Double rescue from the cold

‘I am entirely against the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life,’ wrote Kate O’Brien, with just that chilling aloofness that marks out her two heroines in The Land of Spices. Mère Marie-Hélène, Reverend Mother of the convent school of La Compagnie de la Sainte Famille in Mellick (a fictionalised Limerick), and Anna Murphy, her youngest pupil, each form a single deep emotional attachment — Reverend Mother to her father, Anna to her brother Charlie. Both attachments fall victim to human frailty (sexual transgression on Reverend Mother’s father’s part, the physical weakness of the human body when pitted against the elements in Charlie’s case), and nun and pupil find themselves alone, remote from those who daily surround them. Anna is incapable of humorous thoughts or utterances; Reverend Mother finds comedy in the foibles of fellow-nuns and the parents of her pupils, observing not partaking.

At the start of the novel — a girls’ school story and story of convent life that is determinedly grown-up in expression and intent — Reverend Mother’s emotional Waterloo is comfortably in the past. Anna’s heartbreak is yet to come. The two form a bond that is eventually expressed by Reverend Mother, never so by Anna.

Central to Kate O’Brien’s novel is her refusal to pander to the reader’s longing that Marie-Hélène and Anna should express their mutual dependence, gratitude and, we assume, love in the language of romantic fiction, thereby offering closure and a neatly happy resolution. Anna knows that she has touched Reverend Mother’s heart, but she did so inadvertently, without motive, simply by exercising the vulnerable charm innate to an anxious six-year-old. For Reverend Mother, the encounter is more significant:

Reverend Mother heard, on the little voice, wild floods and cataracts of memory.