All men should read Emma Donoghue’s flawless The Pull of the Stars

Agonising scenes where the women try to deliver their babies while fighting for their own lives are unforgettable.

1919: Train travellers wearing masks try to avoid the Spanish flu epidemic.

There is so much to say about Emma Donoghue’s flawless new novel, The Pull of the Stars, which will be published on July 28 (Picador, 295pp, $32.99). The absolute take-out, for me, is that all men must read it. I’ll come to why in a minute. The Dublin-born writer is one of our greatest living prose stylists. She is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel Room, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and filmed in 2015 (the author won an Oscar nomination for her screen adaptation).

She is serious, wise and funny. She draws from the mind’s eye and has a perfect ear for language as it is spoken. Here’s a brief example from early in the novel. The main character, Julia Power, a nurse, is en route to a Dublin hospital to start her shift.

“So many shops shuttered now due to staff being laid low by the grippe, and offices with blinds drawn down or regretful notices nailed up. Many of the firms that were still open looked deserted to me, on the verge of failing for lack of custom. Dublin was a great mouth holed with missing teeth.”

That word, grippe, adds the time to the place. It is October-November 1918 and Europe is the second wave of an influenza pandemic. “The spectre,” Nurse Power thinks, “had a dozen names: the great flu, khaki flu, blue flu, black flu, the grippe, or the grip … (That word always made me think of a heavy hand landing on one’s shoulder and gripping it hard.) The malady, some called it euphemistically. Or the war sickness, on the assumption that it must somehow be a side effect of four years of slaughter …”

The common name now is Spanish flu. It affected about a third of the world’s population between February 1918 and April 1920 and killed between 20 million and 50 million. Its origin remains uncertain. It was neutral Spain’s free press and the infection of King Alfonso XIII that led to the appellation. Some thought it came from the heavens, which nods to the title of the novel. Yet Nurse Power, a woman who believes in science (and distrusts nuns), does not think so. “I’d never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined the dots, and our lives were the writing.”

Emma Donoghue

 

The novel takes place over three days: October 30, November 1 and November 2. Nurse Power, single, no children, turns 30 on the middle day. Most of it unfolds in a “new” ward in the hospital — a converted storeroom that can fit just three beds — set up for women who are pregnant and have the grippe. The room is signposted Maternity/Fever. This is why all men should read it. The extended, visceral, agonising scenes where the women try to deliver their babies while fighting for their own lives are unforgettable. As Nurse Power puts it, “I did realise that this job was too grim for most people, all the stinking, leaking and dying. Mine was a peculiar vocation.” So this is a pandemic novel written before COVID-19. I asked the author how that came about. She said the 2018 centenary of the Spanish flu was her starting point.

“But my hook was discovering that women just before and after birth were particularly vulnerable to catching that awful flu strain. I started wondering where hospitals would house patients facing labour who also had the flu, and who might be running such an improvised maternity/quarantine ward.”

This brings us to the two other leading characters.

Bridie Sweeney is a young woman who volunteers at the hospital. She is an orphan and doesn’t know her parents or her birthday. She thinks she is 22. She lives in a home run by the nuns. She is naive but quick-witted. She becomes indispensable in the makeshift ward and, as the novel moves on, she takes on another role, one that is surprising, beautiful and heart-wrenching.

Kathleen Lynn, the one character based on a real person, is a doctor, suffragist and Sinn Fein nationalist. Chief medical officer for the Irish Citizen Army, she took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and was jailed. She is free in 1918 — doctors are in short supply — but the authorities may change that at any moment. When Dr Lynn first meets Nurse Power, she outlines her medical expertise. “Obstetrics happens to be one of my areas of special interest, along with ophthalmology and insanity.”

These three women, working together for three days to save women and their children, hoping not to have to ask the question that Nurse Power ponders, “What did it mean to die before ever being born?”, are extraordinary, as are the women in their care. The infant mortality rate in overcrowded, under-resourced Dublin at the time — in general, not just for mothers with flu — was about 15 per cent.

Nurse Power, Bridie Sweeney and Dr Lynn are three of the most compelling characters I have seen in a novel. The men are there, too, in the background, and the author makes us feel for them too, especially Tim, Nurse Power’s brother, who is back from the front and mute. His silence is not through physical injury but due to what we now know as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

This novel is a rare sort of page-turner. You cannot stop reading, but doing so is exhausting (nowhere near as exhausting as it is for the women). When a rare break comes — for the reader, not the women — you will want to make a cup of tea, or something stronger, before returning to the book. As Nurse Power notes of the hospital, “Ours are the gates that cannot close”.

“Something stronger” is relevant. Aside from chloroform, used as a last resort, the main medicines administered to the women are aspirin and whisky.

“It wasn’t just an Irish remedy,” Donoghue assured me. “In many parts of the world whisky was considered safer than aspirin, which was the other main treatment. I did huge amounts of research, first in modern medical websites, and then, stripping away anything discovered/invented since 1918, I’d try to work out how they might have treated them back then, which often boiled down to ‘watch and wait’. I have some 1910s gynaecological handbooks whose illustrations make me gag.”

With that quote in mind, I remember that I said humour was one of Donoghue’s qualities. In this book, it’s perhaps mainly in the dialogue. Here’s Bridie doing the mental arithmetic on the pregnant women. “She, ah, went to school before the bell rang.” And here’s a Catholic priest doing the right thing by a Protestant patient. “There’s only me today, for right- and left-footer alike. Well, as they say, all cats are grey in the dark.”

This is a must-read novel.