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Ghost Light (2010)

by Joseph O'Connor(Favorite Author)

3.47 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0436205718 (ISBN13: 9780436205712)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Harvill Secker

review 1: This is an incredibly sad story yet gripping. I read at at a time when I was quite broke so the poverty suffered in it appealed to me. In Joseph O'Connors historical narrative style it interweaves history into the plot effortlessly. It was the first Joseph O Connor book I'd read and his descriptions of love and loss are poignant and gritty. In his books I get a sense that it is more than just a story and couldve really happened. The end is quite sad but still a good book.
review 2: Although Ghost Light is a novel, Joseph O'Connor's protagonist Molly Allgood was a real woman, a Roman Catholic actress from the Dublin slums who was the muse and fiance of affluent Protestant playwright John Millington Synge in the first decade of the 20th century. Synge was a found... moreer of Dublin's Abbey Theatre and a prominent member of the literary set that advocated a new Irish art based on the experiences of Ireland's peasants and their folk tales. He wrote the part of Pegeen Mike for her in The Playboy of the Western World, a play set on the west of Ireland that sparked riots in Dublin because of its coarse language and realistic themes that some spectators felt demeaned Ireland and Irish women. O'Connor begins his story with an aged Molly eking out a mean existence in a London still freshly scarred by the bombings of World War II. Still an actress, the majority of the book recounts a single day in the 1950s as she travels across London to a job performing in a radio drama for the BBC. Along the way, she visits a variety of shops, and those stops reveal her to be an alcoholic who lives on the edge of starvation, something she fends off by selling off one-by-one her few remaining mementos of Synge. Molly's travels through London are interspersed with frequent flashbacks to 1905, the year she met and fell in love with Synge. Neither of their families approved of the match between Allgood and Synge, but they managed to snatch some happiness together despite being surrounded by heavy and heavy-handed disapproval. The structure of the novel is reminiscent of Joyce's Ulysses, and the story proceeds at a similarly slow pace in dense but vigorous prose. In many ways, Molly is a cranky old lady, but time and again she reveals a truly generous heart, which is why I enjoyed this sad story. less

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