The Banyan Tree
Nolan, Christopher
IRISH CREAM Abigail McCarthy his is the third book, and undoubtedly the best, by an extraordinary author who has conquered extreme difficulty in order to write. Christopher Nolan is mute and...
...There in total darkness the cream lay while the churn hung where it sung, while Minnie geared herself up for the imponderables ahead...
...Nolan's prose has been called Joycean and passages like this give reason to the claim...
...Incident after incident is fraught with luminous detail and fresh insights...
...She learns to help with the peat harvest, "'Now his slean swung toward her, and yielding him a catcher's grasp she clutched his sod, swung round and slapped it down onto the slatted barrow...
...WORLD ANARCHY v. WORLD PEACE R. Scott Appleby n the aftermath of the sucI cessful NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, a triumphant President Bill Clinton promulgated the doctrine that came to bear his name: "If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background, or their religion, and it is within our power to stop it, we will stop it...
...There are emotion and intensity in the telling of the final part of Minnie's life but no real disappointment because of its truth to life...
...He writes by having his head held as he taps at a typewriter with a stick attached to his forehead...
...This novel took him thirteen years to finish...
...Nevertheless, as if bursting out of the bonds of his disability, his prose pours out-lush, exuberant, and evocative...
...Year after year she soldiers on with the farm work while Brendan, now a bishop, struggles with doubt and alcoholism in New York Sheila lives in a loveless marriage, and Frankie, her favorite, goes his lone wild way in Australia...
...Minnie and Peter have three children...
...And shortly thereafter Minnie's youngest son Frankie leaves her to set out on his own...
...Abigail McCarthy, a longtime Commonweal contributor, lives in Washington, D.C...
...There it lay fooling itself that it might yet escape but then snapped the lid, snap went the clamps, and up the churn was hoisted onto its stand...
...To date, the "somebody" deserving of punishment has included Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein--deserving, to be sure--but the comeupCommonweal 2 4 August 11, 2000...
...Day follows day...
...The very ordinariness of the story is transformed by the language...
...The oldest is already ordained a priest and the daughter become a nurse when Peter succumbs to the heart condition he has kept secret...
...Christopher Nolan is mute and a paraplegic...
...Readers will be held by the language to the very end: A day crate before her, a clay crate behind her, clay in every Stygian stitch of the vacancy in the hole where she now lay, and lingering, the crowd gathered at the graveside waited the final decade for decoration at the end, as green grass the clay waited to grow, the earthworms to fodder, there in Drumhollow graveyard, where woman of women all, the Fenian-heart-stopper Minnie Humphries-that-was joined her husband-that-used-to-be for ever and ever, amen...
...And she learns to understand and cheer his game of hurling...
...They milk the cows, feed the calves, slop the pigs, and check the roosting hens before sitting down to tea in their own kitchen...
...Oddly enough the most absorbing part of the novel is Minnie's struggle with loneliness after her husband dies and her children leave Drumhollow one by one...
...One may be forgiven for squinting to detect the fine print of the Clinton Doctrine, and not merely in response to its namesake's unfortunate tendency to inflate a half-truth or tell the occasional whopper...
...It opens with the weekly churning of butter and the language of its description is mesmerizing: Nursing still their helium harvest the cataracted crocks waited, still playing their stoic games, but the moment they were lifted up they yielded up their booty, listening in awe as their dotted cream dropped ploppingly down into the cold, damp coffin of dankness...
...Stubbornly holding to her belief that Frankie will return to farm the five fields and the family will be reunited, she lives out her days in Drumhollow...
...The story is a simple one---the life of Minnie O'Brien on a small Irish farm...
...Minnie, n6e Humphries, has left service in her father's shop to marry Peter O'Brien...
...After an idyllic honeymoon in Dublin, "the city of just about right," they return to Drumhollow to farm their five fields and do the daily chores...
...William Shawcross's grim account of international peacekeeping and "endless conflict" in the nineties suggests all manner of unspoken qualifications and loopholes lurking in Clinton's post-Kosovo proclamation...
Vol. 127 • August 2000 • No. 14
