Skellig Michael, a jagged outcrop off the coast of County Kerry, was used as the location of Luke Skywalker’s hideaway in two Star Wars films, but tradition holds that human habitation on the island dates from AD600, when ascetic Irish monks began retreating to ever-more remote spots. Emma Donoghue’s brooding, dreamlike new novel, Haven, imagines who those first souls might have been and how they might have survived. Suffice to say, the refuge they imagine – somewhere far from temptation and worldly chatter – soon becomes a very different kind of place as their faith in God and one another is tested to extremes.
It all begins with a dream. In the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóis, a celebrated visitor – a “living saint”, no less – awakens in the night convinced that he’s experienced a vision. Its meaning is clear: he must establish a new monastery on an island untainted by human existence, taking with him the two monks who featured in his dream.
Brother Artt, as he’s named, is revealed to be insufferably sanctimonious, but his mismatched travelling companions are complicated, appealing creations. Gangly, red-haired Trian is a young piper whose family gave him to the monastery when he was 13. He’s a ciotóg – a left-hander – and profoundly awkward with it, but he carries about him a deeper mystery that will be disclosed only as the novel nears its wave-lashed denouement. Cormac, meanwhile, is a late convert to Christianity and old enough to have lived an entire other life before entering holy orders. He has the scars to prove it, some more visible than others: part of his skull has been lost to a battle injury, and the plague claimed his wife and all three of their young children.
Despite close shaves with catapult-firing slavers and nights ragged with the howling of wolves, this is a character-driven narrative. Inevitably, tensions surface between the far from equal trio once their “sacred wandering” ends and they reach Skellig Michael. Artt’s insistence that “God will provide” sounds ever more delusional. Cormac, on the other hand, is all about practical matters, sowing seeds in the scant inch of soil the island offers and using stories to ease tensions. As for Trian, along with copying out psalters, he has the task of keeping the brethren in fish and fowl, and he finds himself more and more appalled by how easy it is to plunder the island’s innocent wildlife, flightless auks included.
In her last novel, The Pull of the Stars, Donoghue – who was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2010 for Room – presciently considered the impact of the 1918 flu pandemic, and this latest was a lockdown project, albeit planned pre-Covid. That perhaps accounts for the vivid sense that time is melting and days are merging.
With bitter winter looming: “Trian writes and catches birds, slaughters them and writes. The days are getting shorter but feel endless to him.” Not even darkness offers an escape: “At night he dreams of throttling books in a great featherstorm of flapping pages.” What writer couldn’t relate?
Though this is a text replete with religious fable, it’s in descriptions of the physical world that Donoghue’s prose soars and the narrative’s claustrophobia is alleviated. Likewise, among themes that include isolation and devotion, its ecological warnings are its most resonant. Artt, the novel’s least fully realised character, embodies a calamitous worldview that transcends religion and, largely, culture. Everything on the island, he preaches, has been put there for human use, “like one great banquet table that God’s spread for us”. Before long, they’re using pufflings as fuel, clubbing baby seals, felling the island’s lone tree.
Donoghue’s critique of this is reinforced by Trian’s increasingly murderous misgivings and also in her acknowledgments. Skellig Michael, she notes, is now at risk from tourism and extreme weather unleashed by the climate crisis.
While Haven certainly isn’t her most accessible novel, a flinty kind of hope brightens its satisfying ending. What the reader is likely to take away, however, is the image of a bleak place made still bleaker by human intervention. That, and a raft of early medieval survival hacks.
Haven by Emma Donoghue is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
