Julia describes one of her doomed patients this way: “Mother of five by the age of 24, an underfed daughter of underfed generations, white as paper, red-rimmed eyes, flat bosom, fallen arches, twig limbs with veins that were tangles of blue twine. But this affecting novel suggests that the courses of these women’s lives are ruled not so much by the heavens but by poverty, misogyny and abuse - and a culture that forces women to bear burdens that should be shared by men, with children left to suffer the consequences. Lynn notes that the word “influenza” comes from the Italian phrase “influenza delle stelle,” the influence of the stars. Another patient, delirious from fever, is pregnant with her 12th child, which reminds Julia of an apparently common saying: “She doesn’t love him unless she gives him 12.” The ward’s youngest patient is 17 and lost her own mother in childbirth this girl arrives eight months pregnant but so uneducated about the female reproductive system that she expects her baby to emerge from her navel.Īt one point, Dr. 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.Īmong the ward’s patients is an unwed mother from a “mother/baby home,” whose baby will be confiscated by Ireland’s system of Catholic orphanages as soon as he is weaned.
Julia among the stars review skin#
Donoghue goes into great physical detail as women labor and deliver, as their skin tears and bleeds, as they vomit and urinate and breast-feed - and, in some cases, as they die. 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.
Their lives are intertwined in the constant struggle against the “bone man” - Julia’s childhood nickname for death. Together, these capable women leap from crisis to crisis: life-threatening hemorrhages, skyrocketing fevers that lead to convulsions, a horrifyingly rapid case of influenza that progresses to cyanosis (a bluish discoloration of the skin) in mere hours, and multiple premature labors, an apparent side effect of the 1918 influenza strain. What Bridie lacks in medical experience she makes up for in tenderness and good judgment. Lynn is a young volunteer, Bridie Sweeney, the product of an orphanage so neglectful that she does not even know her exact age. Lynn eventually inspires a kind of political awakening in the practically minded Julia. Kathleen Lynn, a rare female physician (and real historical figure) who is considered a wanted criminal by the Dublin police, for her role in Sinn Fein’s 1916 uprising.
So desperate is the hospital for doctors that the higher-ups soon call in Dr. When the novel opens, the pandemic has left one Dublin hospital with “more than twice as many patients as usual and a quarter the staff.” Julia Power, a 29-year-old midwife, suddenly finds herself the only nurse on duty overnight in the “fever/maternity” ward, the makeshift section of the hospital set aside for influenza patients who also happen to be pregnant. As Donoghue writes in an author’s note, “‘The Pull of the Stars’ is fiction pinned together with facts.” The year is 1918, and the illness, of course, is influenza. The parallels to 2020 are uncanny, but this is history, not prescience. Meanwhile, the government touts false cures and contends that the epidemic is under control. The sounds of wracking coughs cut through the air as medical supplies run short, and face masks become commonplace in the streets. In Emma Donoghue’s arresting new page-turner of a novel, “The Pull of the Stars,” an urban hospital is overwhelmed by victims of a cruel new disease.
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