Customer Reviews

Ghost Light

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ghost Light: A Novel is a transcendent experience, a radiant love story which speaks of a passion that shimmers in ghost light, "An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own plays."

Joseph O'Connor with a virtuosic, literary master stroke has melded fact with fiction in this captivating tribute to love ~ the story of Irish playwright J M Synge and his lover Molly Allgood, the Irish actress with the stage name of Maire O'Neill. This beautiful novel of Irish lore and lyricism has given me hours and hours of pure reading pleasure. Ghost Light: A Novel is so stunning that I found myself rereading paragraphs or entire pages over and over again just to revel in literary excellence.

When I come across a book like this in which I am particularly captivated, I mark certain pages that I want to reread again later with little slips of paper. When I finished this book, I had to laugh at myself because practically all of its pages have little slips of paper sticking out between them! This is one of those rare books where one can open up to any page and find the most extraordinary language, imagery, metaphor, or a passage or phrase that will transport one to another time, another place. For many of these remarkable qualities I am reminded of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and I know that this book is of those great traditions and deserves to be read again and again.

Yet it is not a book for everybody. Many will not appreciate the stream of consciousness narrative. Some will feel bogged down by the meanderings or recursions back and forth among the 50 years of time or setting which skips from Dublin to London to America. But if one approaches Ghost Light: A Novel with a willingness to surrender to the magic of its fractured narrative, a richly rewarding experience can be had.

The novel opens in a dodgy London boarding house in a seedy neighborhood of 1952, not long after dawn when the elderly, hung-over Molly is reviewing her past and facing yet another lonely day in her old age. In Molly's stream of consciousness voice: "You are sixty-five now," is said in the second person narrative which O'Connor brilliantly uses throughout the novel to bring the reader closer to Molly ~ you are her, she is you, or "you" can be Molly speaking to herself, or "you" is Synge being addressed to by Molly. Other times Molly's stream of thoughts shifts into a more usual third person narrative to evoke raptures of the past or to the first person to represent the drifting of Molly's consciousness, all bringing her entire life into the capsule of one day near the end of her life. It's O'Connor's genius to use this technique of flexible narrative voice ~ the effect produces both intimacy and distancing at the same time.

Living alone except for the ghostly presence of her lover Synge, the man with "martyr-sad eyes" who died so long ago, Molly tells a story with a mind that is rich in literary allusion. In fact, Molly has so much literature in her ~ Irish songs, poems, plays ~ that Synge's imagination was fed by Molly. Young Molly, as O'Connor envisions her, is a charming and playful heroine, a pretty, robust and intelligent fledgling actress who fell in love with the much older playwright whom she first met at the Abby Theatre in Dublin. Molly was totally committed to the well being of her gloomy, difficult and chronically ill lover, although in truth everything was against their relationship: the age gap, differences in class and religion, family hostilities, professional disapproval from the theatre, Synge's ill health. Yet they were drawn to each other and Molly loved him fiercely. She loved him for what he was, a man who would lose himself in himself, but whom she could draw out and inspire. She was his lover and his muse and theirs was a great love story.

Now, Molly ~ elderly, drunken, poverty stricken, alone and in the last days of her life, remembers Synge... not her two husbands, but her first love, her "Tramp", her Johnny Synge. Her mind drifts in and out of reverie, back to a now vanished Dublin and Wicklow where Molly and Synge carried out their affectionate but quarrelsome relationship. Back in the now as she shambles alone through the streets of bombed-scarred London, making her way to the BBC for what will be her final performance, she proceeds with the same trained deportment, the same courage and dignity that she has always gathered in the face of her trials and challenges. After all, the show must go on.

O'Connor closes the book with a beautiful heartfelt letter that Molly wrote to Synge but never sent. It was found among her papers after her death. The letter is an expression of Molly's heart, a sentiment which is charming and soulful and a most fitting way to end a story about a great love between a playwright and his muse.

I love this book dearly and rank it high among my favorite works of Irish literature.

Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor is a brilliant and complex book. It is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. The language is poetic and hallucinatory and this is a book where one can't skip passages or lines. Every word is necessary and the whole is a gift put together with the greatest care and love.

