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BOOK REVIEW: Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars explores the 1918 flu pandemic in Dublin

Gemma NisbetThe West Australian
Emma Donoghue
Camera IconEmma Donoghue Credit: Picasa

Two years ago, after reading a newspaper article about the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic, author Emma Donoghue — most widely known for her 2010 bestseller-turned-film Room — began writing a historical novel set during that period.

By the time she delivered the final draft of the book in March of this year, however, its world of face masks, overloaded hospitals and shuttered businesses had taken on a new and unexpected resonance in the time of COVID-19.

Donoghue’s publisher thus fast-tracked the book to publication (it was originally due out in 2021), and the result is The Pull of the Stars, set in Dublin near the end of World War I in a busy makeshift ward for pregnant patients who have contracted the potentially deadly strain of flu.

Taking place almost entirely inside the hospital over three eventful days, the action seems to unfold almost in real time as lives begin and end under the compassionate care of acting ward sister Julia Power.

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She is joined by a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney, and a physician, named Dr Kathleen Lynn, the latter based on a real-life historical figure, who was active in the Irish republican movement. As the novel progresses, the women’s personal stories — Julia, for example, has a brother at home who has returned from the war shell-shocked and mute — gradually unspool alongside those of their largely impoverished and often malnourished patients.

Donoghue, who was born and raised in Ireland but now lives in Canada, paints a vivid portrait of a city exhausted by both war and disease, adroitly capturing the difficulties — at once heartbreaking and mundane — that her characters face. Her unflinching depictions of childbirth are especially riveting. And though the rather sentimental final two dozen pages make for a somewhat disappointing ending, this is an otherwise deeply compelling and beautifully written historical novel.

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