‘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. Much more than a memory. She heard a storm break in her hollow heart, which was not her own storm, for that was over, but rather an assault, a sentimental menacing appeal, from past and future and from nowhere, from the child’s voice and from her father’s.
Through Anna, Reverend Mother revisits her past, ‘the land of spices, something understood’ of George Herbert’s ‘Prayer’, and reaches, like Herbert’s postulant, that state of understanding. Internally, if not visibly, she allows the ice around her heart to thaw, a significant breakthrough for one ‘who had forgone alike the sweets and the schooling of self-expression’. Ironically, having attained this breakthrough, she is promoted within the international order of which the Mellick convent is the Irish outpost, and prepares to take up a position in which her daily human contact will be greatly reduced. Anna, too, exchanges one institution for another, at the end of the novel departing the convent for university.
In prose of incantatory elegance The Land of Spices weaves its subtle spell: sophisticated and complex, irradiated by kindness and wisdom despite the chill of its chief protagonists. Of Reverend Mother’s father, O’Brien tell us, he was ‘so obsessed by the beauty of personal freedom, and the human obligation of non-interference’. Having lost her own personal freedom through her father’s wantonness, Reverend Mother seizes an opportunity for interference in Anna’s life, and restores to the child she loves that gift of personal freedom she has spent her religious life denying.
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