editing changes that Agnes copies out in her handwriting. Devaux finds a publisher for them, and Agnes is whisked to Paris as a child prodigy author. Fabienne insists she go, alone, and later to England, again alone.

The rest of the story involves deceptions, betrayals and the fervent wish of Agnes to return home, to the days when she and Fabienne wandered around the countryside. But, of course, we know that even if that happens, it will never be the same again.

Agnes knows that for a time, she was considered a minor myth. And she knows that no one would believe her now. But she says that isn't important:

But is it a myth's jonb to make you believe in it? A myth says, Take me or leave me. You can shrug, you can laugh at its face, but you cannot do anything about it.

That mindset is embedded in everything Agnes tells the reader. She insists that a notable life and a dull life are the same, because both are lives that are being lived. 

"Any experience is experience, any life a life."

And yet, and yet. If that is so, why was she so determined to go back to Fabienne and to try to reclaim the past? Agnes is determined that she can only be herself when she is with Fabienne and that the two of them make a whole person. To Agnes, they wanted each other's experiences and to feel as the other felt, to go beyond themselves. For someone who states that "any life a life" Agnes protests a bit too much when the story reaches its climax. As she acknowledges:

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

The Book of Goose is not a story about contentment. Or love. It is a complex philosophical treatise about myth and reality, friendship and solititude, truth and deception, in the guise of a narrative. Of course this is an unflinching work. Because this is an author who could write a novel about a woman contemplating the suicide of a daughter (Must I Go) that she put aside when her son committed suicide. She wrote an imagined dialogue between her son and herself in Where Reasons End. This is a book to ponder over with its implications of how people consider themselves and others, and the places in which we exist.

Review: 'The Many Daughters of Afong Moy'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
By Jamie Ford
Historical Fiction
Atria Books

That feeling you can't escape destiny? Or that the person you've just met is someone you immediately feel you already know? Or wondering why people in your family feel the same way about things?

Those ideas are explored in Jamie Ford's new novel, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy.

Ford was inspired by his child's taste in music so closely mirroring his own, and wondering what happened to a Chinese woman who was put on American music hall stages as a curiosity in the 1830s to 1850s, only to disappear from history. She was known mainly as the Chinese Lady, but also was identified as Julia Foo-chee ching-chang-king, Miss Ching-Chang-foo, Miss Keo-O-Kwang King, and Afong Moy.

The family connections he explores through the lens of epigenetic inheritance. At a most basic level, we're talking family traits here. Or the way that some identical twins share so many things in common, even some who have been raised apart from each other.

But Ford and some researchers take it deeper, that there may be a connection between family members in which patterns are repeated from generation to generation because of the way individuals react to situations and feel about certain things. This includes intergenerational trauma, in which later generations learn ways to cope from their elders, ways that may not be healthy. There also is the concept of later generations feeling the burden or pain that their elders went through.

I know many of my relatives and I share similar taste in music, food and entertainment. But sometimes I wonder if there's more when it comes to things like a younger relative not getting over a first love, just like my great-grandfather (who made sure his wife knew she wasn't the one; what a rotten thing to do). Or knowing how to get somewhere in a large city when I'd never been there before (or studied the kind of map that would show me where to go).

What if, well not exactly the same two souls, but two souls who recognized each other, kept meeting but also were kept apart, generation to generation?

The women in this novel are the descendants of Afong Moy. The reader learns her tragic story, as well as what happens to succeeding generations of female descendants. The first daughter encountered is Faye, a nurse during WWII who feels an instant connection to a wounded pilot who crashlands his fighter plane and collapses in her arms. Later, she finds a photograph of her when younger, with the words "Find Me" written on the back. It's a photograph she never had taken.

No way was I not going to find out the mystery of that photograph.

Ford goes back and forth in time, dropping a trail of breadcrumbs through the lives of Moy's daughters. They include a programming genius whose work makes a female-based dating app a spectacular success, a poet in near-future Seattle who suffers from depression and a partner with an overbearing mother, a girl with a crush on one of her female teachers at the famed Summerhill school, a young girl sent back to China after a plague outbreak in San Francisco, and Afong Moy herself. Any single one of them would have been the strong lead in a historical novel.

But Ford combines both the historical stories with the metaphysical and emotional searches of each character. It's not just the meeting, and losing, of each one's true companion. It's also the way each character, in her own fashion, strives to devise a life for herself within the restrictions of her time and place. And the way none of them give up, despite the yearning, despite the loss, despite the traumas, no matter how injured they are.

