Wandering in the New World

FICTION: Astray,By Emma Donoghue, Picador, 274pp. £14.99

EMMA DONOGHUE’S reputation as a versatile and prolific writer was already well established when the success of her novel Room (2010) catapulted her to a very different level of fame. Her new play, Talk of the Town, based on the brilliant New Yorker career of the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, is on stage now at Project Arts Centre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. Donoghue has long been comfortable working in a variety of genres, and although much of her writing has been labelled gay fiction, that tag distorts the scope of her achievement.

There is considerable pressure from the publishing industry for successful prose writers to produce novels, which sell, rather than short stories, which don’t. At least that is the perception. All the more impressive, then, the number of Irish authors, now including Donoghue, who have recently overcome this shibboleth and followed a prize-worthy novel with a collection of stories. Astray is such a volume, and one that is rather swashbuckling.

It travels through centuries, crossing the Atlantic and hopscotching the US-Canadian border. Although most of the stories take place in the New World, it is not Donoghue’s aim to worry cultural distinctions between the latter two countries (as is Richard Ford’s in his recent novel, Canada). Instead she retells curious incidents about displaced people from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Most of these tales are gleaned from 19th-century newspaper reports and letters, the period of peak emigration to North America from Europe. Donoghue, herself an emigre long resident in Canada, has described these as “true fictions” rather than the more common “historical” fiction or even “docufiction”.

In an “Afterwards” the author offers an apologia, explaining that she was inspired by the many applications of the single word that forms her title. She makes use of the usual sense of straying, but also includes connotations of both moral failure and insanity that commonly attach to the word astray. The English word may have a Celtic origin, and is common in Hiberno-English speech – Seamus Heaney chose it as the descriptor for his Sweeney, rather than the alternative “mad”.

Like Sweeney, all Donoghue’s characters are wanderers, emigrants cut adrift or cursed in a sense. Their exile may be voluntary or imposed. They take to prostitution, violence and theft. Culturally out of sync, they are at times lonely, desperate or merely suspect. The resultant alienation makes them apt subjects for the short story. These are the marginal lives Frank O’Connor described in The Lonely Voice. What sets Donoghue’s tales apart, though, is her curiosity about the variety of sexual behaviour that such isolation and disruption can foster or permit to flourish.

Two of the stories, The Long Way Home and Daddy’s Girl, feature cross-dressing women. In the first, the historical Molly Monroe was a cowgirl who came to a mad end. She was known to be female, and was persecuted for dressing and acting as a man. Molly enjoyed the male pursuits of drinking and card-playing, but as a woman she wasn’t averse to having a man in her bed. Daddy’s Girl is written from the perspective of Imelda Hall, daughter of the prominent Manhattan businessman Murray Hall. She is left to fathom the riddle of her father’s hidden life, as he was revealed in death to have been a woman.

The best of Donoghue’s tales are those that work freeform rather than representing exact incidents. In Snowblind the author creates a pair of prospectors during the Yukon gold rush whose interdependency and intimacy grow through months of deprivation. Vanitas imagines the life of a young, pampered Creole girl, and is loosely imagined from Donoghue’s visit to Laura Plantation in Louisiana. Here and elsewhere, period detail, lists of accoutrements and exotic references provide the necessary backstory to the distant worlds displayed briefly for the reader. At times these are awkwardly included or inaccurate, making the reader too aware that the writer is building historical context. For example, in The Hunt, an American revolutionary tale, a young Hessian recruit tries to avoid participating in the systematic rape of women deemed disloyal to the English king, but his term for the colonists in revolt – “reb” – is American Civil War slang, not that of the revolutionary war nearly a century earlier.

Throughout these stories, however, the reader is confronted with the brutality of colonial and frontier American life as the newly arrived Europeans cope with the disease, harsh weather and indenture that awaited them in what they hoped would be the promised land.

Apart from the Afterwards, Astray contains an extensive apparatus. Donoghue appends a note to each story, identifying its factual source and, at times, providing a verbatim citation from the press reports of the day. She also notes the differences between the historical reality of the events or characters represented and her fictive version. Efforts such as these signal a weakness inherent in the undertaking. Historical fiction usually comes in large packages – not just novels but doorstoppers. There is a reason for this. The reader must be drawn into the re- created world of another era or culture, a process that takes time and skill to establish. (Donoghue’s Slammerkin, among other of her works, indicates her ability to develop such a world in fiction.) To build this atmosphere within the confines of a short story – and these are rather short short stories – is very tricky. Donoghue’s decision to reveal the mechanism immediately after the reader has read the tale is rather like a magician stopping after each trick to show us how it’s done.

Readers who discovered Donoghue’s work only with the appearance of the award-winning Room will be surprised and possibly disappointed by this volume. Others who have followed her career will find another of her brave forays into new genres and forms, which may attract an entirely new readership.

Christina Hunt Mahony teaches in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin and is the author of Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition (Macmillan) and editor of Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Carysfort)