Donoghue seems most interested in the dramas of this one space - with which she manages to make clear the broader constrictions and injustices of an entire Irish society. The Pull of the Stars moves with the quickness of a thriller, but instead of spies and helicopters there’s nurse Julia Power in an ad hoc maternity ward. The scenes in the 'fever/maternity' ward are so enthralling that the novel loses a bit of its fire - and realism - whenever it leaves that room, but these departures are thankfully rare. Even in Julia’s slightly euphemistic voice, the sheer attention devoted to these descriptions functions as a kind of unadorned reverence for the work and pain and strength of women - and how the paths of their lives are so often defined by the workings of their bodies. The narrow aperture of the maternity ward allows Donoghue to focus on one of the novel’s most compelling preoccupations: the lives and bodies of women.

Readers familiar with Donoghue’s masterly 2010 best seller, Room, will recall the focused intensity she can bring to bear on constricted spaces. As a result, the entire narrative feels like a flu-induced dream-a prophetic one we should all heed, lest we slip back in time. She omits quotation marks from dialogue so that spoken words drift in between thoughts. The characters themselves in The Pull of the Stars are thinner than those in some of Donoghue’s past books, but the nonstop action of the maternity ward is so compelling that it hardly matters. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.” Ought you really get a say in the affairs of the United Kingdom unless you’re prepared to lay down your lives for the king?” Julia shoots back, “Look around you … This is where every nation draws its first breath. An orderly dismisses the idea of women’s right to vote: “Don’t pay the blood tax, though, do you? Not like we fellows do. This novel is not for the squeamish.)ĭonoghue emphasizes parallels between the women suffering in hospitals and their husbands and brothers suffering in the trenches. (Donoghue clearly reveled in her research on early 20th century medicine. The sickening prospect of a doctor sawing through a patient’s pubic bones during a delivery hangs over each woman who enters the ward. Lynn, their priorities lie with ensuring their patients’ abilities to bear more children, often at the expense of the health of women. On the rare occasions when male doctors do appear, away from the watchful eye of Dr.

Pull of the stars book