Where the Heart Should Be

The Great Hunger of the nineteenth century is one of the greatest tragedies in Irish history, and Ireland has had more than its share.  Before her verse novel begins, Sarah Crossan sets out the bare statistics: ‘Between 1845 and 1861 one million people died in Ireland of hunger or related diseases, and two million people emigrated from Ireland and never returned.’ It is hard to imagine the human cost behind the numbers, but this is what Crossan sets out to do. The catastrophe is seen through the eyes of teenage Nell, whom we meet on her first day as a scullery maid at the Big House, when potato blight is still a distant rumour. It is a job she keeps throughout the horror, enabling her own family to avoid starvation, but, all-around, death is in the cottages and the lanes, sometimes with the immediacy that we see today in the scenes from Gaza. What wasted body was that lying naked in the brambles, preyed on by an owl? It must have been a puppy. It was surely not someone’s baby? In a scene that starts tears, Nell loses her beloved younger brother to the disease that follows close on the heels of the hunger. We are not spared the ruthless inhumanity of many of the English landowning class. We watch Lord Wicken, Nell’s employer, as he fires a tenant’s cottage, eager to use the famine as a pretext for land clearance. And we see the answering desperate violence of the Irish tenantry. Yet Crossan is anxious not to make this account as forlorn and desperate as it must have been for many. The first poem is in Nell’s voice, looking back on ‘a people being torn apart’ and asserting that ‘love wins, even in the face of death.’ Some of that love is to be found among the cottages themselves, with families standing together and neighbour supporting neighbour, but, for Nell, the most important is her love for English Johnny, Lord Wicken’s visiting heir and nephew. They are kindred souls, each with a love of reading and poetry and a firm sense of what is fair and just. Their romance, inevitably troubled by the appalling disaster unfolding around them, is a haven and an affirmation of the irresistible power of life. And Nell’s acute sensual longing for Johnny brings all Crossan’s considerable powers into play. This is a novel to be much admired. Nevertheless, I am not entirely convinced by the romance itself and certainly not by the resolution of Nell’s father’s fate, which takes place hurriedly, and mostly out of sight, towards the close of the novel.