Why have you cast me off?” Donoghue is always writing about outsiders in her fiction, and this new book, with all its painstaking delineation of monastic life and spirituality, is no exception. A line close to the end of the book gives a sense of her preoccupations, and also informs the title: “For you are God, my only safe haven.

If the setting is centuries ago, the themes of her book feel ultra-modern, though to say too much about this would amount to a plot spoiler. No hint of human presence no level ground except the tiny ledges crowded by kittiwakes and guillemots”. Tall alders dangle reddish catkins against glossy ovals that have only just opened.” Their first sighting of the island, meanwhile, shows “spikes of rock in the sea - sheer, sharp islands. On the boat journey, “Downy birch and willow are woven thick on both banks in the first haze of Eastertide green. Her depictions of the natural world are brilliantly real. A fortnight later, adrift at sea, they happen upon the Skelligs and choose to settle on the larger one.ĭonoghue notes in an afterword that Covid prevented her from visiting the island, but you wouldn’t know it from the novel. Setting sail from the monastery Cluain Mhic Nóis in Offaly, the three monks sail down the Shannon in a boat, leaving most of their provisions behind at Artt’s insistence. When his two charges, monks Cormac and Trian, timidly appeal this death knell, Artt’s response has the hallmark reductionism of any good tyrannical leader: “God will provide.”Įmma Donoghue’s new novel, Haven, is a tremendously real imagining of the experiences of the first three people to land on Skellig Michael in about AD 600. Picture the scene: seventh-century Ireland, three men alone on an island off the west coast, winter coming in, rations depleted, birds gone south, no equipment to fish and constant hunger, which will bring, imminently, the promise of starvation and death.īut wait, there’s a boat! An easy way to reach the mainland, to barter for goods, to bring back enough grain to last the winter, if only the leader of the trio wasn’t a hardline religious fanatic, Prior Artt, who has decided, after a vision from God (aka a dream), that the men must never leave the island, that work and prayer alone will see them through.

Haven emma