The Banyan Tree: A Novel [Paperback]

Christopher Nolan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2002

Covering the eighty-plus years of the life of Minnie O’Brien, The Banyan Tree is a rich saga of rural Ireland in the twentieth century. In prose as lushly layered as the land it describes, Nolan lovingly details the triumphs and tragedies of this spirited woman, who struggles to keep body and soul, as well as her modest hopes, alive. While her three grown children have long since moved away, she is determined to keep her family’s farm from the tightening grip of her unscrupulous neighbor, in the hope that one day her youngest will return to claim what is rightfully his. Weaving from the gentle world of Minnie’s youth to the harder realities of the present, this sage and soulful story pays homage to a feisty individual spirit as well as a rich collective past.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Winner of the 1987 Whitbread Award for Under the Eye of the Clock, Christopher Nolan has now fashioned an extraordinary epic set in rural Ireland. The Banyan Tree spans three generations of O'Briens, who own a small dairy farm in Westmeath. For years, alas, the family has seen its ranks diminish. Minnie O'Brien's husband 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 an Australian sheepshearer and oddjobber around the globe. In the meantime, Minnie stubbornly clings to her life, her five fields, and her memories, which take root like a banyan tree and feed her lonely old age.

In many ways, The Banyan Tree is a conventional tale of births and deaths, weddings and funerals, all set against the land and the lure of emigration. What makes it unusual is Nolan's flexible, fickle, and often fantastical language. Not only does he use colloquialisms to locate the characters very specifically, but he brings verbs, nouns, and adjectives to sparkling life by allowing them to change places at will. The butter churn is a "druidic dark drum" that comes "Sundaying into life." On the day after Minnie's wedding, the "morning songed the reading of the streets." Even a description of a sleeping baby erupts into Joycean music:

Breathing soundlessly, the baby slept as though he had been there since the house was built. Waves of tenderness winked from her immaculate eyes as she facted where her baby but slept away his drabness.... His minutes were building into hours and his plumbed hours were nearing that transom hour, that bragging hour, when he might bubble burst just to hymn his daylong lifetime.

Nolan's alliterations and galloping hyphenation evoke not only Joyce but the whimsical beauty of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And like Hopkins, he can sometimes overindulge his penchant for verbal shenanigans. But while the author's circumlocutions may clog the narrative from time to time, The Banyan Tree nonetheless works up to a moving climax, and offers a surfeit of linguistic riches along the way. --Cherry Smyth --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Occasionally a book comes along that is so innocent and seemingly unmindful of current literary fashion that, paradoxically, it shocks--Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, Proulx's Shipping News, McCourts's Anglela's Ashes are works that surprised and delighted unsuspecting readers. So will this extraordinary first novel by Irishman Nolan, who, at 33 years of age, has spent his entire life as a quadraplegic, unable to speak. You wouldn't know it from his perfectly crafted, exquisitely written story, telling the life of Minnie (n e Humphries) O'Brien, born and bred in Westmeath, a rural area west of Dublin. One of the extraordinary aspects of The Banyan Tree is its very ordinariness: the only daughter of a shopkeeper, Minnie marries Peter, a farmer; they tend to livestock, churn their own butter, eat their own eggs and raise three children. The langourous narrative takes the reader from the courtship of Minnie's mother by her father at a country fair in the first years of the 20th century all the way to Greenwich Village in the late '80s, and then back to Drumhollow, where Minnie passes away in her little stone house at the end of a long rutted road. The drama, such as it is, unfolds with such naturalness--and without any of the contrived urgencies of plotting--that the reader is transported to a time and place of irresistible charm. Also extraordinary is this book's language. Nolan's lyrical flights, highly evidenced in his Whitbread-winning memoir, Under the Eye of the Clock, published when he was 21, fly even higher here, a mix of the unabstract poetries of Beckett and the soundscapes of James Joyce. This result is a sensorium of light and noise, with prose rhythms hewing to the rhythms of work and revery, everything spiced with local idioms and fokloric fancy, bringing all things in the surround into animate life: stone houses "gather" themselves, the sun hides; cars "agitate the avenue away" as lawns "guffaw" on either side; chestnut trees growl, "adept at their waiting gaze." Despite this intensity, the biography of a family calmly emerges, and readers will be totally absorbed in Minnie's effort to survive her loneliness in the aftermath of her husband's sudden death and her childrens' moves away from their village. With her eldest son a conflicted, besotted Catholic priest in New York, her daughter trapped in a loveless marriage in Dublin and her favored youngest sowing his wild oats in Australia, Minnie holds out, expecting, despite appearances, that the family will reunite and preserve the farm. Nolan, for all the Celtic emoting he accommodates here, remains clear-eyed; and there are no pat solutions or tidy conclusions to this tale that stays true to life while at the same time redeeming it through a love of language and a belief in its ability to forge lasting ties among people and things. 100,000 first printing. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (February 12, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385720688
• ISBN-13: 978-0385720687
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,185,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BUY IT, READ IT, LOVE IT, April 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Banyan Tree (Hardcover)

WHY AREN'T BOOKS LIKE THIS ON THE BESTSELLER LIST? A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN BOOK, THE LANGUAGE TAKES HOLD OF THE READER AND DOESN'T LET GO.

THE STORY ISN'T, PERHAPS, TERRIBLY NEW. THE WAY IN WHICH IT'S TOLD IS BOTH OLD AND NEW, NOSTALGIC AND REFRESHING AT THE SAME TIME.

IT TOOK ME TWO DAYS TO READ BANYON TREE; IT TOOK THE AUTHOR TWELVE YEARS TO WRITE IT. SIMPLY WASN'T A FAIR TRADE, SO I'LL READ IT AGAIN AND AGAIN. I WALKED AROUND HOLDING THE BOOK TO MY CHEST WHEN THE TALE WAS TOLD.

66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lesson For Authors, April 21, 2000

By 

NYC "atravelingreader" (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Banyan Tree (Hardcover)

It is difficult to forget the trials that Christopher Nolan had to endure to even write this book. The end result is an amazing picture of life in rural Ireland during the last Century written in the most amazing manner. The book shows that a simple story when told by a master author can accomplish more than all the twists and turns authors today feel compelled to put into their novels. A wonderful and human story. Highly recommended.

64 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unicorn Stick And Half A Million Clicks, February 29, 2000

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Banyan Tree (Hardcover)

This is a truly special literary work, a gift from the author who spent 12 years creating it.

If you enjoy any of the great authors of fiction from the 19th and early 20th century you will love the book.

Mr. Nolan won The Whitbread Award in 1987, for the work he penned prior to this one, "Under The Eye Of The Clock".

If you enjoy rich enveloping detail that never is tedious, the book is for you. If you enjoy the scope of a work that takes the needed time, that brings to mind the word "epic", and the phrase "sure to be a classic", get this book.

If you are new to his work as am I, you are probably the rule rather than the exception. The last work published by Mr. Nolan was in 1987, and this new work took 12 years. And this leads to the title of this review.

Mr. Nolan is paralyzed and he is mute. He cannot read aloud what he has crafted so as to hear his prose as he means it to be heard. Mr. Nolan has what is called his "Unicorn Stick", attached to his forehead and with the assistance of a helper; he types his works one letter at a time.

"The Banyan Tree" required 500,000 taps on his typewriter over a 12-year period. The book is a remarkable work by any standard, and is made more astonishing by the method he uses to communicate this tale of a Family's History.

The book deserves your full attention, and a bit more time to read. Rushing through the story would lessen the impact of it, and fail to acknowledge the extraordinary effort it took to create.