Without spoiling the ending, let's just say Ford knows what to do with the narratives he has created. The Many Daughters of Afong Moy is a most satisfying book to read.

Review: 'Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney
By Adam Braver
Literary Fiction
University of New Orleans Press

When the Beatles' Abbey Road album was released in 1969, a giant billboard with the iconic album cover of the Fab Four crossing the street was put up on Sunset Boulevard. Paul McCartney's head was cut off and never found. 

Wondering why that might have happened is a starting point, but not the only point, to Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney. The novel by Adam Braver has an ensemble cast, all touched in some form by the missing billboard head, to bring to vivid life what an intense time the late 1960s were. There is a young couple who drive by the billboard and wonder, like Leonard Cohen, about the cracks that let the light in a chaotic world. There is a college student confronted by the FBI because a neighbor overheard her and her university friends talking about the billboard head but he thought they meant Gov. Ronald Reagan. There is a photographer in East Germany whose sister is working to get him and his work out. There is a young man whose girlfriend talks him into the performance art of dancing down Sunset Boulevard with only his head showing. There is another young couple who hide in a friend's bedroom after they are assaulted in a drug deal. There is a young woman who insists she is in the background of one of the six photographs taken the day the album cover was shot. And there is a young boy who carries the dream of someday finding Paul McCartney's head.

Some of the characters interact with each other. Some of them bump into each other years later, even if they don't know that they share a moment in cultural history. Some of them find closure, some find a way to carry on, some remain mourned for decades. Mistakes also are carried by souls for years.

Whatever bad things happened to each one of us, as they did, we accepted them as penance for that time in our lives when we might have been so much more courageous.

Braver's construction of writing the novel in suites keeps each story on track and the characters individually memorable. Most seek connection with the greater beauty of life, whether they seek a purpose to their days or not.

Those were the years when all I craved was connection, when you have the sense that any person that you might meet could be the one to change your life.

The author also brings back into focus just how intense that time was.

This was a tough time in our country and the world. We had seen a president shot in the street in broad daylight. We watched soldiers and the Vietnamese die on the nightly news. Police officers in Chicago had beat a young man holding an American flag. Black man targeted by cops and then jailed for defending themselves. For us, grasping at rationales had become a way of life.

It's easy to see parallels to today, when put in those terms. 

And because of those parallels, Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney brings to mind how individuals, whether they drift through life or are determined to follow a certain path, are affected by what is going on around them. 

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Shrines of Gaiety
By Kate Atkinson
Historical Fiction
Anchor

The apex of the Roaring Twenties during which nightclubs flourished and competed with each other for the patronage of the aristocracy, the underworld and those visiting the big city for thrills, girls leaving their provincial lives, a family that depends on each other but doesn't much like each other, a morose copper and the queen of night life released from six months in gaol all feature in Kate Atkinson's latest novel.

Shrines of Gaiety is a twisty tale that has the best features of both her Jackson Brodie novels and her historical works, especially Life After Life and A God in Ruins. This one begins with Nellie Corker leaving Holloway after being sentenced for violating liquor laws. The mother of six and owner of London's most popular nightclubs is greeted by her family, a throng of fans, the press and at least one policeman. With the copper is Gwendolen Kelling, a librarian from York who has come to London in search of two girls who ran away from home, but who really seeks to more fully live. She's going to spy on the Corker empire while searching for the girls.

Nellie's children includea WWI sharpshooter, the mysterious Niven; practical Edith, her mother's heir apparent dealing with an unexpected problem; two sisters who would rival the flightiest Bennet sisters; inept Ramsay who doesn't know who or what he likes; and the youngest, nearly feral Kitty. All play a role in what happens to their family empire after Mum is freed, especially with at least two factions trying to bring her down.

And, because this novel is written by someone who is a master of combining narrative threads of various characters, the relationships they form with Gwendolen and others is fascinating.

The others include that copper who was with her when Nellie Corker came out of Holloway. Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher has been assigned to Bow Street to clean house. He also has his eye on the Corkers. And spends a lot of time working because he doesn't know what to do for his depressed French wife, who is trapped in a world of her own pain.

The girls Gwendolen is looking for have stories of their own that convey what life could be like for girls who wanted more than settling for second best in York. Freda is ignored by her mother and thinks she may have a chance to become a famous dancer, performing in the spotlight every night. She convinces her hapless friend Florence to run away to London with her. Their stories show the dangers of shooting for the stars. 

