Haven by Emma Donoghue: Three’s a crowd on Skellig Michael

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.

But 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. 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.”

Emma 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. 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. A fortnight later, adrift at sea, they happen upon the Skelligs and choose to settle on the larger one.

Donoghue notes in an afterword that Covid prevented her from visiting the island, but you wouldn’t know it from the novel. Her depictions of the natural world are brilliantly real. On the boat journey, “Downy birch and willow are woven thick on both banks in the first haze of Eastertide green. 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 ... grey scree patched with vegetation ... No hint of human presence; no level ground except the tiny ledges crowded by kittiwakes and guillemots”.

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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. 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. 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.

Ultimately, Haven is a tense portrait of two good men trapped on an island with a third who thinks himself a saint

Although she is best known for the Booker-shortlisted Room (2010), Donoghue’s oeuvre since the noughties has been timely historical fiction. Her novel Slammerkin (2000) was inspired by a 1763 murder. She followed this with a book of short stories based on real incidents from centuries past. Recent novels such as The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars combine older-world settings with stories that have an eerie resonance for contemporary society. Throughout, the author’s trademark is her ability to blend allegory, fairy tale, myth, and particularly meticulous research, seamlessly into new works of fiction.

Haven fits easily into the back catalogue. History lessons are sneaked in — the salmon of knowledge, the tale of Holy Cóemgen, “who lived in a glen in a hollow tree, knelt in cross-vigil for so long, one time, that a crow made a nest in his hand” — as the monks work day and night in an attempt to build a new order on Skellig Michael. As befitting learned men, the tone is ruminative, the prose considered and rich with biblical imagery. There are similarities with Jim Crace’s new novel, Eden. Both authors choose highly unusual backdrops for their allegorical tales that seek to explore issues of authority, spirituality and redemption.

As with Eden, action takes a back seat in Donoghue’s novel. Life on Skellig is relentless, at times monotonous, but her skilled character creation adds vibrancy. Artt the zealot, Cormac the sage and young outsider Trian make for a winning trinity. The rules on the island are simple — work, pray, sleep, repeat — but Artt’s vision of establishing a world free from sin is dangerously simplistic. From the copying of scriptures, to the building of a chapel, to the procurement of food, everything is carried out in accordance with God’s word, though it is only Artt who has access to the deity, which instantly establishes a hierarchy that Donoghue deftly develops over the course of the book.

Over time, the growing frustrations of Trian and Cormac are palpable, as Artt’s strictures prove counterproductive, potentially lethal, and it becomes clear that nothing will satisfy their “master”. Ultimately, Haven is a tense portrait of two good men trapped on an island with a third who thinks himself a saint: “Sometimes the vileness of the body revolts Artt. Why could men not be composed of air? Why did God stoop to making a race out of stinking clay?”