The Queen of Dirt Island
This year I’ve joined a group of international readers highlighting Irish authors. There, I learned of the brilliant, contemporary novelist, Donal Ryan. His most recent novel, The Queen of Dirt Island (2023), follows the life of Saoirse (pronounced Sor-sha for those — namely the non Irish—not in the know). The novel opens with a happy new father in the days following Saoirse’s birth. As one expects in Irish stories, loss and heartbreak quickly follow the opening scene, and Saoirse comes of age among women: her tough, stand-offish mother and her foul-mouthed, country-bumpkin of a paternal grandmother. In time a fourth generation of female joins their ranks. The Queen of Dirt Island is Saoirse’s coming-of-age tale as she makes sense of the world, finds her unique voice, and learns the meaning of true love.
As Saorise ages, her loss of innocence punctuates life in myriad ways: the first boy she kisses turns out to be a bully, her first best friend loses herself in the face of trauma, her uncle goes to prison, she learns more of her mother’s own story, and she finds herself in an unexpected position after a hazy night in the arms of a stranger. She learns the feel of betrayal as both its subject and its object. Eventually, Saoirse recognizes her knack for story and finds her voice after nearly bequeathing it elsewhere. Indeed, Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island is Saoirse’s story—a portrait of the artist as a young woman, so to speak—but it is also the story of a resilient matrilineal family. By the novel’s end, four women find their way in a harsh world by supporting one another and learning lessons from each other’s victories and losses.
I adored The Queen of Dirt Island and all its quintessentially Irish moments. Saoirse, her mother, and her Nana boldly make a stand amid the misogyny and Catholic-infused culture of central Ireland. Their home is a fiery one, but one in which mutual love and respect are always assured. This is must-read for anyone who enjoys an Irish yarn, or anyone wishing to travel through the page to the Emerald Isle. Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island will not disappoint. Needless to say, this was the first of Ryan’s novels that I read, but it will certainly not be the last.
Bibliography:
Ryan, Donal. The Queen of Dirt Island. Viking, 2023.
A Few Great Passages:
“Stories were everywhere. You could listen or you could choose not to, but the stories would find their way to all ears eventually, and you could believe them or you could choose not to. Stories came in from Nenagh and down from Portroe and up from the lake and down from the mountains” (27).
“Daddy, why didn't you tell me she was dying? I didn't know, the old man said. Don't you know how she was with her secrets? Don't you know, Eileen, how stubborn she was? Stub-born, said Mother. Stubborn. Daddy, why were we all so stubborn? I's just how we are, I suppose, the old man said.
God forgive us our sins, it is” (50).
“She felt again that oppressive weight, that narrowing and closing of the world into a tight smallness, a knot of meanness and unfairness. She felt her heart shift a little in her chest, its rhythm knocked offbeat by the shock of this sudden spite” (56).
“Whatever about the future, she said one day worrying about the past is the hollowest of all things. She said she saw a programme one time about that scientist fella with the moustache and the funny hair, and how he declared that you could travel through time but only forward. And you had to travel nearly as fast as a ray of sunlight to break free of the clock. There's no going back for man or God or any creature that ever lived. We can only go back in our minds and even then we're going back to something that doesn't exist except the way a dream exists. So we can forget changing the past and all we can do is look after our present moment, planting good seeds in it so that our next moments might be fruitful” (79).
“You're landed as you're landed and you may as well make the most of it. You'll only be judged by the holy Joes and Mary martyrs that have themselves yoked still to a notion of the world that's gone. Some people love being ruled. Signs on we let the foreigners walk all over us all these years” (79).
“The dead have a hold on us all, Nana said. And the thing about them is they'll never change their minds” (122).
“[A] hard, wise part of her believed that would never happen. As happy as she was in her first headlong rush into love, part of her felt already the bitter pangs of inevitable pain” (158).
“Take life easy, my darling. You only get one, and you have to do your best to be happy” (209).
“[J]ust a few stones now rising up from a ditch and no trace of any of the people who'd lived their lives and died their deaths there, but wasn't that the way of things? We're all being broken down piece by piece back towards the earth from where we rose” (233).
“Time will wind its own sweet way. We have no choice but to keep up. Our bodies know they're getting old but sometimes our hearts have to be reminded” (235).
