The Banyan Tree: A Novel - Softcover

Nolan, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611457572 ISBN 13: 9781611457575

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2014

Synopsis

Covering the eighty-plus years of the life of Minnie O'Brien, who is bound to take her place alongside James Joyce's Molly Bloom, The Banyan Tree is a rich saga of rural Ireland in the twentieth century. In distinctly layered prose that has been compared to that of Joyce, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas, Nolan lovingly details the life and times, the triumphs and tragedies, of this spirited woman, who struggles to keep her body and soul, as well as her modest hopes, alive.

Married in 1922 to Peter O'Brien, a good and decent man who nonetheless harbors a terrible secret, Minnie bears him three children: Brendan, who joins the Church, rises to become a bishop, and is quietly drinking himself to death in New York; Sheila, who marries above herself to a wealthy but nasty Dublin businessman (her marriage, Minnie muses, is "a funeral set to music"); and Francis, the youngest, who leaves home at age seventeen to wander the world in search of fame or fortune—hopefully both. It is for him—Minnie's favorite, the prodigal son—that she jealously struggles to keep the five fields willed her by her husband from the clutches of her ambitious and unscrupulous neighbor Jude Fortune. For, she is sure, one day soon Frankie will put an end to his wanderlust and come home to claim what is rightfully his.

Ostensibly bucolic, The Banyan Tree—feisty and colorful, filled with humor and love—also demonstrates forcibly that the gentle world of Minnie's youth is gone forever.

 

About this title

Review:

The renowned winner of the 1987 Whitbread Award, Christopher Nolan, has fashioned an extraordinary epic set in rural Ireland, spanning three generations of the O'Briens who own a small dairy farm in Westmeath. Minnie O'Brien stubbornly clings on to life, her five fields and her "long-agos" which take root like a banyan tree and feed her lonely old age. Her husband Peter is long dead and her three children scattered in a typical Irish diaspora--Brendan is a priest in Africa, Sheila, a nurse in London and Frankie, a sheep-shearer in Australia and odd-jobber around the globe. Will Frankie return in time to save the farm from the avaricious grasping of the next door neighbour, Jude Fortune and will Minnie discover the betrayal Peter has kept hidden from her?

In many ways, The Banyan Tree is a conventional tale of births, weddings and death set against the land and the lure of emigration. What makes it unusual however is Nolan's flexible, fickle and often fantastical use of the English language. Not only does he use colloquialisms to locate the characters very specifically, but he invents verbs from adjectives, making them come sparklingly alive. The butter churn is a "druidic dark drum" that comes "Sundaying into life".Minnie's memories are noisy things that clutter her mind like "local attaboys" at the races. On the day after her wedding, "morning songed the reading of the streets" as Minnie experienced her "vulved awareness" and "funky heart". Some of Nolan's alliterations and hyphenated words bring the whimsical beauty of Gerald Manley Hopkins to the novel, but occasionally his inventions collapse into the absurd.

When he describes a pony drinking for example, he writes, "slurping her grizzled credentials, she effected a long draught". Although these circumlocutions can trip up the meaning, the narrative works up to a moving climax that will have any offspring far from home reaching for the phone or a plane ticket. --Cherry Smyth

Review:

Richly even baroquely told . . . Nolan writes with verve.” The New York Times Book Review

"A work of genius. Everything in this story simmers with life."--Christian Science Monitor

"Beautifully Written. Nolan mesmerizes us from the opening passage . . . His descriptive prowess reminds one of Joyce."--Boston Sunday Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1611457572
• ISBN 13: 9781611457575
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384