The Star of the Sea

by Joseph O’Connor

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

News travels. The day after book group, someone in the staffroom at work said to me – I hear your book group was lively last night.

It was. Possibly the best yet.

We talked and talked, often all of us at the same time, eager to get our opinions heard over everyone else’s. We were almost uncivilised.

We talked about Pius Mulvey. Was he evil? Did he become evil or become more evil as the book progressed? Or was he unusually consistent throughout? Was he likeable or despicable or both together? Did his love for Mary redeem him in any way? What was the worst thing he did – killing William Swales or stealing his brother’s land and wife? Or killing the guard in Newgate? I put forward the view that in situations of starvation and imminent death, things such as friendship become a luxury. Mulvey killed Swales in order to survive himself, rather than from pure evil. Others disagreed – he could have stolen elsewhere – it wasn’t such a stark choice as kill your friend or die yourself. But Mulvey was too far down the line by that point – he had already killed – and brutally. He enjoyed killing the guard – spilled enough of his blood to use as ink for quite a long quotation in the sand. He killed Swales because he liked him. He liked him so much he wanted to be him. He wanted his life, his job as a schoolmaster and the respect which that brought. He wanted it, so he took it. That was the bottom line with Mulvey – he took what he wanted.

The time spent as a schoolmaster was the best of life for him. He still had the idea of Mary to sustain him. The belief that she might be waiting for him with his child. The possibility she might take him back and they could become a happy family. The children in the school respected and liked him as did the villagers. It was the only time in his life that he was liked.

Then the bubble burst and he returned to Ireland to find his dreams and his world in tatters. That is when I would say the evil entered his soul. Before he was selfish, thieving, murderous and unlikeable. But now malice floods through and colours everything. The older brother, the hardworking, pious, good looking elder brother who overshadowed his childhood and took the lions share of their mother’s love, has ‘stolen’ the dream of a happy life which had been sustaining him. All he has left to sustain him now is revenge.

And revenge is also an essential part of Mary Duane. After Pius has forced her and her husband off the land, stolen her self respect by seducing her, and pushed them into such dire circumstances that her husband kills both himself and the child, she writes the letter which sets the whole train of events, which are the story of Star of the Sea, in motion. What happens to Mulvey before during and after the voyage is the revenge of Mary Duane.

Of course, she doesn’t know that the Liable men will punish Mulvey by putting him on the same boat as her, with orders to kill the other man who once loved her and left her. She doesn’t know that Merridith is in fact her half brother and love between them would be impossible for that reason. There is a lot she doesn’t know.

And a lot we don’t know about her. We rarely get close to Mary Duane. Apart from her letter to the Liable men (which is mostly statements of facts) we never hear Mary’s voice. We never get as close to her thoughts again as at that happy time when she loved Merridith and he used to write to her from England. What Mary thinks and feels, Joseph O’Connor doesn’t tell us. We see her as other people see her. She is a device for moving the story along, a person for other people to react against.

As such she is the backbone of the story. The pillar around which all the others rotate. We don’t know what happens to Mary when she arrives in America. Dixon spends years chasing glimpses which might be her. She was apparently a prostitute for a while. This, along with the distance at which we, as readers, are kept from Mary, makes her more a type than a character. A symbol of all the thousands of nameless women who took this journey to America, only to find there was nothing for them except the most lowly of professions.

Most of us liked David Merridith. He had good intentions. He wanted to do right by people. He was a good father who had a fairly intimate and modern relationships with his two sons, who seem as likely to come to him with their problems as to their mother (until, towards the end, when he is losing his grip on life, he slaps Robert at the dinner table in front of the guests). It is interesting, however, how attached to Dixon the two boys seem to be. So much so, that as young adults they add his name to theirs, losing the Merridith in the middle.