But the heart and soul of this novel is Gwendolen. The former war nurse who became a librarian is an intrepid heroine who shines, even when she's not sure of where her heart is leading her. She represents what once was seen as the best of sturdy English sensibilities. As a portrait of was considered to be the genuine character of a nation, she anchors the serious commentary that in turn anchors the rompish aspect of the narrative. Both she and the novel are delights.

Review: 'The Deceptions'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Deceptions
By Jill Bialosky
Literary Fiction
Counterpoint

Some novels call out to certain readers to find them, so that those readers can be immersed in the feelings and ideas that make up the reason for the story. Such a novel for me is The Deceptions by Jill Bialosky.

The novel begins with notice of an upcoming book that promises to shed light on the relationship between two contemporary poets. The book, by a young woman academic, is entitled Vindication. Echoes of Mary Wollstonecraft are perfecty appropriate. For this is a story about a woman, about creativity, about communing with words and the poet's challenge to use words to make sense of ideas, emotions and events.

The novel then switches to the narration of a nameless woman, a middle-aged teacher whose latest book of poetry will soon be published. She isn't sure whether to look forward to or dread a promised review in The New York Times, especially if a certain misogynist writes the review. She is a person who is wrapped up in words, and has been for most of her life. She teaches classics to boys on the verge of manhood in a private Manhattan academy. Her husband is a research doctor. Their only surviving child, a son, is a college freshman in a small town.

As the story opens, she is anxious and her husband is angry. He focuses on television sports and they do next to nothing together. Of course it's been ages since they were intimate. How much of this is due to her anxiety about her book? About both of their concerns for their son? What about his work, which he doesn't like to talk about? And what about the Visiting Poet who was in residence at her school last year? What role does he play in her regrets?

To help steady herself, our poet spends as much time as possible in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a place she has frequented for much of her life, and she finds both peace and quests there. During her visits, the reader gets to see the works of art that are her focal points of concentration, and to ruminate on how the attributes of both the artwork and the diety portrayed propel her search for answers to what is causing her internal crises. These interior monologues, and a few conversations with museum personnel and visitors, are outstanding ways to work through the ideas that anchor Greek, Roman and Egyptian classical literature and dieties, and the way these ideas structure our culture today.

The classical references are especially apt because her upcoming book is a series of poems inspired by the myth of Leda and the Swan. That there is more than one way to view the story and Leda is woven into the monologues at the museum and the very fabric of the narrative. It's not an easy subject, but it is one that is tackled with heart and mind.

To compare and contrast our poet's family life, she has a longtime neighbor whose situation at times mirrors her own. Both couples had twins, a boy and a girl. Our poet's daughter died after one day. The other couple's daughter is like a foster daughter to her in their shared love of literature and the written word. Whereas it's not clear what happened between her and the Visiting Poet, her neighbor has fallen for her yoga instructor and knows she is now living her best life.

Before the novel ends, the reader finds out the mystery of the Visiting Poet, what kind of a book review is published in the Times and what our poet plans next. Because of the journeys she has undertaken at the Met, there is a solid foundation to her determination to be her own true self and to not be confined by the way a male-dominated society views the world.

Throughout The Deceptions, the author is willing to confront nuance, more than one way of looking at something and the lies people tell themselves, as well as others. As is noted while contemplating one statue of Heracles, pathos is an important aspect of this novel. Emotions are both acknowledged and projected.

The Deceptions is an engrossing, engaging novel. The reader does not have to be able to relate to every aspect of our poet's situation to connect with her thoughts and feelings. It is a novel that can stay with the reader for a very long time.

Review: 'White Horse'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

White Horse
By Erika Wurth
Horror
Flatiron Books

The late horror writer Peter Straub once told me, in an online interview, that he decided to write in that genre because of the freedom is gave him to write about all kinds of things. One short story of his in particular, about a boy who was bullied, showed me how true his statement was.

Among the indigeneous authors now writing in the horror genre, doing the same thing, is Erika Wurth. Her novel, White Horse, is ostensibly about what happens when a bracelet with power is brought to the protagonist. But this story is about a lot more, and it is a story told well.

Kari James has reached equilibrium in her once rowdy, rebellious life. She's still no pushover, but she has cleaned up her act and works long hours at two waitress jobs. Time off includes hanging out at the White Horse, a rundown Denver tavern that has a long history of catering to both urban and tribal Indians, reading horror novels and petting the saloon's cats while sipping beer or whisky. She's still recovering from the long ago deaths of her best friend and her mother.

