5/9/2023 0 Comments The pull of the stars bookWhere the novel falls down is in Donoghue’s weakness for lurid melodrama. She has said she wanted to give the dialogue a “hallucinatory effect”, and it certainly conjures up Nurse Power’s exhaustion. Nurse Power has been sent a young volunteer helper for the day, Bridie Sweeney, who is so ignorant she is astonished to feel a baby moving inside its mother’s body: “I thought it only came to life once it was out,” she admits.ĭonoghue has abandoned quotation marks in this book. There is tenderness and even beauty amid the horror, as nurses manoeuvre the expectant mothers into bizarre positions to accelerate labour and thus save lives. The first part of the story takes place over 14 hours as women weakened by flu contort themselves in labour. Donoghue’s prose is visceral, and the sense of peril in the cramped, tiny ward is compelling. After only four short sentences, we can already smell the “dung and blood” of the Dublin streets as nurse Julia Power cycles to work at an understaffed hospital in the city centre. As anyone who has read Donoghue’s internationally bestselling novel Room – i nspired by the grotesque Josef Fritzl case – will know, she is quick to draw the reader in.
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