The Pull of the Stars

Emma Donoghue is a reliably wonderful writer and this tale is incredibly timely. Like the best historical fiction, this novel evokes the past and tells us something about the present. Set in Ireland during the 1918 flu pandemic, the small world of a hospital ward serving pregnant women who also have the flu manages to touch on the First World War, the Irish fight for independence, the advent of women's suffrage, the harsh conditions of children raised by nuns, sexuality, death, and motherhood. And, impressively for the amount of death in the book, manages to leave on with some hope by the end. If you're looking for a novel that captures both the past and echoes of current events without being hopeless, this certainly one to check out.

If you need to be reminded that it could be so much worse: The pull of the stars is about a nurse/midwife caring for very pregnant patients with influenza for three days in Dublin, 1918. This is very well written. For all the horrible things that are going on, the book never stops hope.

But this book . . . this book I loved and read in two days. It is set in a maternity ward in Ireland during the influenza epidemic in the early 1900s. The main character is Julia Power, who is a nurse running the short-staffed ward for pregnant mothers with influenza. She is highly competent, intelligent, and caring without letting her emotions color her work. She lives with her brother, who is suffering with PTSD after fighting in WWI.

Into her well-ordered life enters Bridie Sweeney, sent by a local convent that houses orphaned young women in return for servitude. Bridie and Nurse Power are immediately drawn to each other. They work well together and over a brief couple of days form a strong bond that is just what Julia has been show more lacking in her otherwise full life.

The pacing of this novel is fantastic. Donoghue writes in four long sections that mimic the hectic pace of the maternity ward. One of the reasons I read it so fast is that there is nowhere to stop - just as the nurses/doctors experience the relentless pace of illness and birth, the reader does as well.

It's also an intriguing parallel between the influenza pandemic and the covid pandemic. I was so interested to know that Donoghue wrote this before covid - it seems so clearly like an intentional parallel. The fear of contagion resulting in isolation, the masks and disinfecting, the trauma for hospital workers, the ineffectual government response . . . show less

Ms. Donoghue is one of my favourite writers. I loved Room and I really like her historical books. This one is historical, but very timely. Ms. Donoghue wrote this book to mark the 100 anniversary of the 1918 Spanish flu, but it came out during Covid, and its amazing how similar our issues are now, one hundred years later. What amazes me is that the world hasn't really learned anything in the hundred years since the 1918 pandemic. And that after it killed more people than deadly World War I did. This book is about a midwife and nurse by the name of Julia Power. She is working on the maternity fever ward (which isn't really a ward, but a small box room converted to a hospital room). The room barely has room for three beds. The timeline of show more the book is approximately three days, and in those three days Julia deals with life and death situations numerous times. Three babies are born to mothers who are suffering from influenza and four mothers rotate through the door. With the help of a cheerful, helpful young woman by the name of Bridie Sweeney, she manages to deliver three babies in appalling conditions. Ms. Donoghue spares no punches in this powerful story that she has written. We are there for all the life and death emergencies in this little room in a Dublin hospital. In describing the pandemic through one of her characters who is a female doctor at the hospital, Ms. Donoghue has this to say about the 1918 pandemic. "The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life," - Emma Donoghue - The Pull of Our Stars. And what is a virus but a form of life after all? It's a form of life that continues to try to reproduce itself which is no different from the human race. This is true of the Covid pandemic that we are now experiencing as well.This is a remarkable book that looks at the pandemic full on. Ms. Donoghue spares no punches in this book, and she does it all within a surprisingly few pages. show less

Set in Dublin in 1918, as deadly influenza spreads and the war continues, The Pull of the Stars takes place over a mere two-day timespan (Oct. 31-Nov. 1), as Nurse Julia Power works in a hospital, in a repurposed closet now labeled Maternity/Fever: she has three beds of pregnant patients afflicted with the flu. When she arrives at work just after dawn one morning, she finds that she is in charge - and the only person to aid her is Bridie Sweeney, newly arrived to the hospital, not even a "probie" (probationary nurse).

The story is separated into four sections (Red, Brown, Blue, and Black, for the skin color of patients during progressive stages of the flu). Over two days, Nurse Power manages births and deaths, aided only by Bridie and show more occasional visits by a doctor - including another new arrival to the hospital, Dr. Lynn, who is rumored to be an Irish rebel. (Dr. Lynn is the only character based on a real historical figure, Kathleen Lynn.) As the three work to save the lives of mothers and babes through difficult labors and deliveries, Julia and Bridie get to know each other better. But just as Julia begins to hope and plan a way out of Bridie's current situation - and maybe a future for the two of them - she discovers that Bridie has lied about having had the flu already.

Quotes

As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. (12)

My job wasn't to cure all [her] ills but to bring her safe through this particular calamity...to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life. (26)

No need for a certificate of birth or death; legally speaking, nothing had happened here. (re: stillbirth, 100)

Every symptom is a word in the language of disease, but sometimes we can't hear them properly. (Dr. Lynn to Nurse Power, 102)

If a lesson's not learnt, blame the student. But if it's not taught right - or not taught at all - blame the teacher. (Nurse Power to Bridie Sweeney, 103)

Were all [Dublin's] lights going to blink out one by one? (149)

Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you. (154)

Regret seemed all too likely either way. (to marry or not, 154)

This was how civilization might grind to a halt, one rusted-up cog at a time. (the postal delivery being temporarily suspended, 158)

If the war was over by then, what would have taken its place? (168)

What if...there was nothing I could do to rescue mother and child from each other, from their joint and private hell? (215)

I'd stepped so far away from my old life, I wasn't sure I could ever go back. (258)

documentary: Kathleen Lynn: The Rebel Doctor (2011) show less

It may seem like insanity to read a book about a pandemic while currently living through a pandemic. And not just any pandemic but THE pandemic, the one to which all experts compare our current COVID pandemic – the Spanish Influenza epidemic. However, in the capable hands of Emma Donoghue, The Pull of the Stars becomes a story so much more than its setting with its universal themes of hope, love, and compassion.

