Nuala O'Faolain combines the lush narrative style of the 19th century novel with hard-edge contemporary morality in this melancholy tale of a travel writer coming to terms with her rootlessness and loneliness. Kathleen de Burca left her native Ireland as soon as she was old enough, to escape poverty and family dysfunction. Despite her professional success and the outward glamour of her life, she lives in a dank basement apartment and habitually betrays meaningful relationships in favor of degrading sexual encounters. In its beginning chapters, the book reads as if it might be just another whiny tale of ennui and amorality among shallow and neurotic cosmopolitan types. But when Kathleen returns to Ireland to do research for a book about an affair between a British landowner's wife and an Irish servant during the potato famine, the scope broadens and deepens. In returning to her home and researching what she at first thinks of as not much more than a romance novel, Kathleen comes face to face with the familial and historical roots of her own shame and self-hatred.
It's never a good idea to get all of your history from a work of fiction, but good fiction can illuminate and personalize historical events. In this case, the author, a columnist for The Irish Times, explores the personal and social costs more than a century later of the potato famine, the brutality of the British occupation of Ireland and lingering British bigotry against the Irish. And she tells a damn good story in the meantime, with surprising plot twists and the kind of suspense that arises when the reader comes to genuinely care about the characters. Ultimately, the book is warm, optimistic and life affirming.
If you missed My Dream of You when it came out in hardcover, it's well worth the price of the new softcover edition.
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2002.
