This
is probably the first novel by a mainstream, bestselling,
'serious' American writer to include the RIRA and
the Omagh bombing as part of its main plot, if not
the first to address the [UTF-8?]‘Antigone
complex' as the motivation for its eponymous character.
Pearl Meyers, driven by the accidental death of
an autistic nephew of an incarcerated IRA bomber
to go on hunger strike so as to die for the success
of the peace process, decides to chain herself to
the pole in front of the US embassy in Dublin. Her
mother, Maria, travels there to intervene. From
Rome comes the childhood friend with whom Maria
was raised, Joseph, who has his own agenda and reasons
for his own arrival at Pearl's bedside.
Removed to the hospital under the formidable care
of Dr Hazel Morrisey, “the most appealingly
drawn foil to Ivy League, privileged activist-turned-yuppie
Maria Meyers,” Pearl pulls together her surrogate
and actual family along with Breeda, the mother
of the autistic boy Stevie Donegan and sister to
Reg Donegan the IRA man. Stevie's father, a Yank
with the suitable name of Mick Revere Winthrop,
is a sort of Dave Rupert figure without the FBI
paycheck, a meddling trust-fund backer of the RIRA,
for whose cause Pearl's lover Finbar McDonagh and
his TCD mates have pledged support. (For the record,
I did find one error in a book that opens with Gordon
crediting first Tim Pat Coogan's IRA work and then
that of Ed Moloney, Padraig O'Malley, Bobby Sands'
journal, and Gerry Adams' 'autobiographical work'.
On pg. 279: 'The Gardai were always ripping up her
place in Belfast', Finbar tells Maria about Breeda.)
In a perhaps intentionally muddled series of events,
Pearl blames herself for the fatal accident that
killed Stevie, and she decides to forego her linguistic
studies in Irish on her year abroad from Wesleyan
to demonstrate her devotion to sacrifice her life
not for the republican hard-liners but for the nascent
1998 GFA.
Gordon in her novels such as Final Payments
and The Other Side has written often on unhappy
Irish American families. This novel offers a departure
from the New York terrain she has explored in fiction
and essays in that it builds upon her recent, if
rather self-pitying-memoir of her father, The
Shadow Man. This account delved into her father,
a convert from Judaism to Catholicism, who managed
to be not only a speechwriter for Senator Joe McCarthy
but a publisher of a soft-porn magazine in the 1950s.
Gordon in her latest novel considers movingly the
collapse of the pre-Vatican II, postwar Catholic
mentality in which her father raised her, the tenuous
connections to a sundered Judaic heritage, and the
changes in a newly secularised (upper-middle-class
at least) America for which Maria and her comrades
had struggled against their 'white ethnic' parents'
generation. Joseph, likewise, son of a Polish immigrant
who had served the Meyers and who himself was raised
by them along with Maria, lingers more as a secondary
figure next to the assertive Maria, but emerges
in a particularly mundane but powerful scene to
finally speak his mind against his 'foster sister'.
The novel presents complicated issues of faith and
its loss, the value of living and dying for a belief
in a society that has shelved (if not solved) the
issue of a Divine Presence, and the appeal and drawbacks
of an Ireland that now resembles more the New than
the Old World for returning Yanks. What will be
most challenging to any reader unaccustomed to the
editorial omniscience in Victorian triple-decker
novels such as those of Dickens, Thackeray, or Eliot
will be Gordon's use of a garrulous and always intrusive
narrator who goads us along and guides the story
in and out of the predicaments and pensiveness of
Pearl, Maria, and Joseph. I let this voice wash
over me for dozens of pages at a time, resisting
and then surrendering and then being annoyed anew.
Maria resents Finbar (after he has told of the unprecedented
cross-border co-operation between police forces
south and north of the border in invading republican
houses): 'She almost says, You are simply going
to have to stop condescending to me. But she needs
to keep his favor. She still hasn't heard Stevie's
story, which seems to be connected, somehow, to
Pearl's. Without this information, she's paralyzed.'
(280). I felt the same way about what I call this
'recording angel' that never seemed to let the story
take its own course, who constantly, like Jiminy
Cricket or perhaps a voice of reason, kept up a
running commentary like a 'color man' chattering
while the sports game carries you on with its own
energy, no need for added banter. Still, this irritating
if sometimes endearing feature of narrative is rarely
used at length in popular contemporary fiction,
and Gordon's to be admired if also resented for
daring such an insistently patronising mode of conveying
the details of her long and serious novel. It could
have benefited from some of the gallows humour beloved
by the Irish, New York and Dubliner alike. Gordon's
tackling generational changes, maternal love, and
the end of idealism, so perhaps, like Maria and
Joseph, 60s liberal earnestness trumps the 'whatever'
generation the hippies spawned. The voice may be
that of, as it tells us, a sort of pre-Marlon Brando
godfather to Pearl; I preferred thinking of it as
an assertive female angel, myself.
As the plot reaches its end, the allusions to biblical
events and figures make for some satisfying typological
comparisons between Judas, Mary Magdalene, the Resurrection,
and classical figures like the aforementioned Antigone.
Dr Morrisey poses as a great foil to the no-nonsense
Maria, and their showdowns wittily play off New
York and Irish characterisations. Although I feared
from the pairing of Maria and foster-father Joseph
a too-neat messianic Pearl incarnated, this luckily
was averted. Pearl's father, in case you're wondering,
is a briefly present Cambodian doctor who, after
a month in the Big Apple and Maria's embraces, returns
to his homeland and dies, off-stage before Pearl's
birth. Thus he predicts the hunger striker, as her
father conceives of to her mother: 'If we should
have a child it would be very impure: Jewish, Russian,
Cambodian, Catholic, Buddhist. A real mess. I am
in love with the idea of mess. The mess is our only
hope against the tyranny of the pure.' (95)
The RIRA represents the pure, against whose Mick
Winthrop tirades against the 'eurodollar' Pearl
counters. She becomes an emblem of the object at
one with the color. This, in an early aside, matches
what the narrator notes about Irish, in its equivalence
of white, grey, and yellow with the meanings of
brightness/wisdom, stone, and noble. Pearl sees,
in her deliriium, detached faces as if cut-outs
from her past, of Stevie and others she has loved
and known. This scene reminded me of French Symbolist
art of a century ago: faces like petals, falling
from a branch upon a blank and therefore pure background.
In Pearl's quest for equivalence, the deed of starvation
blurs into suicide so that martyrdom and witnessing
cannot be disentangled. Her embodiment is her path
to enlightenment. What Maria, the doctor, and Joseph
come to represent in their interruption of this
chosen self-sacrifice is the call of the living
not to follow too confidently into the realm of
the dead, but to spare human allegiance for those
among Pearl's world who seek to draw her back from
the shadowlands to the mess of humanity.
Pearl: a novel. Mary Gordon. Published by
Random House/Pantheon in New York & London.
Random House, Toronto. 2005.
