In a novel reminiscent in many pleasurable ways of Joyce's Ulysses, Joseph O'Connor has painted an indelible portrait of a man, a woman and a time.
Molly Allgood, stage name Maire O'Neill, is the centerpiece of the novel. When she and John Millington Synge, playwright and co-director of the Abbey Theatre (with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory), meet and fall in love, he is 35, she 19. Molly and her sister, Sara, are members of the Abbey Company, Ireland's National Theatre. She is of Irish peasant stock, poorly educated, a Catholic, a young woman of huge appetites and ambition, a vamp and a beauty. She attracts men everywhere she goes, but her affections settle on Synge, ill with Hodgkins' disease, cranky, well-born, educated and a Protestant. Neither family is amused. The scenes where each meets the other's family are horrifyingly hilarious; the Irish Catholics falling all over themselves, with the exception of Granny, and the haughty Protestant Mama cold and contemptuous.
In faultless, elegant prose that is oh-so Irish in its music, O'Connor takes us through a day in London, in 1952, the year Molly died, and, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, allows us to see what became of her after Synge died. Interwoven with that story is the courtship of Molly and John, and a poor thing it was, consisting mostly of 10-mile walks across terrain where they would not be seen. There is--finally--one idyll where they actually get to spend time together. Molly has told her mother that the company is on tour and she and John head off for what appears to be their only real tryst. It ends badly when he won't set a marriage date. He says that he can't afford to be married; the truth is that he is intimidated by his mother, and Molly knows it.
Molly's reminiscences take place as she walks through London, from her flat to the BBC, where she has a part in a radio play. She is penniless, selling off possessions to buy brandy, a hungry street drunk who is only one step away from panhandling. On the other hand, she wears her one good Worth blouse to that day's work and, though overcome with terrible pain while on air, soldiers on and finishes her part at full throttle.
A ghost light is "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 plays." This story is full of ghosts: lost love, lost friends, Molly's realization of a past that is dead, one in which she is no longer invited anywhere, seldom employed and important to no one. She has become a ghost. Drink is her only friend now, and in the throes of it, all the ghosts show themselves--even John, her Tramp, and she his Changeling. O'Connor has brought to brilliant, three-dimensional life these two ill-matched people. The tale is never romantic, but it is a love story.--Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: A fictionalized version of the real-life story of John Millington Synge and Maire O'Neill (Molly Allgood), theater life and the mores of London and Dublin at the turn of the century.