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Ghost Light: A Novel, by Joseph O'Connor
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1907 Edwardian Dublin, a city of whispers and rumors. At the Abbey Theatre W. B. Yeats is working with the talented John Synge, his resident playwright. It is here that Synge, the author of The Playboy of the Western World and The Tinker’s Wedding, will meet an actress still in her teens named Molly Allgood. Rebellious, irreverent, beautiful, flirtatious, Molly is a girl of the inner-city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. Witty and watchful, she has dozens of admirers, but it is the damaged older playwright who is her secret passion despite the barriers of age, class, education, and religion.
Synge is a troubled, reticent genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by conventions and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of immense loneliness and severity, he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, and often tender.
1950s postwar London, an old woman walks across the city in the wake of a hurricane. As she wanders past bomb sites and through the forlorn beauty of wrecked terraces and wintry parks, her mind drifts in and out of the present as she remembers her life’s great love, her once dazzling career, and her travels in America. Vivid and beautifully written, Molly’s swirling, fractured narrative moves from Dublin to London via New York with luminous language and raw feeling. Ghost Light is a story of great sadness and joy—a tour de force from the widely acclaimed and bestselling author of Star of the Sea.
- Sales Rank: #1524761 in Books
- Published on: 2011-02-01
- Released on: 2011-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.49" h x .95" w x 5.73" l, .82 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
O'Connor (Redemption Falls) presents a turbulent love story loosely based on the relationship between Irish playwright John Synge and actress Molly Allgood. The story opens in post-WWII London, where Molly is a spinster with a fondness for drink, but through a series of reminiscences the reader learns that, in her youth, she was a promising actress out of the poorer quarters of Dublin. Working in a theater group that included her more talented older sister and W.B. Yeats, Molly soon develops an attraction to the significantly older playwright Synge. She is pugnacious and ambitious, he circumspect and introverted, but the two secretly fall in with one another, and over the course of years they struggle with the differences in their age, class, and religion, and with their respective temperaments and expectations. The voice of old, broken Molly is an impressive creation, and the narrative convincingly plunges the reader into a tumultuous and tender account of a tortured romance, though some of O'Connor's stylistic choices (notably abrupt tense and perspective shifts within Molly's head) impede narrative momentum and yield a reading experience that feels heavy and too hazy. (Feb.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In 1950s London, a drunken, broken-down old woman recalls her passionate love affair with a gifted playwright. O’Connor fictionalizes the real-life relationship between promising young actress Molly Allgood and tortured playwright J.M. Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World. When 18-year-old Molly joins the celebrated Abbey Theater ensemble in 1907, she quickly becomes enamored of the extremely talented but emotionally remote Synge. As the action stretches back and forth between post-WWII London and Edwardian Dublin, the bittersweet disconnect between the vital and passionate Molly of the past and the shuffling survivor of the present is heartrending. Although plenty of poetic license is taken in rendering this rumored love story, the emotional impact of the narrative rings true. --Margaret Flanagan
Review
“A great ambitious novel about love and loss. Joseph O’Connor has the magic touch, and I can’t imagine many better—or braver—novels coming out this year.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
“A brilliant novel.” —Joseph O’Neil, author of Netherland
“When I think of Ghost Light, the words climb over each other to be first in the queue: brilliant, beautiful, exhilarating, heartbreaking, masterly. It’s that good.” —Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
“It has an astonishing command of voice and period detail, and offers an intimacy with the lives of others that is rare in fiction.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
“A spellbinding read.” —Aisling Foster, The Times (London)
“Ghost Light is a tender and compassionate love story, and a fine stepping stone to the majesty of Synge.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Remarkable, radiant and captivating . . . On top of the biographical information concerning these two, Synge and his Molly, Joseph O’Connor has imposed a fictional overlay, and makes a vivid performance of it . . . Deeply and resolutely imagined, Ghost Light casts its heroine as a charming and robust, playful and wayward young girl, committed to the well-being of the rather difficult and gloomy JM Synge. Molly Allgood, in this version, has a good deal of Molly Bloom in her make-up, and a lively intelligence to boot . . . In this incarnation, [she] is a figure of great gaiety and aplomb; and O’Connor’s novel carries all the pungency and resonance of a particular era of the past.” —Patricoa Craig, The Independent
