Landscape and seascape are central to poet Sue Hubbard’s elegiac story of loss and valediction. Newly widowed, Martha Cassidy returns to her husband’s writing retreat, a cottage on the Kerry coast, “the end of the world with nothing between her and America except the cold sea”. Brendan, an art critic, had specialised in the work of the St Ives artists. Rainsongs allusively links the western edge of Ireland with St Ives and the Hebridean island of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which provides a wider frame for the novel. Martha embraces anchoritic solitude, within ancient terrain that remembers the monks who in 520AD set sail in curraghs to found a community in the barren Skellig Islands.
Collapsed houses recall waves of Irish emigrants escaping famine, “skin kippered from turf smoke ... lungs thick with phlegm”. Here Martha confronts her own ghosts. Beautifully, the novel’s structure raises to consciousness an anterior trauma buried in Brendan’s loss that had opened a rift in their marriage. Their only son, Bruno, died in childhood. Scarcely mentioned in the earlier chapters, he is gradually reclaimed for Martha through a landscape of memory.
Decades ago, the child had agitated to visit the Skellig Islands, which exert a magnetic pull like Woolf’s lighthouse rock. Woolfian echoes and quotations pulse through Rainsongs, haunting the reader with the ubiquity of mother love and longing: “she thought, he will never be this carefree again ... No chance of the Skelligs today, Bruno, said Brendan.”
Minor characters – odious property developer Eugene, decent farmer Patrick and young poet Colm – dramatise the struggle between old and new. But Hubbard’s most profound effects occur when, keeping the narrative tight to Martha’s consciousness, she evokes what Romain Rolland’s famous letter to Freud called “the oceanic feeling” – the sensation of being one with the cosmos. “When there’s nothing left,” Brendan had written, “there’s still the ocean and the sky”; and his widow finds healing, “merged with the rough brown scrub ... the grey mountains”.
• Stevie Davies’s Awakening is published by Parthian. Rainsongs is published by Duckworth. To order a copy for £9.99 (RRP £11.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
