The Queen of Dirt Island

“Oh, but look. What could be known about people in their privacies? No eyes could see beyond a closed door or into a heart.”

This passage takes place while Saoirse is still a child trying to understand the social parameters of the place she lives in. Girls, Saoirse realizes, face all sorts of rumors about their personal behavior; however, she also knows none of those rumors reflect what’s really happening on the inside. This insight will be reflected and repeated throughout the narrative, as those judging eyes and rumors turn on her when she becomes pregnant as a teenager.

“She was crying because, for the first time in her life, in this office of a woman whose job it was to protect children, she was afraid. Saoirse Aylward was fourteen years and nine months into her life before she felt fear.”

This moment represents a firm break for Saoirse from her sheltered and idyllic childhood as she enters the wider and more nuanced world of adults. After this moment, Saoirse begins to experience the judgment, rejection, and exclusion that come from pursuing her desires as a young woman.

“Your mother broke my parents’ hearts. She’s a whore. Do you know what that is? And all Saoirse could do was nod. There was nothing she could do about the pain that rose in her throat, the pounding in her head.”

As with Saoirse’s interaction with the social worker, this conversation with her abusive uncle Richard during a funeral represents a distinct moment in which the cruelties of the outside world infringe upon the perspective that Saoirse has built for herself. This moment also foreshadows Richard’s future escalation, which culminates in his physical attack on Eileen over a land dispute much later in the novel.

“She felt again that oppressive weight, that narrowing and closing of the world into a tight smallness, a knot of meanness and unfairness.”

Part of Saoirse’s character arc consists of the slow dismantling of her trust in others, particularly men. Due to the close nature of her family, Saoirse frequently puts her trust in people, such as her aunt Doreen and her future boyfriend, Josh, who end up betraying her. This moment with Oisín is the first time that Saoirse’s trust is betrayed, and her reaction to this betrayal forms the basis for her development through the rest of the narrative.

“And then Chris said: Remember, Eileen, how you were put to shame. We won’t ever do to Saoirse what was done to you. We’ll never ever make her feel ashamed.”

Eileen’s extreme reaction to her daughter’s pregnancy stems from the shame that she experienced at the hands of her own family. While Eileen doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes that she did, it takes her brothers-in-law to remind her that the negative consequences were due to her treatment at her family’s hands, and she shouldn’t treat Saoirse the same way.

“Happiness was a strange notion, something that was wrapped neatly and packed into the closing scenes of television shows and daytime films, sharply relieved on the screen but blurry in real life, a vague ideal. She wanted Pearl to be happy, of course, in a pure and uncomplicated way, and she thought that she was.”

The motif of happiness—who is allowed to feel it and who demonstrates it—is an ongoing concern in the novel. Saoirse wants her daughter to be happier than her, just as Eileen wanted Saoirse to be happier than she was. However, that notion of happiness is inevitably complicated as the difficulties of the real world intrude.

“You only get one life, and no woman should spend any part of it being friends with men. That’s not what men are for.”

With characteristic bluntness, Nana informs Saoirse that women are the only people she can rely on. This gender divide is reinforced throughout the book as Saoirse is repeatedly betrayed by the men she chooses to trust.

“Saoirse took a doleful stock of herself. Twenty-one years of age with a three-year-old daughter. No Leaving Certificate, never even had a job. Never really had a proper boyfriend, except Oisín who’d hardly been more than a crush that grew into an obsession in her mid-teens and ended in a burst of anger in an alleyway in Nenagh.”

Saoirse’s character arc through the novel partially rests on the dissatisfaction she feels with the life that she has. Saoirse has an internalized narrative about herself, reflecting the motif of storytelling, but that narrative shifts and adapts as she grows older, eventually culminating in her becoming a successful novelist, able to translate that internalized narrative into stories for others.

“Josh’s eyes were closed above her, and she wondered why he wasn’t looking at her, and she was about to tell him to stop when he opened his eyes, and she saw in them a light reflected from her own eyes, and she chose to believe that it was love that she saw there, furiously lit, and she drew him down and into her, and it was love, it was.”

In her desire to achieve the life she wants, Saoirse pursues Josh romantically, despite her initial reservations and Josh’s strange behavior. In doing so, Saoirse tries her best to become her role model Honey. The relationship is founded on both Saoirse and Josh wishing that Saoirse were someone else, and it inevitably falls apart.

