Trian, from a seafaring family, proves an adept fisherman and, within his narrow bounds, a keen explorer. Though they are granted little liberty, the brothers each discover inner resources that might otherwise have been overlooked. Though, by now, we have glimpsed enough of Artt’s nature to guess at what lies before them.ĭonoghue wrings plenty of narrative sustenance from her barren landscape. Their master may seem harsh and inscrutable but, for the time being, his authority is unquestionable. “This place,” Artt declares, “was set aside for us when the Earth was made.” Accepting their lot, the monks clamber ashore.

Donoghue wrings plenty of narrative sustenance from her barren landscapeīut when the pragmatic Cormac ventures this opinion, he is sternly rebuked. Were it not the site of a real monastic settlement from this period, it could reasonably be described as uninhabitable. A jagged mass of almost naked rock, it towers above the Atlantic seven miles or so off the Kerry coast.

Skellig Michael may be familiar to some from its appearances in later Star Wars movies. It helps, too, that they have little notion of just what that calling will entail.Īrtt’s island proves to be a place for which nothing could have prepared them. Neither is much of a true believer, but both are sufficiently awed to accept their new calling without a murmur.

Trian, meanwhile, is a mere youth, “ungainly and odd” by his own rueful admission. Cormac is well past his prime, a grizzled brawler who found Christ only after a plague claimed his family and a rival clan his patch of land. In fulfilment of his vision, Artt settles upon an unlikely pair of missionaries. Taking two monks as companions, he is to journey to this storm-lashed rock – a place not “tainted by the breath of the world” – and found upon it a bastion of prayer. Artt’s dream, being divinely inspired, is also highly specific. God has visited him with a dream, he explains, of a solitary island “far away, in the western ocean”. It is to general relief, then, that Artt announces his departure. Donoghue does some deft scene-setting in these early pages, giving us a strong sense of a society still stitching together its disparate fabrics, a people not so much embracing the light of Christ as putting it where it wouldn’t be in the way. Bringing with him new and uncompromising notions, he finds himself an honoured if not entirely welcome guest, refusing the abbot’s wine and disparaging his lax observance of fast days.

Artt, a learned priest recently returned from afar, arrives at the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóise. From the outset, it grounds itself in an early medieval Ireland that was much more plural and fluid than is often supposed.

Haven donoghue