Book Review: Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor

“Ghost light. An Ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own plays.”

There are some books that would be better not reviewed, for they are so self-aware that they review themselves. Ghost Light is such a book. Its title, with analogies to plot, atmosphere, and some of the longing melancholy that a reader will take away, is just the start of a stunning novel in which no words are wasted and all imagery and metaphors reflect back on the central ambiance. It’s a book that is most clearly defined by its atmosphere, its feeling, rather than what happens, and as a piece of sustained atmospheric writing, it succeeds on every level. Hauntingly sad, yet packed with wit and invention, reading Ghost Light is a little bit like gazing through a microscope at the petal of a flower or the intricacy of an animal skeleton: awe-inspiring in it’s apparently simple complexity.

O’Connor takes as his subject the romance of leading Irish playwright JM Synge and his muse Molly Allgood (stage name Maire O’Neill). His letters to her survived, hers to him do not. So what O’Connor does is use this gap to invent Molly as an almost entirely fictional character and to present their relationship through her eyes. “Certain biographers will want to beat me with a turf shovel,” O’Connor notes in his Afterword, but the liberties he takes with accepted historical truth are common in fiction. This is a retelling in spirit rather than fact, and the author makes a stunning performance of it. Like much good fiction, it uses the spectre of what we already know will happen to add poignancy to events on the page.

We meet Molly Allgood as an elderly actress living alone in a lodging house in London. Two failed marriages and the death of son in the war have left her alone and poor, living a shoddy life in run-down post-war England. Yet she’s unfettered in attitude, a tough old girl with a spark of life that cannot be extinguished. “She is the kind of woman who persists in the face of hard evidence. It has caused her much grief, this trait.”

As she walks the streets of 1950s London, passing time before heading to the BBC for a now rare casting in a radio play, she reflects on her past, on the dazzling career that has faded, and the ghosts of the life she might have lived. Her journey calls to mind both Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and her namesake Molly Bloom, and she certainly owes something to Bloom’s capricious lust for life.

The narration switches back and forth between this 1950s London and Dublin in 1907, when a young Molly is engaged in an affair with JM Synge. He’s older, serious, a troubled genius with ‘martyr-sad eyes’ from a wealthy protestant family who is, in his own words, “slowly roasted on the flames of [his mother’s] widowhood”. She’s forthright and flirtatious, a Catholic girl from the Dublin slums dreaming of stardom in America. He is her ‘Tramp’, she his ‘Changeling’. Their affair is uncertain, opposed on all sides, tender and affectionate. He is often distant; she can be impetuous. They have much in common and yet everything – an age gap of sixteen years, social, religious and economic disparities, the opposition of their families and colleagues, Synge’s ill health – works to keep them apart. At one point Molly reads a rhyme that they find in an old book: “She reads the final couple aloud. He chuckles at her pronunciation. In his accent, it rhymes. In hers, it does not. For less have millions starved.” They are the classic impossible couple, part Romeo and Juliet, part Pygmalion and the Statue, their relationship demonstrates some of the divisions in Ireland at the time. An Ireland where riots accompany the premier of Synge’s latest play, The Playboy of the Western World, for its supposed slight on Irish womanhood, “libel on the peasantry,” and vulgarity.

Ghost Light is a novel about, and inspired by, Dublin. Ulysees runs in and out of much of it, WB Yeates is a character and the Abbey Theatre its setting. It is an Ireland that is filled with life and excitement, the land of Molly’s youth and exuberance, where everything was possible and romance blossomed. This raucous land is contrasted with the dreary London landscape of Molly’s present, where, she reflects that A Streetcar Named Desire would have been named “A Bus Called Passing Interest” were it by an English author, bomb scarred buildings loom grey and empty, and vagrancy is rife. At one point Molly sees an advert in a laundrette window which reads:

CLEAN ROOM TO RENT

SUIT COUPLE (MARRIEDS ONLY)

NO BLACKS

NO IRISH

NO DOGS

It’s only the BBC, that great beacon of art, that seems to rise from the ashes of the war, only the BBC that offers all the glamour and stature of the Abbey Theatre back home.