Told through the eyes of one Julia Power, we experience her life as a midwife living in Dublin in 1919 before the end of the Great War but still in the midst of the Spanish Influenza pandemic. We experience three days as the head nurse of an isolated maternity ward for those pregnant women who have the flu. Short of staff and show more room, we see her come into her own as she must make life-or-death decisions while providing comfort and care to her patients.

Julia is a remarkable character, so well-defined that you forget that she is fictional. Her experiences in those three days are insane and yet one gets the impression that they are also completely normal. Her constant level-headedness and, most importantly, the compassion she shows each of her patients are a refreshing reminder of how people should act in times of crisis.

So much of the story could happen today. Through her patients and through her own commute to and from work we see the same poverty, the same loss, the same abuse, the same scorn for anyone who is different. Even eerier, we read posters that talk about keeping your distance from others to stay healthy, we see people wearing masks to protect themselves, and we see the fear that occurs when someone in public sneezes or coughs. Yet, at no time did I feel uncomfortable about reading the novel. If anything, there is a strange comfort one finds in understanding how little things change sometimes, even when it should.

The one thing The Pull of the Stars did do is to reinforce my belief that the Catholic Church is not only hypocritical but also evil in the damage it has done to those they profess to protect. Taking place in the very Catholic Dublin in a Catholic hospital no less, one encounters the policies established by the Church in a myriad of ways. However, it is the impact of those policies and the Catholic belief system on the women in Julia’s care which drive home that hypocrisy.

The Pull of the Stars is a remarkable story for several reasons. For one, Julia Power is a fascinating character. She doesn’t do anything other than act with compassion, but you finish the novel thinking her the wisest of women. For another, the story has a timeless quality to it because the social issues Julia sees occurring within her own little ward occur across time. Lastly, it reinforces today’s messaging about mask wearing, hand washing, and social distancing as the only acceptable ways to maintain your health while the current influenza virus rages around the globe.

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Emma Donoghue’s startlingly prescient novel, The Pull of the Stars, is set in a Dublin maternity ward during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Specifically, the action takes place over three days beginning on October 31, the day before the novel’s main character, Nurse Julia Power, will turn thirty. Julia’s hospital—ravaged by the effects of the war as well as the worsening pandemic—is impoverished, understaffed and in a perpetual state of crisis (her “ward” is actually a converted supply room with space for three beds reserved for women sick with the flu who are about to give birth). As the novel begins, Julia arrives for her shift to discover that one of her patients has died in the night, and, as the day progresses, Donoghue show more chillingly evokes the myriad and horrific challenges facing health professionals at a time when a deadly illness of mysterious origin is spreading unchecked through the population via mechanisms that defy understanding. The novel’s dramatic urgency derives from the fact that the virulent respiratory illness makes pregnancy and childbirth even more dangerous than it normally is. Julia’s responsibilities to her patients—to ease their distress and see them safely through a period of physical dependency where any number of things can go wrong—often prove impossible to uphold. Over the course of the three days we see her grapple with as many deaths as births—only rarely do the fortunes of her patients match her hopes for them. As we’ve seen previously in Emma Donoghue’s historical fictions, she does not shy away from depicting the squalid and gory details of her characters’ daily lives. In the Pull of the Stars, childbirth is rendered as a torturous rite of passage, fraught with risk for both mother and child. For Ireland’s typical young mother or working-poor female in 1918, there is little beauty or magic in being pregnant, and none of the romance and glowing promise we find in popular representations. It is, in fact, a dread condition for women who are frequently malnourished and physically depleted from caring for already large families and labouring like slaves from dawn to dusk. More often than anyone would like to admit, it is a death sentence. Julia’s concerns and activities are not limited to the hospital, and her emotional life deepens as the action moves forward. She lives in a flat with her brother Tom, who returned from the war shell-shocked and unable to speak. For Julia, Tom is a source of comfort, but also a source of worry and heartache. In the makeshift Maternity/Fever ward, Julia develops a close and surprising bond with a young volunteer worker, Bridie Sweeney. Nurse Julia does not regard herself as naïve—she is acutely aware that unwholesome living conditions are a prime contributor to the misery her patients endure. Experience has taught her that women’s subservience to men and their forced adherence to rigid religious doctrine exact a huge physical toll. But Bridie’s situation as a boarder at a nearby convent opens Julia's eyes to a whole new world of suffering of which she is ignorant. Julia Power understands that there are limits to her influence. She will never fix the rampant inequities to which she is witness. She knows that she is but a miniscule cog in a massive wheel. But she emerges from her experiences over these three days profoundly altered, newly energized to make a difference, to alleviate suffering, to defy the forces of oppression. Emma Donoghue’s novel is written on an intimate, human scale, but its message is large: that if we can find a way to set aside our differences and accept our shared humanity, it will see us through any crisis. show less