The novel is about a grand love affair between Molly Allgood, an actress (stage name Maire O'Neill) and the playwright John Synge, most well-known for his play, Playboy of the Western World. The book starts out in 1952 on the streets of post-war London. Molly, 67 years old, is walking the cold blustery city and freezing. She lives in a hovel and drinks too much. She is hungry and cold, going from one sheltered spot to another and hallucinating from the the alcohol, her hunger and her freezing. She is on her way to a BBC radio reading and on her way she remembers, in broken dream sequences, her relationship with John Synge.

Molly and John Synge had an affair and at the time of their affair she was eighteen years old and he was thirty-six. John was very ill, most likely with lymphoma but perhaps tuberculosis or some other lung disease. He had one neck surgery after another. He lived only two years after they met. They came from opposite sides of the tracks. Molly was an actress who was from a mixed marriage - protestant and catholic - and she worked with her mother in a drapery shop. John came from old money and was of protestant background. He had a symbiotic relationship with his mother which made his relationship with Molly doomed from the start as his mother would not permit him to bring Molly home and threatened to cut off his trust fund should he marry her.

The book goes back and forth in time from 1952 London to 1905 Dublin where Molly and John were involved in a theater group. John was the resident playwright for William Yeats and the Grand Dame of the theater was Lady Augusta Gregory. Molly was an actress in the theater troupe. In those days it was very risqué for women to act.

Molly and John had to keep their affair a secret because John was terribly afraid of anyone finding out. He and Molly met on trains and traveled to Wicklow together for a vacation but acted like they did not know one another in Dublin. The affair was tender and poignant. John was very ill and the marriage was doomed from the start, never to be realized. They remained engaged until John's death. John called Molly his Pegeen, his Changeling girl.

We travel with Molly to the United States where she acted after John's death. She recollects the plays she was in and the popularity she had. She ended up marrying a philandering husband and had two children, a son who died during World War II and a daughter from whom she is semi-estranged because she can not get along with her son-in-law.

The novel contains imagined letters and real letters between the two lovers and hallucinatory memories from Molly's desperate mind as she tries to stay alive despite the difficult circumstances she finds herself in. My favorite parts of the novel are when it travels to 1905 and the reader gets to participate in the acting troupe with the great Synge and Yeats.

Parts of this novel are true and other parts are fictional according to Mr. O'Connor. Mr. O'Connor grew up in Dublin near the Synge house and was fascinated by the playwright's life. This novel is the outcome of his fascination. In some ways it reminded me of the poetic beauty of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. Sense of place is very important. This is a novel with grand scope and great beauty, one that will not be forgotten by any lover of literature.

Joseph O'Connor has fashioned a marvelous novel, a reimaging of the love affair of John Millington Synge - the famous playwright of Playboy of the Western World and other fine works - and the younger, less well-stationed Molly Allgood, who performed under the name of Maire O'Neill.

"Certain biographers will want to beat me with a turf shovel," O'Connor states in his aftermath. Indeed, in reading that aftermath, this is not the book for those who are seeking a historically-correct look into these principals. It is definitely fiction.

But what fiction it is! It sings, glows, and at times, reads like sheer poetry. There are hints of James Joyce in the stream-of-consciousness. It all flows from the title Ghost Light, which O'Connor defines later in the book, "An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own play."

And within the confines of this novel, these "ghosts" definitely do. The "play" begins in 1952; Molly, now quite old and penurious, is in London where is to record a radio play for the BBC studios. There, in an alcoholic haze, she muses upon the highlights of her life: as an actress at Abbey Theatre of Dublin, her acquaintance with Yeats, and most of all, her love affair with the much-older John M. Synge.

She remembers that Synge was "a man who could see into things - very ordinary things...His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet."

Ah, poetry! By using the documented framework of Synge - his ascension to the top of his craft, his complicated relationship with his widowed mother (who strongly disapproved of his "liaison"), his engagement to Molly, his early death at age 37 - Mr. O'Connor expands his story, weaving fiction in with the fact. His portrayal of Molly - playful, wayward, with a spirited independence - is sublime. And then, Mr. O'Connor goes further, also weaving some highlights of the Abbey Theatre and the cruelty of class-consciousness into his tapestry. A most amazing book - and very recommended by this reader.

This is one of the most beautifully written and well-conceived novels I've read in a very, very long time. This not a quick fast-paced item nowadays called "a read." It is an honest-to-goodness book. It cannot be skimmed, constructed as it is with a glorious use of language that is sheer pleasure, along with characters so intimately crafted that it is actually wrenching to come to the end and be separated from both the writing and the people. For those who aren't in a tearing hurry to get through the next item on their bedside reading stack, this is a dream of a book. I am still marveling over the wealth of detail, past and present, all of it stemming from the mind of a touching, irritating, fully realized, funny, rude, gifted and good-hearted, utterly remarkable woman. Don't miss this! This is a keeper, a book to be reread. Most highly recommended.

