So many! What can drive them to flock in such urgent numbers, to form one great bird shape of their countless pointed bodies?” Now the whole mass forms a spiralling, swirling cloud, speckling then darkening into a winged shape that smears like ink, rips and dissolves again. Trian is filled with wonder as “Swallows wheel and cavort overhead in shrill numbers, the odd little brown flyer dipping low enough to beak an insect off the water between one wingbeat and the next. This requires them to be resourceful, although Artt declares that God always provides (inspiration, perhaps? serendipity?) for his devotees. Only a single tree, a stunted rowan, adorns this barren place.Īrtt insists they do not overload their little boat with unnecessary equipment and provisions, ensuring that, within weeks they run short of supplies and need to improvise for food, fuel, quills and candles. Their meagre supplies are carried to the tiny habitable patch, and a source of water located. Indeed by sail and oar, their craft arrives at a pair of skelligs, both inhospitable except to many species of sea birds, the larger deemed by the Prior as their destination. Within days they are sailing down the Sionan and out to sea, in search of their deserted island.

The Abbot is a bit puzzled at just whom the Lord has instructed him to take along: instead of a dozen strong, seasoned men of middle years, he will take only the old lyre player, Cormac with his dented head, and the young red-haired piper, Trian one practical, one a bit of a dreamer. To set out on pilgrimage with two companions, find this island, and found a monastic retreat” Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, when the Lord speaks to him in a dream, ordering him to “withdraw from the world. He notes their greed, laziness, spite and lust with distaste.

During his stay at Cluain Mhic Nois monastery by the River Sionan on the Isle of Hibernia, Artt, a priest, scholar and hermit whose reputation for piety and conversion precedes him, cannot help but notice how poorly many of the monks, even the Abbot, observe their vows of poverty and chastity. Haven is the twelfth novel by Irish-born Canadian author, Emma Donoghue. Land and sea like opposite pages, intricate and bejewelled with colour, in a book laid open for all to read.”

The clouds shift, the light tints the Great Skellig brown, then grey, then green, as if God’s nib is inking in an illustration. “Stray beams shard through gaps in the vast sky. Donoghue's imagined establishing of Skellig Michael is brilliant.

Haven review emma donoghue