Ghost Light is inherently a sombre novel, illuminated by moments of bleak humour and a romance to root for. Those who enjoy second person narration will love the use O’Connor puts it to here, employing it to convey all of the mental turmoil and self accusation that Molly puts herself through in much the same way as David Peace used it to convey the psychological troubles of Brian Clough in The Damned Utd. The meandering passages in the 1950s drift in and out of this second person, as though a ghostly apparition is talking to Molly. There are passages that take one’s breath away: an unsent letter from Molly to Synge, a comic one-act play that sends up Synge’s pretentions to being the playwright of the common man, an elucidation of the fragile process of writing:

“And at some point he realises he has twenty strong pages. Then what becomes important is bravery. To go on might yield nothing – everything can die. Anyone can make a beginning; to embark on a second act takes the courage. It is like building a house, he says. The smallest error is fatal. Every course of brick-work must be angled correctly or the whole will collapse in the end. But fifty pages, sixty, he knows if the impossible is happening. The people summoned into being by the old power of words might begin to unfurl, to walk about and love, to say things he himself would never dream of uttering, in voices not his but theirs. It is like watching the muzzle-flash of a gun through fog yet wanting the billets to hit you, he says. Essential to hold your nerve, not to let the excitement of the alchemy throw you into crowd-pleasing stupidities or grandiosities. Who can say where they come from, these people who never lived? But he is one of the intermediaries they come to. He seems to think of himself in the third person, as perhaps all do from time to time. Is it possible he sees himself as a character?”

Ghost Light is an intense read, driven by the power of the writing and the compelling narration, rather than plot. It is a book to read slowly, to revisit regularly and not to worry if at first one does not engage with the characters. At times, O’Connor’s turn of phrase is jaw-droppingly good. There are pages one could read over and over again and not grow tired of. Lovers of lyrical prose will love Ghost Light. It has a feel to it, a feel that is replicated in every phrase and word, an empty stage with a single light burning, and an audience full of people longing for those ghosts to turn up and play for them.

“Does the body remember? When the mind has forgotten?...And if dreams unmask our longings, as the wise have claimed since the Greeks, why is it that the dead are so often silent when we dream them? Don’t we want them to speak? What would they say?”

Ghost Light was first published in Great Britain by Harvill Sekcer in 2010. The edition shown is the 2011 Vintage paperback edition, ISBN 9780099481546, 246pp

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

If Mrs Dalloway were a diamond it would be almost as big as the Ritz, priceless, and kept under lock and key in a national museum. Visitors would gape at it, experts celebrate it, soothsayers develop all sorts of legends around it. Most of all it would inspire awe in those who looked upon it, for no one could quite conceive of the gargantuan forces needed to bring about its creation. And yet, for all this immense beauty it would remain shut up in its case, impractical, and with grains of carbon imperfection at its core.

What Michael Cunningham does in The Hours is akin to the master jeweller who takes this unwieldy diamond and from it creates a series of smaller, perfectly crafted gems which sparkle in the light and can be placed within rings and pendants and worn in public for all to enjoy. His skill is in knowing exactly where to cut and where to shave so that none of the original beauty is lost. The result is a precious reworking of a great novel, simplified, purified, and with an engaging plot which augments, comments upon, and replies to the themes of Woolf’s original text.

The story unfolds through the interweaving narratives of three women whose lives are linked by and constantly refer back to Mrs Dalloway. It is the 1920s and having been forced to retreat from literary London after a breakdown, Mrs Woolf is tentatively beginning to write her new novel. Occasionally she catches a glimpse of inspiration, but fears it will fade like a dream the moment she wakes up. It is the 1940s and Mrs Brown is pregnant with her second child, savouring a few extra minutes in bed with her book before she has to go downstairs and play the role of wife and mother. And it is the end of the twentieth century and Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her New York apartment to buy flowers for the party she is throwing in honour of her friend Richard Brown, a celebrated poet who is dying of aids.