The main character, for she cannot be called a heroine, is an elderly, alcoholic actress in 1950's Britain. Her life is described in elliptical, ongoing, fluid, dreamlike, and sometimes horrific detail.

Written like a bad dream with flashbacks from here to twenty years ago and then back again, this is a story of love without reward or redemption, and achievement without any lasting ends. It falls into the genre of books that one tends to think of as "European Poverty", e.g., hunger and minor thievery described so realistically that one is tempted to check the cupboards. (Think Frank McCourt, if he were in his nineties, and still living in Ireland, or even some of Doestoevsky's works written about prison, although the prison here is one of dashed hopes and a lonely old age.)

This is beautiful and very sad. You'll want to finish it to find out what happens, but then you'll be sorry, because it's wistfully painful and quite memorable.

I quite disliked the first two thirds of this book -- but that may actually be a tribute to the author, whose only faults are depressing choice of subject and an occasional tendency to overwrite. I should have known from the title: a ghost light is the single bulb left burning in the middle of the stage after the last actor has gone home; it is a desolate image. The Irish playwright John Millington Synge left behind a fiancée at the time of his death, a young actress named Molly Allgood. There is certainly potential interest in their relationship, forged across the divisions of age, class, and religion. But in his afterword, O'Connor admits to reading more into this than the facts can support, and it took me a long time to believe in their love as a living passion. Molly was only 24 when Synge died of cancer in 1909, and she had a long life to live out, in tours of Britain and America that became increasingly threadbare. As a theatre person myself facing my own retirement, I may be unusually sensitive. But when the book opens with an old woman, living in penury in a London bed-sit, selling empty bottles to buy cheap brandy, you just know that she is not going to arrive at the BBC that evening in a fit state to read her small part in a Sean O'Casey play for the overseas radio service, perhaps her last chance in a vanished career. I had to force myself to keep reading.

The book jacket shines with praise for O'Connor's writing. Much of it is indeed excellent, but a little self-conscious; its quality seems to lie outside the story rather than being truly integral. Here, for example, is Molly anticipating that broadcast: "And perhaps there is an otherworld only radio waves can attain, where the dead are listening quietly together. Her son, her two husbands, the man in the photograph on the mantelshelf, her brothers, her mother, Yeats, her sister. The brave, broken boys who died in the war. The murdered of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Memory is their oxygen, megahertz their rain. Their country has no currency or flag. The aurora borealis is their national anthem, for they are able to hear colours, touch sounds. Their flicker-lit eyes see no blitzes, no firestorms. Their language needs no words for torture." Sonorous and evocative prose, for sure, but it segues from the real thoughts in Molly's mind to ideas that belong solely to the author, taking us away from the central character rather than deeper into her life. This is not an isolated case; O'Connor's writing is often pitched in a higher register than would be appropriate, even in an Irish context. Synge's censorious mother speaks like a character out of melodrama; when Molly overhears a conversation between him and Lady Gregory, she at first thinks it is a scene from a new play -- as well it might be, but not one by Synge, whose own ear for speech was impeccable.

After about 100 pages, nonetheless, the book picks up. Paradoxically, O'Connor does more to convince me by showing the characters' reversals than their sweet-talk. The chapter leading to the premiere of Synge's masterpiece, THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, begins with a furious quarrel at the Abbey Theatre, saved only by the intervention of Yeats. An escape to a cottage in Wicklow reveals stresses between the couple that somehow authenticate their idyll. There are two grotesque set-pieces when they introduce each other to their respective mothers, and a chilling one as Molly is fobbed off by Synge's family after the funeral to which she was not even invited. And my first prediction turns out to be wrong: Molly's radio broadcast is indeed a climax, but not at all of the nature I might have imagined. Yes, Joseph O'Connor has the skill to pull some light out of the darkness -- there are some beautiful moments in these last pages -- but if I had not undertaken to review the book for Vine, I would never have stayed around long enough for the illumination.

The reviews on the front and back cover of the book set my expectations pretty high: "...I found myself going more and more slowly because I didn't want to miss a single sentence...It is a rare and wonderful book...I can't imagine many better-or braver-novels than Ghost Light coming out this year." While Ghost Light was a very well-written and intriguing piece of fiction I found that it fell short of such grandiose praise.

