While the novel makes brief detours to the gray streets of Dublin, to Julia’s home, where she lives with her shell-shocked brother, and to other parts of the hospital, most of the action is set in the maternity ward, which is actually three beds shoved into a supply room. Kathleen Lynn, who had briefly been jailed for supporting Irish independence, Donoghue’s character is smart, tough, funny, and willing to listen to the nurses who know her patients better than she does. One doctor is an exception, though she is a woman. Nurses, as they continue to do today, keep the hospital running, while the male doctors are conceited and if not exactly stupid, then hardly the peers of the women who work for them.
Bridie is young, poor, and uneducated, but she is energetic and as imperturbable as her mentor. On the day the novel begins, she is given a new volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. She is unflappable, although “the great flu, khaki flu, blue flu, black flu, the grippe, or the grip” seeps into every corner of the hospital where she works.
Julia Power, who has already had her “dose” and “come through practically unscathed,” is a soon-to-be 30-year-old nurse working in an improvised maternity ward for quarantined mothers. It would be a uniformly grim picture if not for the two protagonists. Businesses are boarded up, hearses line the streets, and those who have yet to be infected shrink away from those who may be. Indeed, it did, and how prescient Donoghue’s novel seems now, with its descriptions of a pandemic that has swept through Dublin during the First World War.
Just after I delivered my last draft to my publishers, in March 2020, COVID-19 changed everything.” “In October 2018, inspired by the centenary of the great flu,” Emma Donoghue tells us in the Author’s Note of her new novel, “I began writing The Pull of the Stars. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue | Credit: Courtesy
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