Despite its modern trappings, Charleen Hurtubise’s novel Saoirse, with its damsel-in-distress and dark secrets, is a classic gothic romance at heart. Fleeing her drug-addict mother and criminal stepfather in Michigan, Sarah arrives in turn-of-the-millennium Ireland seeking a fresh life.
Her new name, Saoirse, means freedom in Irish. She meets Paul, a budding doctor, and settles in Dublin’s beautiful Sandymount suburb. Unfortunately, Paul proves both pathetic and menacing, and his hapless father, buttoned-up mother and sneering sister comprise a D4 version of Rebecca’s Manderley that’s delightfully sinister in its well-heeled hypocrisy.
We’re introduced to Saoirse’s past through her paintings, as renderings of domestic subjects (Lavender, ChapStick) are paired with painful memories. A high-school collage made from yam peelings makes us ache with its plausible details: “I cut small shapes from the peel with the razor blade that Lou uses to cut his cocaine. I let the peel wither … a mouth that I paint with a fuchsia lipstick that I have stolen from the pharmacy.”
Linking art and memory is not new, but it’s the novel’s most triumphant aspect, because Hurtubise, an artist herself, does not overreach.
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Like her heroine, Hurtubise came to Ireland from the United States in the 1990s, and parts of her book read like a manual for expats, with definitions of “culchie” and “Gaeltacht” and digressions on the Eighth Amendment. Perhaps unexpectedly, there are some terrific laughs, like a social slight delivered via obituary.
However, as with many gothic tales, Saoirse can sometimes be faintly ridiculous. In contrast to Paul’s storybook villain, Saoirse’s true love Daithí, a builder from Donegal, is brooding and beautiful; with his absent Kenyan doctor-father, he suggests a hunky, Irish Obama. The novel’s passages of power and beauty are offset by more embarrassing moments: “She picks up a pure white stone and a polished black one, the colour of onyx. She opens her hand to show him, then brings them to her lips.”
There’s also Saoirse, for although she’s supposed to embody contemporary female resilience, she is – upon examination – extremely Victorian, a beauty in need of rescue. Her outcome is determined not by her but multiple dei ex machinae, and even her name, Saoirse, is chosen by Daithí. But instead of letting us revel in its pulpy pleasures, the novel preaches a message of strength that rings hollow. “Here is to your Freedom,” one character salutes her. Alas, for Saoirse, that freedom still requires a good man and a prayer.
