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"The
Yellow House
" by
Patricia Falvey
;
Center Street
(352 pages,
$21.99
)
———
Patricia Falvey
, who was born in
Northern Ireland
and now splits her time between there and
Dallas
, makes a strong fiction debut with "The
Yellow House
," a stirring romantic drama set during the nascent
period of "the troubles" that tore
Ireland
apart throughout the 20th century.
The book
tells the first-person story of
Eileen O'Neill
, whom we first meet as a child in Ulster, the epicenter
of the conflict between the British-rule supporting
Protestants and the Home Rule-supporting Catholics.
Eileen's idyllic childhood, set in the bright house of
the book's title, comes apart when she loses, in quick
succession, both parents (one to desertion and madness,
one to death) and two of her siblings.
Left with
just her younger brother to care for, she goes to work
in a linen factory, attracting the attention of the
owner's son,
Owen Sheridan
, a gentle Quaker who gets drawn into the political
upheaval when he becomes a British military officer.
Eileen
also finds herself attracted to
James Conlan
, a rough man on the other side of the battle, whose
fighting spirit appeals to her own warrior nature.
"His hand was rough on my arm, as if a fire seared
my skin," she says of James. "I thought of the
warm glow
Owen Sheridan's
touch always caused. Just now I liked the fire
more."
As the
book progresses, and the animosities between the
Protestants and the now fully formed
Irish Republican Army
grow ever bloodier, Eileen feels herself continually
split, with conflicts of love, lust, compassion and
loyalty running roughshod over her soul. The early
scenes of Eileen's and James' lawless exploits for the
Catholic resistance make for thrilling reading, and her
gradual realization that lust doesn't necessarily lead
to long-lasting contentment is both realistic and
piercingly sad.
Falvey
has a tendency to force emotion on her reader; people
"shout" and "retort" and
"cry" an awful lot when the author could
simply have written "said," letting the
emotional weight build from the content of the scene.
But her research is flawless, and she perfectly balances
the fictional story with the real-life characters and
events that populate it.
She also
staunchly declines to make easy division between the
good guys and bad guys, instead trusting the reader to
appreciate the complexities born of neighbor turned
against neighbor and brother against sister.
Reading
"The
Yellow House
," I was struck anew with how much revolutionary
Ireland
resembled Civil War-era America, at least
psychologically. The book serves as a provocative
reminder of the tangled strings of family, war and
familial war, and also (although it's being marketed as
literary fiction) as a splendid example of
old-fashioned, minimal-bodice-ripping romance.
———
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