by Nuala O'Faolain
A roving travel writer returns to her long-abandoned homeland to
research the love story between a Lady of the Manor and a hired hand
during the horrific famine years.
Reviewed by: A.F. Morrow
About A.F. Morrow
When Irish immigrants discuss their visits home to see family and
friends, they don't say "going for a visit". Instead, the question is
always "How long since you've been back?" For Kathleen deBurca, the
narrator of "My Dream of You", going back involves carrying some heavy
emotional baggage. Kathleen has not only avoided going back to her
homeland of Ireland, she has been a travel writer for many years,
flitting from assignment to assignment in a quest for passionate living
that leaves her, ultimately, alone in a London basement flat. Clearly
in twenty years of writing about tropical resorts and romantic
destinations she has been on the run. Yet, this is no morose return to
the scene of the emotional crime, it's a zippy look at midlife and the
surprises it can hold.
O'Faolain weaves glimpses of Kathleen's childhood in Ireland and young
adulthood in London with the grim present, in which she is creeping into
middle age while mourning her closest friend. Her surroundings may have
been beautiful these many years and her life one glamorous spa after
another, but she's not been in paradise. Despite a series of lovers, in
fact, despite the complete inability to decline a man's advances,
Kathleen is a lonely rover. Her best friend has died very suddenly, her
other close friends are so distant that they also might as well be dead
to her, and her youth is rapidly vanishing in the rear view mirror
without a trace; save the memory of sex with any man who ever was
interested enough to ask. Whether in the throng of a London street or
romancing a lover in an exotic port, Kathleen is alone.
"I believed in passion the way other people believed in God;
everything fell into place around it," she thinks to herself at one
point. In subtle ways, O'Faolain fashions a mid-life rite of passage
that is recognizably common. Kathleen is still a beautiful woman but she
is facing the end of her long youth. She has written for one agency,
TravelWrite, for many years, but suddenly commits to a freelance
assignment in the country she's spent years avoiding. She skipped her
parent's funerals, yet now visits her brother on his home turf. Woven
among these excruciating milestones is her growing fascination with a
love story that occured during the Nineteenth century famine years, and
as she comes to terms with mid-life she also rediscovers the troubling
period that shaped her ancestor's lives. The locals who help in her
research accept her warmly, and the thaw begins.
With historical knowledge comes personal knowledge: as she reads about
the conditions during the famine years, including corpses piled on
roadsides and left leaning in doorways where they fell, she begins to
understand her father's fervent patriotism, and, to a degree, her
mother's morose demeanor. As she learns of the deceptions practiced by
the famine survivors she realizes that most of them must have cooperated
in some way with the gentry in the Manor house, although their ancestors
would never admit that collusion with the gentry occurred. O'Faolain
presents these paradoxes eloquently, without much judgement or fanfare.
In her plainspoken approach there is no political polemic necessary:
corpses are corpses; their presence speaks for itself.
Reading through journals and articles, Kate immerses herself in the
dreary and often gruesome details of the love story and emerges a
changed woman. No writer will be surprised to find that by writing a
story completely unrelated to her life, Kathleen deBurca gains new
strength and a wealth of self-knowledge.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: My Dream of You
Copyright © by A.F. Morrow , 2003
Reviewed by A.F. Morrow:
-- Fall on Your Knees - by Ann-Marie Macdonald
-- October Sky, originally published as Rocket Boys - by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
-- I Know This Much Is True - by Wally Lamb
-- Mrs. Dalloway - by Virginia Woolf
-- My Dream of You - by Nuala O'Faolain
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