In an accompanying note to Haven, Emma Donoghue acknowledges that while she conceived of the novel before the pandemic, she executed it in the thick of things. While not explicitly a Covid novel, it nevertheless takes on features of the experience in tangential ways. We learn, for example, that one of the characters, a monk named Cormac, lost his wife and children to the plague in the years before he took his vows. The Prior has a black stump where his right little finger used to be, evidence that he himself has survived the plague. And then there is the idea of haven itself. A stranger named Artt arrives at an Irish monastery in the 6th century and, prompted by a dream, recruits two monks to join him in establishing a hermitage on a remote island off the coast of what is now the county Kerry. This is Great Skellig or Skellig Michael (which served as Luke’s retreat in The Force Awakens). The island’s remoteness and isolation are evocative of our recent experience in lockdown during the pandemic. During the last three years, most of us have felt at times like monks living ascetic contemplative lives, with our diminished horizon and impoverished social life. So I elevate Haven to the status of pandemic novel even though it touches on other unrelated themes.
The Prior, Artt, recruits the elderly Cormac and the youthful Trian to join him on his quest. Artt is educated, uncompromising, and severe. Even so, his strict adherence to the dictates of scripture and to the call of his personal vision is inspiring and his two acolytes follow obediently. The novel plays out in three distinct movements. First is their voyage down the River Shannon to the sea and ultimately to the island where they will live out the rest of their days. Since this is early medieval Ireland before the emergence of the English language, the monks speak Gaelic, and Donoghue reminds us of this by lacing her descriptions with the occasional Gaelic word. And so the monks voyage down the Sionan. With the second movement, we watch the monks gain a toehold on an inhospitable place where even the prospect of fresh water is in doubt. Finally, with the arrival of the first winter and its harsh conditions, their tiny social order strains and ultimately shatters.
Spoiler alert: skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what precipitates the dissolution of the hermitage’s social order.
At the outset of the novel, we have an innocuous observation that will later have explosive consequences. Trian is odd, ungainly, gawky. He is ciotóg which is Gailic for left-handed. A daydreamer, easily distracted from the task at hand. In addition, we learn that Trian cultivates a scrupulous modesty:
In all his years at Cluain Mhic Nóis he never took off his clothes in front of anyone, and washed only under them. On the rare occasions when the monks bathed in the river, Trian hung back until he could do it alone.
Although Trian could avoid undressing before the other monks when he lived in the monastery, his new life in isolation with two others produces an intimacy that makes it inevitable they will discover how Trian is driven by more than simple modesty. While Cormac is tending to a feverish Trian, he discovers that Trian has both male and female genitalia. Cormac conveys his discovery to Artt and is taken aback by the severity of Artt’s response. Relying on scripture (Genesis: 26-27), Artt can find no way for his religious convictions to accommodate an intersex person. He releases Trian from the obligations of his vow and banishes him from their midst.
Given that three people working collaboratively have barely been able to eke a living from the rocky island, one suspects that Artt’s act of banishment is simultaneously an act of self-harm; he is unlikely to survive without the support of this person he finds so loathsome. Donoghue offers us a symbolic representation of Artt’s lofty theology and its worldly consequences: he chops down the island’s only tree so that he can fashion a cross to decorate the chapel they’re building from the island’s rocks. One can’t help but think of Ronald Wright’s cautionary tale about Easter Island in his book, A Short History of Progress, which comprises his 2004 Massey Lectures. The Island’s gods demanded so much that, in answering those demands, the inhabitants rendered life on the island unsustainable. Although Wright intended it as a parable of post-industrial life in relation to the planet’s resources, it can stand more generally as a commentary on the dogmatic application of any ideology.
When I set Haven against Emma Donoghue’s previous “pandemic” novel, The Pull of the Stars, I’m inclined—and I must say this is entirely a matter of personal preference—to think Haven is the better novel. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m a man and harrowing descriptions of childbirth leave me feeling queasy. I don’t think that’s it, but maybe. I’d like to think it has something to do with the care Donoghue has applied to the realization of her three monks. In particular, I find compelling the way we, along with Trian and Cormac, come to realize that Artt’s discipline is a function not so much of piety as of fanaticism producing a gospel in which love has been supplanted by cruelty. And we feel satisfaction in the way Cormac comes into his own. Initially, he presents as a simple man, a little awed and a little intimidated by his learned master. But by recognizing Artt’s cruelty for what it is and by aligning himself with the “meek” of the Earth, Cormac emerges as the novel’s moral centre. He demonstrates what we know in our hearts to be true, not just of Christianity, but of all major religious traditions: erudition is no path to anything if not accompanied by empathy for those who, for whatever reason, find themselves marginalized.
In addition, the writing here is taut. While The Pull of the Stars felt a little ragged around the edges, Haven has about it a spareness that suggests the barren landscape of the Great Skellig. More particularly, it evokes the feeling we’ve all come to know during periods of pandemic lockdown. We can understand how Artt might go a little mad in his isolation; we’ve all felt that way on occasion. We may condemn his behaviour, but we understand.