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.