Wild, gamey, bodice-ripper with WB, Iseult and Maud
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Saturday August 30 2008
A Dance in Time
By Orna Ross
Penguin Ireland, €14.99
Fiction and truth are only a hair's breadth apart, says the narrator of this simmering saga that spans four generations. At its heart is Iseult Gonne, daughter of the beautiful, manipulative Maud Gonne and her lover, the French politician Lucien Millevoye. Maud, of course, was also the muse of poet WB Yeats and wife of the executed 1916 leader John MacBride, whom Yeats dubbed a "drunken vainglorious lout".
Maud told Yeats years later that Iseult was conceived in the crypt near Paris where her infant brother, Georges Millevoye, was buried. She was intended to be his re-incarnation, so that his destiny as Ireland's saviour might be fulfilled. It was clear that the fates refused to cooperate. The baby was a girl (and therefore not little Georges), and Maud never hid her disappointment.
Orna Ross adheres to the facts of Iseult's all-too-fantastic life. Neglected by her chilly, self-centred parents, when she grew up Yeats proposed to her shortly after Maud had -- again -- rejected him. Predictably, so did Iseult. But she would not be dissuaded from an abusive marriage to the teenage Francis Stuart, later a novelist with ambiguous attitudes to Nazi Germany. And she worked as a nurse during World War One.
It's at this point that Ross gives imagination free rein. She introduces a fictional Irish soldier who crudely forces his attentions on the young nurse, and the spark of an unlikely relationship is ignited. Iseult Mulcahy, that soldier's daughter from an illicit union, is our narrator, and her experiences a half-century later intersects with her namesake's.
As the tale begins, Mulcahy, a writer, has recently died, and what we now read is her last book, prepared for publication by her estranged daughter, Star. Star's youth at the hands of the self-absorbed, beautiful, unconventional Iseult Mulcahy provide a parallel to Iseult Gonne's, but they are played out in free-love California, not 19th-century France.
Star is an encumbrance to her single parent. She is simultaneously unwanted competition and a tightly-guarded possession, and refuses to conform to her mother's conventionally unconventional expectations.
But Star has her revenge. She repeatedly disrupts the story with asterisked (starred?) editorial comments, a grown-up child insisting on being heard.
Ross ransacked (her word) the best scholarly sources for her facts and ingeniously knitted a complex tale of betrayal, revenge, suspense, murder mystery -- and surprise. One key event pounced on this cynical novel-reader utterly without warning.
Ultimately, the novel is cynical about humanity. It's Wuthering Heights without Heathcliff's come-hither. Cruelty defines most of the male characters, and the whiff of child abuse is pervasive.
Old "Double-You-Be" Yeats, however, is utterly risible, the butt of Maud and Iseult Gonne's shared jokes.
Can this shadowy fool really be the great poet? Ross's women are convincingly unattractive, but her greatest achievement is her evocation of the neglected Iseult Gonne.
Orna Ross' first novel, Lovers' Hollow, was an account of two families caught up in the Civil War continuing up to the 1990s and at over 650 pages it was a big popular read. A Dance in Time is another big read but this is no mass-produced chick-lit. In this wild, gamey, bodice-ripper John McGahern meets Maeve Binchy.
Dr Mary Shine Thompson is Dean of Humanities at St Patrick's College Drumcondra
- Mary Shine Thompson
