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. Set in the seventh century, it strips away the misty hagiography shrouding this period, dispensing with saints and. I thought this when reading her 2020 novel The Pull of the Stars, set in the 1918 flu epidemic, and Haven is no exception. Emma Donoghue’s latest novel takes a disenchanted view of these events. 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. Haven by Emma Donoghue, review: the Room author’s extraordinary new novel I didn’t know quite what to expect from Haven but it wasn’t the satisfying and thought-provoking book that I read.
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