This novel pulls you into its drama and won’t let you go until the end. Donoghue doesn’t skimp on the detail of labour, this isn’t for the squeamish, but she writes with such skill that makes you care for her patients too. As temperatures rise and coughs hack, labour pains rise and fall.
Gradually we fall under the spell of Donoghue’s story as Julia and Bridie attend to the needs of their patients in the room with its handwritten note on the door, Maternity/Fever. Every character, major and minor, is touched by the twin enemies of war and flu. Power and McSweeney are Donoghue’s inventions. She was arrested during the 1916 Easter Rising and in The Pull of the Stars is wanted by the police as a rebel. The third, Doctor Kathleen Lynn, is a real person, her history documented. The figure of three recurs – three beds, three days, three key characters. On the day the story stars, Julia’s only help comes from an untrained young volunteer, Bridie McSweeney, who acts as a runner to find doctor or orderly as required. Donoghue excels at the ordinary detail of Julia’s life, her journey to work, the arbitrary rules of the matron, the needs at home of her war-damaged soldier brother Tim who is now mute. Taking place over three days, Nurse Power arrives for work to find herself temporarily in charge. This is an at times breath-taking, touching and emotional novel that sucks you into a feverish dream so you want to read on and on.
Both of these are unpredictable, killing at random, lasting longer than predicted and classless. All patients are pregnant and quarantined while the world is racked by war and influenza. Emma Donoghue’s latest novel The Pull of the Stars takes place almost exclusively in a cramped three-bed fever ward in an understaffed hospital. In Dublin, 1918, it is a time of immense global and social change.
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