GOWP Reviews: Flight - Oona Frawley
Despite coming in at a slim 200 pages, Oona Frawley’s debut novel, Flight, is perhaps best described as an ambitious book. It seeks to paint a full and uncompromising picture of the immigrant experience in Ireland- from both sides of the playing field. The novel follows Sandrine: a Zimbabwean school teacher who flees the horrors of poverty and political violence that have come to define her homeland by immigrating to Ireland. Leaving her son and husband behind, the secretly pregnant Sandrine finds herself working full-time as a home carer for Tom and Clare: a once fiercely independent couple whose minds are now in the grip of dementia. Tom and Clare reluctantly depend on their world-weary daughter Elizabeth to help them live in a world they recognise less and less of.
The novel's action is spread out across the globe: Ireland, the U.S, Vietnam and Africa all play a prominent role. Flight is a novel that is intimately aware of just how difficult it can be to forge a cultural identity in a globalised world. The story of Tom and Clare’s daughter Elizabeth is a particularly moving exposition of this phenomenon. Elizabeth is a member of a new breed of Irish children. Born to globetrotting parents, she is shuttled from continent to continent as a result of her father’s spice trading business. In Ireland she is harangued about her British sounding name, in Vietnam she befriends a girl who claims to be French despite having never been to France, and in America (the land without history), she is simply ‘Lizzy’: a normal high-school girl. Flight is the first Irish novel I have come across that gives these displaced children a voice. Significantly, one of the first things Sandrine notes about Elizabeth is that her accent is conspicuously different to the accents of her parents. Frawley does a wonderful job of exploring the things that alienate children from their parents. Flight is a novel that asks serious questions about what words like ‘family’ can really mean in 21st century Ireland.
But it is Sandrine’s story that acts as the centrepiece of Flight. Rarely has the immigrant experience been so sensitively and deeply explored. The character of Sandrine forces the reader to empathise with the immigrant population as a whole. The story of Sandrine and her struggle to find a home goes a long way to dismantling the immigrant’s lonely and venerable status as ‘other’ in Irish society and literature. In Flight we see both sides of the coin. We are exposed to the struggles of those who left Ireland looking for a better life and the struggles those who have come to Ireland searching of the very same thing.
Frawley writes long, lyrical sentences. The reader is effortlessly transported from the violent beauty of coastal Ireland to the oppressive heat of exotic Vietnam. Frawley is that rare thing: a gifted prose stylist who is also capable of dealing with complicated ideas and situations. Perhaps her one weakness as a writer is dialogue, which in Flight can often sound just slightly inauthentic. But this minor shortcoming is overcome by weaving most of the novel’s dialogue into passages of great descriptive beauty. Flight was written nearly ten years ago, around the time of the 2004 Citizens Referendum, and failed to find a home despite positive feedback. It is easy to see why. Flight is, as the beginning of this review states, an ambitious novel and as is often the case with brave, new work, it is difficult to categorize. And thus difficult to market. Flight is a novel for anyone interested in memory, identity, family, the dark side of the Celtic Tiger or the global world we now inhabit. It is also a novel for anyone who loves a great story that packs an emotional punch. It is a novel for lovers of lush, poetic prose. But it is probably not for people who dislike shedding quiet tears on public busses as they reach the end of novels (as this reviewer did). Flight is an impressive debut novel.
Flight is published by Tramp Press and available in available to buy here.
Words: Christian Cooney