It is all of these three times at once, for life, like great literature, is timeless. The characters experience similar hopes and fears, similar passions and constraints, and, just occasionally, those moments of exquisite happiness which makes each of these books such a rare treat. What changes is the world around them: the material freedoms of different ages and the social mores which govern what one can and can’t be. As in Mrs Dalloway, the focus is on the beauty and wonder of individual moments, but more fundamentally than its predecessor, The Hours is about their transience, the irrevocable march of time which ensures that everything will ultimately fade and decay. On top of this Cunningham takes many of the sub-plots from Mrs Dalloway – privilege, parenting, homosexuality and mental illness – and looks at them through the lenses of different decades. What is impossible, almost unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s 1920s and hidden behind suburban façades in the 1940s is gloriously possible in the 1990s. This is most clearly the case when it comes to homosexuality. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa cherishes one moment in her life above all else, the kiss she shared with her friend Sally Seton. Here the inspiration for this passage comes from Woolf’s own life, and a simple sisterly kiss shared with her sister. This moment is developed through Mrs Brown stolen moment of solidarity with a sick neighbour, and then fully achieved in the New York of the 1990s, where instead of marrying Richard Dalloway, Clarissa is living happily with Sally.

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book…What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

The Hours is packed with these sorts of triptych moments, where biographical fact and classic fiction blur together to create something new. Special moments from Mrs Dalloway are revisited and updated; reflected upon in an atmosphere of nostalgic illumination which only serves to heighten their poignancy. By portraying Virginia Woolf, meticulously researched and brought to life, Cunningham is able to add to the mix an investigation on the nature of writing. Through his elegant, haunting prose, he explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader. While Mrs Woolf is shocked to discover that she can still think clearly and write capably, Mrs Brown is overwhelmed by the clarity of her expression and ascribes almost mythical significance to her words. And while Richard Brown is preparing to be honoured as one of the greatest living poets, he muses repeatedly on the impossibility of it all:

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something live and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

These moments of heartbreaking honesty are what make The Hours such a great read. For all the beauty of Woolf’s prose, it remains an acquired – and even then challenging – taste. Not so Michael Cunningham. He has a clarity of expression which is dreamy, emotive, and a joy to read. Where Mrs Dalloway is hard work, dense and over punctuated, The Hours is understated and with a beautifully lilting flow. What Michael Cunningham understands is that spectacular prose cannot be overdone. For a passage to shine with its full power it cannot be crowded with dense prose on all sides. Great art is about knowing where to stop – not layering the paint too thick, repeating the motif too often, or attacking the notes with too much bravado – and letting what is already created speak for itself. The Hours may owe its most powerful passages and images to Virginia Woolf’s literary genius, but in taking them out of the Mrs Dalloway context and making them the centrepiece of all which takes place, they become even more beautiful to the eye, like a single flower blossoming in the middle of a lawn.

It is impossible to say which I prefer: the elegant and rewarding Mrs Dalloway which can be peered at in awe through a microscope for hours on end, or The Hours, masterly crafted and perfectly paced. It all comes down to personal preference and I cannot recommend them each highly enough. Ultimately they are each better for the existence of the other. Each captures the beauty in individual moments and the fragility of time. There is one moment near the end of The Hours which sums it all up and captures perfectly that very human experience which they are each about.

“Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties;…we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”

9 out of 10

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

The following review was first published on Vulpes Libris, a very fine book blog run by a great community of interested and interesting readers. I am particularly proud of it as it marks a rare occurrence where I have managed to fuse style, pace, and structure together to capture exactly what I wanted to say about a multifarious book.

I will return later this week with a companion review, again appearing on Vulpes Libris, this time looking at The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Until then, adieu.



“In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”

There is a passage in Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in which Dave and his thirteen year old brother drive a convertible through the hills around San Francisco; young, alive, and spectacularly free. It captures something of those fleeting moments when, regardless of anything else going on, the beauty of life is impossible to ignore.

But nowhere is this achieved more expertly than in Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway steps out of her house on an ordinary sunny morning in June 1923 and feels her senses attuned to the world around her, as though time has slowed down to make this wondrous morning last forever. She is hosting a party this evening, and needs to buy flowers. Throughout that single day her life, and those of the people she passes, are brought alive by the exact, dreamlike, and sensuous prose of Virginia Woolf.

It is not only Clarissa who is enamoured with the fleeting beauty of life. Across town Clarissa’s husband Richard Dalloway, is suddenly struck by the strength of love he feels for his wife and rushes home with a bouquet of roses to tell her so. In another part of London Peter Walsh has just arrived back in England from India and having visited with Clarissa, takes an afternoon walk through Regents Park. And then there is Septimus Warren Smith, shell-shocked and on the verge of madness, spending the day in the park with his wife, overcome with the beauty in the world, but fearful that people, without honesty or kindness in them, cannot perceive it as he does. He has been numbed by the war, and now lives inside his head, hearing his dead friend call to him from behind screens in his room. The doctors are about to put him in an institution and so he makes one last, desperate, bid for freedom.

