The Great Skellig falls away below the Plateau like green silk, and Artt’s suddenly filled with triumph. To think that he and his monks have travelled all this way, to the hidden haven saved for them since Creation. They’ve begun their work, and God looks on it and calls it good.
In an Afterword at the end of Haven, author Emma Donoghue describes a jagged island off the southwest coast of Ireland — known as “Skellig Michael” since the early Eleventh Century, but likely first inhabited by monks around the year 600 — and it’s in this time and place that she has chosen to set her story of a “living saint” and the two monastic brothers whom he enlists to found a new order at the uninhabited edge of the world. Donoghue is a master of historical fiction and she perfectly captures this time of stink and strain and superstition. She is also a writer who has lately taken to criticising the historical wrongdoings of the Catholic Church in her novels — which is a totally fair perspective for her to write from, but with a tale that focuses on a character who embodies the worst of the Church’s hubris, hypocrisy and misogyny, there weren’t a lot of surprises in this narrative; as pride goeth before a fall, so too does the reader anticipate a final reckoning. Certainly not a waste of time — Donoghue’s scenes and sentences are as engaging as ever — but this didn’t add up to anything special to this reader. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Artt finds himself wondering if perhaps tales will be told about him. Is it arrogance to think it? The legend of how the priest and scholar Artt set off, with just two humble companions, in a small boat. The extraordinary pair of islands he found in the western ocean; how he claimed the higher one for God, and founded a great retreat in the clouds. The glory of the books reproduced there, and then generations of the copies’ offspring. The ceaseless hum of prayer always rising from that little hive.
Artt — a learned scribe and famed converter of pagan hordes — has a dream in which he and two fellow monastic brothers found a new order in the empty ocean. The brothers from his dream — one old and hunchbacked and the other young and gangly — are readily released from their vow of obedience to the worldly Abbot of Cluain Mhic Nóis (if only to get rid of the priggish and judgmental Artt), and several days into a frightful water journey, the trio land on the larger of a pair of sheer-cliffed “skelligs”. While the older monk, Cormac — trained in masonry and gardening — would like to immediately start building a shelter and planting food, and the younger, Trian — an observant naturalist from a clan of fishermen — would like to start planning trading trips in order to barter for the things not found on their hump of isolated rock, their godly Prior, Artt, charge the men with building their monastery — carving a gigantic cross, building a stone chapel, locating an open-aired scrivenery — assuring the others that God will provide for their bodily needs. What could go wrong with a plan like that?
As the narrative unspools, Cormac — a garrulous storyteller, to Artt’s silence-loving displeasure — is forever telling young Trian tales of the saints, and as they occur so often, they honestly began to feel like filler. “I’m put in mind of the voyages of holy Breandán and his seventeen companions,” Cormac will say, or he’ll relate the story of holy Brigit’s pupil Darlugdach (who put embers in her own shoes when she was tempted to go to a man in the night); we learn the tales of blessed Molua, holy Colm Cille, and of the time the austere Comgall caught some thieves, etc. When Artt tells a story for the improvement of young Trian, it’s generally along the lines of, “The wisest Church Fathers, and the ancients before them, all agree that a woman is a botched man, created only for childbearing,” or referring to the legendary Sionan as “this perverse daughter of Eve”. When Artt quotes the Gospel in ways that confound the other monks, Cormac thinks, “He doesn’t need to fathom the depths of scripture, only follow and obey.” And it is the vow of obedience — to a self-aggrandising fanatic — that will lead to hunger, exposure, and suppressed dissent; all for the glory of God (or at least for His representative on Earth).
How did it happen that they came to this place? Was there a different way the currents and breezes could have taken the boat that would have washed them up on another, gentler island, where spring and summer and autumn might have played out differently? Or have the three of them always carried this terrible tale inside themselves?
Also in the Afterword, Donoghue writes that the monks who settled Skellig Michael were “more practical” than her invented characters (bringing livestock to the island and engaging in trade to create a community that lasted centuries), so it was a conscious choice for her to inhabit her island with a prideful zealot and the underlings who were bound by vows of obedience to not push back against his denial of their corporality. And that’s certainly a fair situation for her to explore — there’s no doubt men like Artt have always existed — but the storyline unfolded predictably (the ultimate “twist” was telegraphed along the way and could certainly have been explored more deeply), and with the frequent stories of the saints feeling like so much filler in a not-long novel, this didn’t entirely satisfy me.
