Many of Donoghue’s novels are historical or, like Room, sparked by a contemporary event (the story of Josef Fritzl, who held his daughter captive). Three Men in a Boat it is not, Artt being ‘zealous for all hardships’. He picks two monks - one old, Cormac, a storyteller, and one young, Trian, a musician - and off they sail. Set in the 7th century, a holy man called Artt has a dream vision directing him to “withdraw from the world, set out on a pilgrimage with two companions,” find an island and found a monastic retreat.
This must surely be her most Catholic novel. I thought this when reading her 2020 novel The Pull of the Stars, set in the 1918 flu epidemic, and Haven is no exception. Also, it has to be said that she’s frightfully good at suffering and endurance. The Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue doesn’t entirely qualify as a Catholic writer, even though she’s on record as saying she’s currently obsessed with Catholic theology, specifically Purgatory, but there’s a thread of Catholicism (particularly the Irish variety) in many of her books. I used to envy Catholic novelists - Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac - as having that extra point of view, namely eternity.
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