For it is not simply the beauty of moments in life which Mrs Dalloway seeks to portray, but the loneliness of these moments, for they can so rarely be shared with others. This is a novel of insular delights, of the joys shared with ones self alone, when all around the world is rushed off its feet. And, perhaps most powerful of all, it is about the irrevocable march of time; for these moments never last. Woolf’s working title was The Hours and it is a sense that nothing is set in stone, that everything in life will fade, which underpins all the beauty. There is a wonderful phrase which characterises this relentless march of time. So powerful is it that Woolf uses it twice, once from Clarissa’s point of view, later through Richard. “Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

This steady ticking away of time is the subtext for everything which takes place. Each of the characters struggles, at some point, with the terror of ageing and death. It is on Peter Walsh’s mind as he walks through Regents Park, and Clarissa muses upon it repeatedly, staring into the chamber of an old woman next door. She cannot believe that these wonderful moments of life will end, and that when they do “no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…”

When the party arrives, after she has seen her rambunctious old friend Sally Seton for the first time in many years, transformed now into a happy old housewife with five children, after she has feared that the party will be a huge failure, it is actually the news that Septimus has committed suicide which resurrects her mood, for she sees it as a powerful effort to preserve the purity of his own happiness.

“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.”

Mrs Dalloway is a work of interlocking stream of consciousness internal monologues, of the hopes and dreams and fears of more than twenty characters whose minds we pass through during the course of that one day in June 1923. Virginia Woolf possesses a startling ability to find strength and originality in each of her characters, to cut right to the heart of their being and enunciate their thoughts and feelings as if you were sitting inside their head listening to them directly. Put together, these lives build a patchwork of society and experience, each in their own way troublesome, and yet filled with these moments of rare beauty.

So key are these brief snippets of beauty to Mrs Dalloway that they not only constitute its major theme, but also, somehow also reflect the experience of reading it. There are passages, frequent and profound, which leave one breathless. But these are sandwiched within dense and complex prose. It is over-punctuated to the point of truncation. Never have my eyes seen such a feast of semicolons and commas; or my mind reeled when faced with so many extended sentences, sub-clauses, and tangent thoughts. This creates a style so unlike anything else that it took me almost seventy pages before I was able to find the rhythm and flow of its cadence. That it took me two weeks to read a book which is only 213 pages also perhaps reflects its density. It is not a book to lose ones self in. Not for me, anyway. It is one of those books which might be better to listen on audiobook first, to sit back in a field in the middle of the afternoon, or else put on in a darkened room and let the words wash over you in that rhythm and pace which is all their own. For the prose is beautiful, often startling so. It is just that the density, page after page after page, is not easy to read. If you want a book to read once and enjoy throughout then this is probably not it.

However, if you enjoy books which gains with every reading, which can be studied and considered and delved into repeatedly, then Mrs Dalloway is one of the most rewarding novels you could find. From the way in which the women’s clothing is coloured in earthy tones of green and described as though it is a living thing growing from their bodies, to the subtlety of the title which creates the impression that Clarissa is defined by her marriage rather than the experiences and thoughts which make her individual, Mrs Dalloway is a veritable melting pot of ideas, structural invention, and stylistic originality. The more I think about it, the more I read and reread passages from it, the more I fall in love with it. Woolf possesses supreme linguistic ability and the power of her observation is second to none.

There will be a time while reading Mrs Dalloway when you draw in a breath and read on, spellbound, scared to release it lest the magic be broken and the beauty disappear like a droplet of dew brushed from a single stem of grass. Few books are so ripe with fantastic passages, few authors so talented as to capture such depth of feeling so consistently. It is one thing to recreate sadness, desperation, paranoia, hundreds of books have done so. But to capture fleeting moments of happiness so magnificently is something I have never seen done so well before. Mrs Dalloway is a book to make aspiring writers weep at the futility of ever possessing the skill to compete with a writer as skilled as Virginia Woolf. For those who do persist, however, it offers inspiration of what can be achieved in a novel. I will leave you now with one final phrase which sums it all up, though it would be a joy to share so many, many more.

“To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tingling divinely on the grass stalks – all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”

8.5 out of 10