7/8/2023 0 Comments Haven emma![]() ![]() So I elevate Haven to the status of pandemic novel even though it touches on other unrelated themes. ![]() During the last three years, most of us have felt at times like monks living ascetic contemplative lives, with our diminished horizon and impoverished social life. The island’s remoteness and isolation are evocative of our recent experience in lockdown during the pandemic. This is Great Skellig or Skellig Michael (which served as Luke’s retreat in The Force Awakens). A stranger named Artt arrives at an Irish monastery in the 6 th century and, prompted by a dream, recruits two monks to join him in establishing a hermitage on a remote island off the coast of what is now the county Kerry. And then there is the idea of haven itself. The Prior has a black stump where his right little finger used to be, evidence that he himself has survived the plague. We learn, for example, that one of the characters, a monk named Cormac, lost his wife and children to the plague in the years before he took his vows. While not explicitly a Covid novel, it nevertheless takes on features of the experience in tangential ways. ![]() In an accompanying note to Haven, Emma Donoghue acknowledges that while she conceived of the novel before the pandemic, she executed it in the thick of things. ![]()
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