THE ISLAND CHILD

A mother’s quest to find her estranged daughter is wrapped around another, earlier mother-daughter story of secrets and superstition, violence and desperation, rooted on a wind-whipped island.

A fevered intensity drives British writer Aitken’s debut, along with an unrelenting stress on femaleness and maternal attachment. In parallel timelines, it traces the lonely, burdened life of child and adult Oona Coughlan, daughter of an obsessively restrictive mother on the Irish-speaking island of Inis. The free-spirited child, born while her mother was having a vision of the Virgin Mary, lives a narrow life compared to her brothers—“There’s no leaving the island. Not for a woman”—and Oona strains against her bonds, yearning for a different mother, like Aislinn, the incomer and healer who lives on the cliff edge. Aitken’s lyrical voice evokes the perilous fishing community and the harsh beauty of the island while piling on the high-colored, often blood-drenched events. There’s a miscarriage, a witchy outcast who gives birth on the beach, a murder, a fire, a rape, a drowning, a home birth that shocks a child, a shipwreck. Meanwhile, in the other, interleaved narrative stream, dating some 20 years later, adult Oona, married to Pat and living in Canada, is desperate to reconnect with her own daughter, Joyce, who has disappeared. An intermittent third narrative, spun like a fairy tale, punctuates events with suggestions of the Persephone myth, adding one more layer of emphasis to the matrilineal theme. These overlapping, parallel threads, nearly always delivered at the same (high) emotional pitch and from Oona’s fixated perspective, run an immensely long course as she travels her physical and psychological journey of emigration, postnatal depression, second pregnancy, loss, more loss, and, in a final circular spin, a return to the island where her two worlds may eventually become one.

A stylish but overburdened fable of suffering and expiation.