“She wondered about his life with Honey. Had she a right to know? He hardly ever mentioned her. When he did he’d cast his eyes downwards, in shame, she presumed, or in embarrassment at his behaviour. She wanted badly to know exactly what he was thinking but she was afraid to ask him. She wanted to be worldly and sophisticated like Honey, to just know things, to pick up reflexively, effortlessly on the cues and signals that people emitted, to read the truth of them through the gaps between their words and actions.”

In this passage, Saoirse demonstrates the jealousy that she feels toward Honey and the deep insecurity about her role in Josh’s life. Throughout her own experience, Saoirse has been treated as disposable by people outside her immediate family; this wariness continues throughout the rest of Josh’s and Saoirse’s relationship.

“Ye didn’t think anyone could see what ye were doing. You leaning against the trunk of a tree and young Elmwood behind you and your skirt up around your waist and your knickers down and he going at you like a young bull. And that poor child asleep in her buggy at the edge of the water.”

After inviting Saoirse over, Doreen berates her over her relationship with Josh, implying she’s a bad mother. While lakes and pools of water have symbolized love and family in the earlier portions of the novel, in this moment the symbol becomes twisted by Doreen to represent lust and distraction.

“Later Doreen walked the boreen to the road with them, holding Pearl’s hand. In the mesh basket under the seat of Pearl’s stroller was a fruitcake wrapped in greaseproof paper. Mary loves my fruitcake, Doreen said. It’s the one thing about me she likes!”

In this passage, Doreen tries to apologize to Saoirse for upsetting her earlier. This paragraph demonstrates an alternate experience with The Bonds of Family; rather than family being a place of comfort and support for Doreen, her rejection by Nana and Chris has transformed family into a space of pain and rejection.

“After a while Nana began to soften towards Doreen, who it seemed was possessed of an insatiable prurience and a vast store of information about all the people of the parish and surrounding townlands.”

Following her confrontation with Saoirse, Doreen becomes much closer to the other members of her family. Storytelling as a motif gains a new dimension here as Doreen and Nana can finally emotionally connect over a negative form of storytelling: gossip.

“Her mother’s family formed a blurry coterie in Saoirse’s imagination, Richard’s the only face with definition, standing in his black suit at the centre of the cloud of mysterious sorrow, his hair blue-black and combed back into a wavy quiff, his cheekbones sharp and high below his burning eyes.”

Saoirse’s focus on imagining what Richard must look like demonstrates the importance that she’s placed on him as a judgmental, scary figure in her life. She imagines him as a sharp and remote person, someone to whom love is conditional. To Saoirse, Richard is less of a person she knows or understands and more of a living embodiment of rejection.

“He boarded up the windows and the doors of the farmhouse, and when Nana saw this work done she howled in anguish and rose from her chair into the frame of her walker and crossed the dried muck of the yard to the edge of the haggard and she asked Saoirse to take up a handful of soil and to bring it home with her. And when I’m in my grave, she said, you’re to throw that down on top of me.”

Both Chris and Nana face an immense amount of loss throughout the novel as Doreen, Paudie, and Saoirse’s father all die. However, reflecting the theme of The Bonds of Family, both react to loss differently. While Chris boards up the family farmhouse and tries to leave his memories behind, Nana clings to the past and the nostalgia of the house itself.

“Saoirse didn’t reply. She didn’t like the suggestion that she was a vessel, empty, passive, a dumb element in some grand divine plan for Josh’s life. Nor did she like this talk of Honey and her leaving as a central, defining part of Josh’s emotional landscape. She felt diminished, sidelined, duped.”

Following Doreen’s death, the relationship between Josh and Saoirse begins to fall apart. Exploring The Pitfalls of Relationships, the novel shows how each partner contributes to their relationship’s decline, as Saoirse’s insecurities over Honey as well as Josh’s lack of awareness both play a role.

“On the edge of the wooden quay by Woodford pier they sat while Josh trained his sights on the far distant shore. After a few minutes of humming and focusing, sweeping his view slowly across the miles of placid open water, he said, There. There it is. That’s our spot. There was a warmth in his voice that pleased her: this was a thing between them that was just theirs; it had no print on it of Honey or any part of their lives before they loved each other.”

