review of the pull of the stars emma donoghue

‘Always on their feet, these Dublin mothers, scrimping and dishing up for their misters and chisellers, living off the scraps left on plates and gallons of weak black tea. However, when you combine the later stages of pregnancy with a deadly flu, managing a ward of three patients is not as easy as it may seem.

It unfolds over three days within the maternity fever ward of a Dublin hospital and is narrated by a nursing midwife who has been put in charge of the ward and is expected to run it solo, after all, resources and people are stretched thin a pandemic is raging. The Pull of the Stars is set in Dublin, at the beginnings of the pandemic. The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than WWI, an estimated three to six percent of the human race (Author note). This is a magnificent novel in its own right, but reading it now, whilst our world is in the grips of pandemic, was an offering of context like no other. But, never say never, and if you’re inclined to shy away from this one because it’s just all too much at present, I don’t blame you, but you will be missing out.

I never thought I’d read a novel about an historical pandemic whilst living within a contemporary one. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders: Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with an unfamiliar Flu are quarantined together.

Review of the pull of the stars emma donoghue