“A moving tale.” —The Sunday Telegraph
“An entertaining read that carries a touching tale.” —The Economist
“Masterful . . . With his previous novels, Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, O’Connor carved out a unique way of playing his storyteller’s hand over a wide landscape, with the use of invented documentation and textual adventure. Ghost Light brings that achievement to a new dimension, more specifically located and yet all the more masterful in its management of re-imagined lives and the time they inhabit . . . The writing is lyrical and moving.’ —Hugo Hamilton, The Financial Times
“With his usual deftness and intelligence, O’Connor brings to life the intense love affair between young actress Molly Allgood and the great Irish playwright JM Synge . . . Brilliant.” —The Daily Mirror
“Joseph O’Connor’s seventh novel, Ghost Light, will give days of pleasure to tens and tens of thousands of readers. It is a great love story, with extras: a virtuoso display of literary talent, a tribute to the Hiberno-English heritage of lore and lyricism and an interpretation of the Irish literary revival as the fruit of settler and native, Protestant and Catholic . . . One of the novel’s great achievements is not just to display imaginative power but also to show how the imagination works . . . A stroke of genius.” —Adrian Frazier, Irish Times
“Engrossing stuff . . . Beautifully written and charming.” —The Independent on Sunday
“What shines in the end is O’Connor’s precise style bolstered by quick flashes of his wicked humour. Ghost Light is a careful, thoughtful story, the worlds of which are impeccably rendered.” —Irish Examiner
“Ghost Light is a sad and stirring story of love and loss, and O’Connor skillfully brings to life a brief affair that burned brightly and for Molly, was never extinguished.” —Claire O’Mahony, Irish Sunday Tribune
“A tender, haunting tale . . . An original and moving love story.” —Marie Claire
“O’Connor has fashioned a deeply moving, beautifully written story . . . Admirers of his writing will take pleasure not only in the ambitious range of Ghost Light and its depth of feeling but also in the nods in the direction of the author’s immediately preceding novels, Redemption Falls, and, before that, Star of the Sea . . . Ghost Light stands up to scrutiny on its own terms. It is a profoundly sad story, but triumphant.” —Scotland Herald
“The author displays typical imaginative virtuosity and emotional depth . . . As well as being impressively well crafted, the novel is wreathed in language of Joycean richness. [O’Connor’s] prose is tuned to a singular lyrical frequency.” —The Sunday Times
“Superbly written, magically evocative novel.” —The Scotsman
“Ghost Light is a spirited novel . . . Like her namesake Molly Bloom, Allgood is an earthy, wily and sexually magnetic creation but O’Connor’s real feat is in his careful deployment of Hiberno-English by which he not only doffs his cap to Synge but gives flesh and blood to Molly’s neglected life story.” —The Metro
“Ghost Light will give days of pleasure to tens and tens of thousands of readers. It is a great love story, with extras: a virtuoso display of literary talent, a tribute to the Hiberno-English heritage of lore and lyricism and an interpretation of the Irish literary revival as the fruit of settler and native, Protestant and Catholic . . . Brimming with sympathy and skill.” —Irish Times
“Joe O’Connor occupies a special place in Irish life. The novel is artfully constructed . . . O’Connor’s evocation of such a difficult, morbid and yet morally beautiful man through the memory of an earthy and vivacious woman is remarkably ambitious and imaginative. Ghost Light is full of . . . sly pleasures and there is a great deal of broad comedy.” —The Irish Independent
“Lyrical and moving.” —The Sunday Tribune
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
EXQUISITE!
By Charlotte Vale-Allen
This is one of the most beautifully written and well-conceived novels I've read in a very, very long time. This not a quick fast-paced item nowadays called "a read." It is an honest-to-goodness book. It cannot be skimmed, constructed as it is with a glorious use of language that is sheer pleasure, along with characters so intimately crafted that it is actually wrenching to come to the end and be separated from both the writing and the people. For those who aren't in a tearing hurry to get through the next item on their bedside reading stack, this is a dream of a book. I am still marveling over the wealth of detail, past and present, all of it stemming from the mind of a touching, irritating, fully realized, funny, rude, gifted and good-hearted, utterly remarkable woman. Don't miss this! This is a keeper, a book to be reread. Most highly recommended.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A Novel of Grand Scope and Beauty
By Fairbanks Reader - Bonnie Brody
Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor is a brilliant and complex book. It is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. The language is poetic and hallucinatory and this is a book where one can't skip passages or lines. Every word is necessary and the whole is a gift put together with the greatest care and love.