That equilibrium is disrupted when her cousin Debby, who has a history of pestering Kari into not destroying herself, brings her a bracelet that belonged to Kari's mother. Her mother disappeared when she was two days old, and Kari has spent the last 30-some years angry at her. That her father suffered an accident that destroyed his brain in mourning her doesn't help. The moment Kari touches the bracelet, she sees ghosts from her past. First it's Jaime, her best friend who OD'd when they were partying hard, then her mother. Her mother's ghost is accompanied by the specter of evil following close behind.

Wurth is wonderful at describing what Kari and Jaime were like in their wild days, growing up in Idaho Springs, wishing for more, whatever that might be, and why Kari will always love heavy metal rock.

We'd hitched one Saturday night, ready for adventures of the kind that could not be had in a small town that sat at the bottom of a mountain, the trees swaying above our trailers, our dingy houses, our wild, furious hearts.

As the story progresses, Wurth uses the tropes of horror to tell the story of a young Indian woman who disappeared just when it looked like she had everything to live for -- a husband she loved, a new baby, a political cause. And this fits so well. The real-life monsters who abuse women, who kill them, who are frightened of them having a voice, are no less menacing than a grim paranormal creature of death. And because this is a horror novel, just as in magic realism, they are intertwined.

White Horse reaches its full narrative power as it becomes a story of individual indigeneous women and men who form alliances, who forge communities, who recognize their connections to each other as family.

Erika Wurth joins the company of such powerful storytellers as Stephen Graham Jones, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cheri Demiline, and authors who sometimes use the tropes of horror/magic realism such as the great Louise Erdrich, Richard Wagamese, Morgan Talty and Cynthia Letitch Smith.

They acknowledge the spiritual in life as well as the physical and emotional. They take full adantage of the folklore roots of horror storytelling to explore psychological aspects of the indigenious experience. They create characters to care about and insights into their experiences. This is storytelling to treasure.

Review: 'The Marriage Portrait'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Marriage Portrait
By Maggie O'Farrell
Literary Fiction
Knopf

She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Browning's "My Last Duchess" was the first poem I studied in college that caught my attention and imagination. The story it tells of a young woman who seemed kind and interested in the world, who was not appreciated by a world-weary aristocrat, who died and who was not mourned, whose portrait was a curio among many for her widower, floored me.

How could anyone be that callous? How could anyone not appreciate kindness and beauty? How could "a nine-hundred-years-old name" be worth more than those qualities? Is the male ego that fragile? Is is an aristocracy thing?

These questions came back to mind while reading Maggie O'Farrell's latest historical novel. The Marriage Portrait imagines the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici d'Este. The middle daughter of Cosimo and Eleanora de' Medici was married to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, at the age of 13. This happened after her elder sister, also promised to Alfonso, died before the wedding could take place. Lucrezia died at the age of 16.

She is believed to be the subject of Browning's poem about a dead young wife's marriage portrait. The actual painting of her that inspired Browning, which was on display near his Italian home, although it was apparently painted some time after the marriage, makes one wonder what she was thinking. O'Farrell has some ideas.

In the novel, Lucrezia is unlike her sedate siblings. She is not only the opposite of sedate, she also is curious and desires to know things, to see things, to understand things. As a child, she crept down to the family's courtyard during the night when a tiger her father had commissioned to be part of his private zoo arrived. Mesmerized by the fierce, caged beast, she later gets to visit the caged animals with her older brothers and sisters. As the odd one out, Lucrezia is skilled at fading into the background, and does so to go to the tiger's cage. To stroke its magnificent fur. She is discovered doing so and is dragged away. Later, the tiger is killed when the doors to its cage and those of the two lions already in the zoo are opened. 

That part of the story is factual. But like deeds surrounding her eventual husband, whether her father had something to do with what took place is worthy of speculation. 

To anchor Lucrezia's fictional character to the real portrait, and subsequent fame through Browning's poem, O'Farrell's protagonist is a talented painter. Brushstrokes, use of color, the fascination of creating underpaintings no one but the artist will see are all fascinating and satisfying to the Lucrezia of the novel. The way that O'Farrell describes how these aspects of creating art giving meaning to her character's inner life show another interpretation to the complaints of the widower in the poem, who is peeved at not being on some mythical pedestal. Instead, the novel's Lucrezia is lost inside her art.

The truth is, though, that she is still caught in the microcosm of her painting: that is the only place she wishes to be. All other sights, all ther worlds, will be dissatisfying to her until she finishes it, until the painting is complete and will release her back to where she belongs. Here, in this salon, waiting for her husband to appear, an embroidery hoop in her hands.

