A Ghost in the Throat

Like many of us, I read many books. Some for time-filling, or amusement, others I discard after a page or two. For light-hearted fun and pleasure in revisiting well-known characters, I turn to Terry Pratchett and his Disk World. Very, very rarely do I come across a new book that thrills me with its sparkling brilliance, truth and language. A Ghost in the Throat has done this. Passed to me by chance from Ann's reading, it is the best written book I have read for years. The author is Doireann Ni Ghriofa, an Irish writer, weaving a sparkling mix of amateur historian with autobiographic detail. 

Written from a strictly feminist stance, it recounts her attempts to trace the story of the Irish poet, Eibblin Dubb Ni Chonaill and her one poem, Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire, or The Keen for Art O Laoghaire, written after her husband's murder in 1773. The poem was passed down in oral tradition by generations of women until it was finally written down from an old woman's memory of it; it expresses with deep emotion Eibblin's love for Art from glimpsing him in the marketplace, through their elopement and the birth of their children until his brutal murder under the English occupation of Ireland and the suppression of Catholicism. The poem has been described as the best eighteenth centuary poetry in Ireland or England, though in my ignorance I did not know of it till now.

Doireann Ni Ghriofa herself is a successful Irish poet, though I can't pretend to have known her either. She writes how she grew with the poem, yet all histories of its creator are lost, and describe Eibblin as simply the "wife" of a famous man, or the aunt of another man.  Even the date and burial place of her death are lost; Doireann sets out to redress this imbalance, and her account is a record of hunts through archives interwoven with the mundane. Frustrated in every detail by the lack of written records by women, she turns to the text of the men but even this is oblique and cursory, for as so often in the past, women were written out of the narrative. 

I generally read little purely feminist literature, so much being justifiable polemics about their ill-treatment at the hands of men, and normally such tales pass me by. Yet here, her descriptions draw me into a world no man may ever know, imagine as we might. Ghriofa writes movingly of her life as a mother in a good marriage, describing longing for pregnancy, births, breast feeding, and sitting for weeks in an ITU with a premature, weak infant before returning to her daily chores, all with such intense vivacity it is like sitting watching in her kitchen. Her use of language for simple tasks is breathtaking in its adjectival vocabulary and phrasing, and I could not put the book down for the simple joy of reading brilliant, original throat-gripping English. 

Though her first book, it was the second I have read by this author; the first being Said the Dead. This followed the pattern of the first, when Doireann trespasses upon a derelict Victorian asylem being converted into luxury apartments. Her imagination inspired, she searches the old Cork archives for case books detailing the lives of the female patients, bringing them into being like living ghosts, filling the imagination with sympathetic joy. She describes in detail the first British woman psychiatrist, Lucia Strangman, who dealt with them, but whose caring and professionalism leave me ashamed; for I too once worked for a year in a large psychiatric hospital before its closure as the patients returned to community care. But I was not so dedicated, leading a nine-to-five existance, being too selfish to give myself fully. Yet Lucia does everything willingly, from extracting teeth to setting bones, and delivering babies to the pregnant inmates - often in those days the cause of their incarceration, yet throughout the narrative lies the undercurrent of "this could be us" that makes it so relevant. All are described sympathetically and in the glittering prose that drew me to Doireann's writing and led me read her first book. I look forward intensely to her third.