The novel is about a grand love affair between Molly Allgood, an actress (stage name Maire O'Neill) and the playwright John Synge, most well-known for his play, Playboy of the Western World. The book starts out in 1952 on the streets of post-war London. Molly, 67 years old, is walking the cold blustery city and freezing. She lives in a hovel and drinks too much. She is hungry and cold, going from one sheltered spot to another and hallucinating from the the alcohol, her hunger and her freezing. She is on her way to a BBC radio reading and on her way she remembers, in broken dream sequences, her relationship with John Synge.
Molly and John Synge had an affair and at the time of their affair she was eighteen years old and he was thirty-six. John was very ill, most likely with lymphoma but perhaps tuberculosis or some other lung disease. He had one neck surgery after another. He lived only two years after they met. They came from opposite sides of the tracks. Molly was an actress who was from a mixed marriage - protestant and catholic - and she worked with her mother in a drapery shop. John came from old money and was of protestant background. He had a symbiotic relationship with his mother which made his relationship with Molly doomed from the start as his mother would not permit him to bring Molly home and threatened to cut off his trust fund should he marry her.
The book goes back and forth in time from 1952 London to 1905 Dublin where Molly and John were involved in a theater group. John was the resident playwright for William Yeats and the Grand Dame of the theater was Lady Augusta Gregory. Molly was an actress in the theater troupe. In those days it was very risqué for women to act.
Molly and John had to keep their affair a secret because John was terribly afraid of anyone finding out. He and Molly met on trains and traveled to Wicklow together for a vacation but acted like they did not know one another in Dublin. The affair was tender and poignant. John was very ill and the marriage was doomed from the start, never to be realized. They remained engaged until John's death. John called Molly his Pegeen, his Changeling girl.
We travel with Molly to the United States where she acted after John's death. She recollects the plays she was in and the popularity she had. She ended up marrying a philandering husband and had two children, a son who died during World War II and a daughter from whom she is semi-estranged because she can not get along with her son-in-law.
The novel contains imagined letters and real letters between the two lovers and hallucinatory memories from Molly's desperate mind as she tries to stay alive despite the difficult circumstances she finds herself in. My favorite parts of the novel are when it travels to 1905 and the reader gets to participate in the acting troupe with the great Synge and Yeats.
Parts of this novel are true and other parts are fictional according to Mr. O'Connor. Mr. O'Connor grew up in Dublin near the Synge house and was fascinated by the playwright's life. This novel is the outcome of his fascination. In some ways it reminded me of the poetic beauty of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. Sense of place is very important. This is a novel with grand scope and great beauty, one that will not be forgotten by any lover of literature.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Literary and Luscious
By Jill I. Shtulman
Joseph O'Connor has fashioned a marvelous novel, a reimaging of the love affair of John Millington Synge - the famous playwright of Playboy of the Western World and other fine works - and the younger, less well-stationed Molly Allgood, who performed under the name of Maire O'Neill.
"Certain biographers will want to beat me with a turf shovel," O'Connor states in his aftermath. Indeed, in reading that aftermath, this is not the book for those who are seeking a historically-correct look into these principals. It is definitely fiction.
But what fiction it is! It sings, glows, and at times, reads like sheer poetry. There are hints of James Joyce in the stream-of-consciousness. It all flows from the title Ghost Light, which O'Connor defines later in the book, "An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own play."
And within the confines of this novel, these "ghosts" definitely do. The "play" begins in 1952; Molly, now quite old and penurious, is in London where is to record a radio play for the BBC studios. There, in an alcoholic haze, she muses upon the highlights of her life: as an actress at Abbey Theatre of Dublin, her acquaintance with Yeats, and most of all, her love affair with the much-older John M. Synge.
She remembers that Synge was "a man who could see into things - very ordinary things...His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet."
Ah, poetry! By using the documented framework of Synge - his ascension to the top of his craft, his complicated relationship with his widowed mother (who strongly disapproved of his "liaison"), his engagement to Molly, his early death at age 37 - Mr. O'Connor expands his story, weaving fiction in with the fact. His portrayal of Molly - playful, wayward, with a spirited independence - is sublime. And then, Mr. O'Connor goes further, also weaving some highlights of the Abbey Theatre and the cruelty of class-consciousness into his tapestry. A most amazing book - and very recommended by this reader.
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