Merridith is also a type. He is the last of a weakened and dying aristocracy which has no place in the New World. He is poor at making decisions and at making his feelings known. Although he has fairly radical beliefs for his class regarding the famine, when he speaks in the House of Lords, all he gets is ridicule. He isn’t forceful enough to push his point across.

He doesn’t stand up to his father as a young man over the matter of his and Mary’s courtship, and therefore doesn’t find out that he is her half brother until much later, when it is impossible to mend his relationship with her. Although he marries Laura against his father’s will, he never lets this be known. Her parents are kept in the dark. He falls into the whorehouses of the East End as though he can’t help himself, is weakened by laudanum addiction, and finally falls victim to syphilis. It is a sad and wasted life.

Dixon explains that for Merridith, death by murder was a positive choice, as death by either suicide or syphilis would have stripped his sons of the family name. It is poignant then, that as soon as they are able they choose to reject that name.

Merridith hopes to build properties in New York. He wants to replicate the sprawling mansions of the English and Irish aristocracy. He believes talk of multi-floored buildings to be a nonsense. But he is wrong. America isn’t a land for the old aristocracy which, like Merridith, is weakened and diseased. America is for the likes of Mary, the offspring of the old and the new, with strong mixed blood running in her veins. And those like Meadowes, with brutal energy, adaptable and willing to exploit the new land for what it can give him.

With Merridith gone, Laura and Dixon are free to love each other. They marry with almost indecent haste, and begin, what should be, a new and blissful life in the New World. This should be our happy ending.

Of course, it isn’t. The marriage lasts for eighteen months, and although they never get divorced, and stay good friends thereafter, the implication is that the relationship is platonic, the romance evaporated.

There are probably many reasons for this. One might have been Laura’s grief for her husband. After all, once upon a time Merridith and Laura were in love. They married against his father’s wishes because they loved each other. And if Merridith’s love for her was mixed with other feelings to do with his father and his own independence, there is no reason to think that Laura’s were. As their relationship deteriorated, Laura stuck by him. Although the times made it difficult for a woman to leave her husband, her family were rich and modern and would probably have stood by her. Her relationship with Dixon seems to be something she has fallen into through a need for love and affection, rather than a whirlwind romance like the one which began her marriage.

For Dixon, carrying the silent burden of guilt of Merridith’s murder for the whole of his long life, Laura’s sadness would have been doubly difficult to cope with. They have both brought too much painful baggage with them from the Old World for their relationship to stand much of a chance.

We discussed the epilogue. Some of us didn’t like it, some of us loved it, others didn’t seem to have read it very carefully!! That it was possible to miss Dixon’s confession entirely, I feel shows the imperfections of Star of the Sea as a novel. The confession seems tacked on to the end, there is no lead up to it. The revelation is not accompanied by an “oh, of course!” on the part of the reader. Just a fairly flat “oh.”

That’s not to say the book wasn’t hugely enjoyable and thought provoking, just that it wasn’t perfect. And what book is? Ellis Bell’s Wuthering Heights? The works of Dickens? We talked about the appearance of these authors and their works in the book. Also about the portrayal of history here and elsewhere.

“History happens in the first person but is written in the third. This is what makes history a completely useless art.”David Merridith (undergraduate) from Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

This is a simplistic view of history, and it is telling that Merridith wrote it as a immature undergraduate. But it led to some discussion on the value of history, and the difference between what we read in text books and what was the truth. And as to what is most important – the truth or our perceptions of it.

The history in this book is not the history we learned at school. There have been so many injustices and tragedies in the world it is impossible to learn about all of them. But this being so close to home – and so recent – we wondered that it was not taught in schools. Probably because the repercussions are part of our ongoing political climate.

Star of the Sea is also a book of its time. As Robert pointed out, historical novels and science fiction novels have something in common – they both tell you more about the time they were written than the era they are written about. Joseph O’Connor is trying to give a voice to people who had no voice, to show us a picture which has been hidden from the world. And we can be sure that there are many similar pictures being hidden from us right now.