In postwar London former actress Molly Allgood struggles to survive amidst great poverty. She is also an alcoholic. As she wanders about her day her thoughts turn to the past, to the time she spent with John Synge, a renowned playwright. The two carried on an illicit affair despite differences in age, class, education, and religion.

As a reader you never feel like you really get to know Molly outside of her relationship with Synge. The few parts in which the elderly Molly interacts with the shopkeeper and policeman are rare bright parts. As she humorously puts on an act for them you see some personality for a change. Likewise, the reader really never learns why it is that opposites like Molly and Singe fell in love.

As far as plotting goes this is not a page-turner. Rather it is best read slowly, taking your time to enjoy the beautiful prose. Most of the action occurs in Molly's reflections of her relationship to Synge. And for that matter the action is merely the highs and lows of a doomed affair. Where this book shines is that captures in evocative and elegant prose the subtle aspects of a love affair. The language is beautiful and is near poetic in some scenes.

For me, the second-person narrative really took away from the story. It was distracting to be on the one hand following Molly around London and her memories while also being told the story as if I were Molly. This lead to some bizarre issues with perception that I haven't before experienced when reading a book. For example, a particular paragraph begins with Molly in front of a theatre thinking, "Do they think I am dead?" but concludes with the second-person phrase, "A swirl of damp wind strikes your face." This had an overall disjointing effect on the work.

Those fond of prose should not miss Ghost Light for it contains some of the finest prose I've come across (which is why it earns 4 stars in my book). However, I believe Ghost Light will frustrate readers who are not patient and do not appreciate a slow-paced albeit rich story.

I really enjoyed O'Connor's 'Star of the Sea' and was eager to read 'Ghost Light'. This novel is a fictionalization of the life of Molly Allgood, who was in love with and engaged to John Synge the Irish playwright at the time of his death.

O'Connor introduces us to Molly who is now sixty five years old living in London, the year is 1952. She is alone and lives in a less than desirable part of the city, she drinks gin to ease her mind and sometimes drinks too much. She looks back on her life and the love she had with Synge. She shares those memories with the reader through the foggy haze of cold, hunger and inebriation.

While much of this novel is beautifully written it was also often difficult to follow, time and place turn in within a thought and it's often difficult to know where you are, in the present or the past.

The narration itself was a bit of a puzzle to me, it too shifts, actions are described in the third person as well as the first person. Some observations are given in an almost staccato rhythm, then a moment later the words are beautifully arranged, nearly poetry. John Synge interjects his thoughts and opinions periodically. And while I'm certain that every word of this novel was intentional, my uncertainty is only with regard to how much I enjoyed it.

I loved some of this novel but as a whole it was difficult to follow. I think writers and fans of literature will appreciate this work. Readers who typically enjoy popular fiction may want to try O'Connor's 'Star of the Sea', which is in my opinion much more accessible to the common man.

I was drawn to this book because the plot seemed interesting, but what may very well be a great story at the core was completely extinguished by the god-awful stream of consciousness narrative, completely detracting from the confusing events that unfold in a jagged and scattered way, jumping backward in time and then forward again, while every single sentence consists of several dozen more descriptive words than necessary, and you find yourself wishing that the author would just hurry things along and get to the freaking point, before all is lost and you die of boredom while trying to muddle through this horrid book.

Yeah. It's like that. NOT GOOD. Disappointing, too, because "Ghost Light" is loosely based on historical events, and it has the potential to be a great story. However, the redundant and exaggerated writing style quickly sucked all the interest and enjoyment out of this book for me. Do not waste your time.

This was a lovely book. It's a highly fictionalized account of the life of Molly Allgood, a young Irish actress who had an affair with the playwright John Synge in the early 1900's.

The structure was unusual. When the book starts, Molly is in her 60's, destitute, and living alone in a rundown flat in London. She's sold everything of value, including all of Synge's letters to her, and she's a drunk. In "real time", the book encompasses just one day. She's been hired for a radio program, and as she walks from her flat to the BBC building, she remembers her life with John and (more fleetingly) her acting career.

The language is gorgeous but the book is sometimes confusing. At times she talks to herself in third person, and toward the end, her thoughts are a jumble, a puzzle to be worked out. It's sad and funny, but what comes through most is Molly's good nature and deep feelings for people.