Added into the mix are Alfonso's troubles with his Protestant mother, who has angered the Pope, and his desperation for a child. (The real Alfonso married twice more after Lucrezia's death but had no children.) If Lucrezia feels a bond with a different man, that could well be the last straw for an aristocrat accustomed to getting his way.

It is easy to see that a would-be empire builder, in an age when Henry VIII would be doing the same, only in public, would think murdering a wife could solve some of his problems and perhaps soothe his ego.

How much any of this is true is not the purpose of the story. It is the wondering about what drives people, what inspires or motivates them, what controls them, that makes The Marriage Portrait a fascinating look at how people with so many advantages can fail at life on such a grand scale.

Review: 'Haven'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Haven
By Emma Donoghe
Literary Fiction
Little, Brown and Company

Three monks leave a comfortable monastery a thousand years ago to begin their own community. Two were chosen by the third, who dreamed of perfection in worship and contemplation in the wilderness, away from the evils of humanity. They find Skelling Michael and begin the work of making their prior's dream a reality.

In Emma Donoghe's Haven, Artt has traveled the known world and is now visiting an Irish monastery. The food is plentiful, the abbott has a comfortable family life, the monks are hard-working. But he is not content. He eats little and holds himself aloof. As a famous and mysterious figure, he is fascinating to young Trian. The growing lad, given to the monks when he was 13, is a pure soul who loves playing music with one of the older monks. Cormac came late to the religious life, after surviving both battle wounds and the death of his family to the plague. He is content to live out his days with his brothers.

But in his dream of a new brotherhood, Artt sees Trian and Cormac as his followers. Although he resists the title of abbott, it's clear he considers himself the leader because he is the one who was given the dream. While Cormac and Trian want to take care of the basics, such as food and shelter, Artt wants to make a cross of stone and an altar. Because they trust his extreme views as faith, they obey.

As the conflicts between reality (eating, shelter) and divine (worship, copying manuscripts) take root, Donoghe also delves into the practical. She chronicles just how Cormac and Trian solve problems of survival with the little at hand. This fascinating narrative of how people created what they needed to get by in pre-industrial times grounds the overlying parable of how one determined man tries to make his vision real.

And that's what Haven is, a parable that delves into the differences between faith and religious doctrine, between perception and reality, between being in charge and being a leader. As the author gives the reader looks at their situation from each character's perspective, it is clear that all three are sincere in wanting to serve God. But they all three approach this sincere wish differently, because of who they are.

Trian loves being one with nature. The idea of being like a bird, able to exist in air, on water and on land, appeals to him. Having grown up in a fishing family, he is adept at scaling the rocks of Skellig and swimming.

... he finds himself wondering what it would be like to be equally at home on land, in water, and in air. To be powered by the breeze, wheeling and soaring, free from the weight that keeps other creatures shackled to the earth.

Cormac is a builder, a gardener and a healer. He accepts people for who they are.

After recounting a story in which time passed by while a holy man listened to an angel's song, Cormac shows a love of humanity:

It strikes Cormac now what a sad story this is. To be soothed with music and given a heavenly reward, but in exchange you've lost a century and a half in a blink, and all your friends are dead and buried ... If he'd been Mochaoi, he'd have preferred to sweat over every beam of that church than to dream away his whole life in an afternoon. Once childhood is over, don't the years pass too fast already, rollling over a man as fast as waves?

Neither one of them are prone to judge.

Artt is all about judgment. The scores of birds on the island drive him crazy. Cormac's stories drive him crazy. The two monks' wishes to create music, shelter, heat and food sources, to not be adept copiers of manuscripts, drive him crazy. It soon becomes clear that all of humanity and nature drive him crazy. Artt appears to wish, above all, to be pure spirit in worship. His desire leads, of course, to acts of hubris.  Does he have a death wish for him and the two men he called to join him in this quest? As he tells one of the monks:

Why dread sickness and death at all, when we should rather trust God to do with us what he will?

Artt's ego is definitely involved:

Artt finds himself wondering if perhaps tales will be told about him. Is it arrogance to think it?

The way he punishes himself also is ego-driven. No wonder when one of the others falls ill, his brother prays:

Don't dare die on me, our first season. Don't leave me here alone with a saint.

The real Skellig Michael has been home to monks for centuries. It's probably better known now as a key location in the last three Star Wars movies. The setting serves the story well, whether Donoghe's initial aim was to explore how and why monks first settled on that beautiful, harsh, remote isle, or whether she set out to explore the differences between love of humanity and love of God. Regardless of the inspiration, Haven is a calm and forceful look at the nexus of faith and love.