By this point in the narrative, even Saoirse’s pleasant associations with pools of water become tainted by her insecurities over Honey. Josh’s attempt to connect with her can only be interpreted, in Saoirse’s mind, through the lens of his previous relationship. The motif of pools, therefore, continues to develop and deepen throughout the book, now taking on a new meaning as something that signifies Saoirse’s difference from Honey.

“[S]he sat one evening at the rail of Nana’s bed and she took Nana’s hand in hers and she told her what Chris had done, and Nana said nothing in reply except that Chris was to be brought to her, and when he drove in from his flat in town he stood at the end of Nana’s bed with his hands hanging, and she said nothing to him, she just sat back against her pillows and looked at him and cried silently, and her tears scored him, like acid on his bare flesh.”

Chris’s selling of the farmhouse represents the strongest break yet between his and Nana’s reactions to grief. Chris tries to get rid of all reminders of his previous life with Doreen and Paudie, while Nana clings further to the physical reminders. He interprets her tears as physically harming him, like acid, which serves as a metaphor for his feelings of disconnection from his mother following his decision.

“The way this lad tucks his phone between his shoulder and his ear to talk to you at work, it’s so CUTE! His little whispers he thinks we can’t hear! It’s sickly fucking sweet. Oh, well. I suppose you are called Honey after all!”

The motif of naming takes on a new dimension in this passage when Josh is confronted in public by a coworker who thinks that Saoirse is Honey, revealing to Saoirse that Josh still speaks to his ex regularly. Beyond this moment engendering a major argument, it also demonstrates how in the novel, people’s names can represent how they’re viewed by other people: Honey, in Josh’s coworker’s eyes, is seen as a sweet person purely due to her name.

“When she opened the bow and removed the band she saw that the top page had typed across it THE QUEEN OF DIRT ISLAND, and below that title the words, A Novel, and below that, By Joshua Elmwood. She couldn’t see herself on the pages at first.”

When Saoirse receives Josh’s novel draft, she initially doesn’t recognize herself in the pages. This serves as a synecdoche for her interpretation of the rest of the book: just as on the initial pages, Saoirse is unable to recognize herself or her family through the rest of it.

“Nothing would ever be grand again now that the truth of things was lying scattered on the floor between them. That her story wasn’t enough for him, that she wasn’t enough for him, that the inhuman figure in his story was preferable to him as a subject than her mother, her brave, glorious, beautiful mother; that the faithless, weak-willed girl in his story was somehow his truth of who and what she was; that the long-limbed goddess on the canvas in the stream of windowlight was his true love, and not her, not her.”

In showing Saoirse his novel manuscript, Josh has accidentally revealed the parts about himself that he’d prefer to remain hidden: his continued love for Honey and his lack of understanding of Saoirse. His extreme emotional reaction further reinforces this—Josh reacts defensively and angrily to her reading of the novel as if she were personally attacking him rather than the content of what he wrote.

“Mother thought to cash in her inheritance quickly. You need to do something with your life, she told Saoirse. You need to get some kind of qualification. What was I thinking all this time letting you moon around after that fucking hippie Joshua Elmwood and you not having a piece of paper to your name to say you were anything or could do anything?”

Eileen’s surprising change of heart regarding Richard is initially justified as a way to provide security for her daughter and granddaughter. However, the sale of the land also benefits Richard, the brother who attacked her. In this way, Eileen demonstrates further growth and maturity, letting go of old grudges in favor of moving forward.

“Pearl was thirteen before she asked about her father. It had never seemed to occur to her that she was missing something, that her family was composed differently from most of her friends’ families. Years later she would tell Saoirse that she’d presumed that the smiling man in the framed photos on the mantelpiece and the sitting-room wall whom her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother all referred to unthinkingly as Daddy was her daddy, too.”

This passage serves as a direct contrast to the beginning of the novel when Saoirse expresses the understanding that her family is different than other families due to her lack of a father. While Saoirse is plagued by insecurity and comparisons with others (for instance, her ongoing love for and jealousy of Honey), Pearl is portrayed as much more confident, accepting her place in the world without actively trying to change it.