| Another
prefatory note (of thanks to Noel Browne) implies that
the author himself was a sanatorium patient. Indeed it
would be hard to believe that such a convincing document
could be produced by someone who had not endured the
long months of enforced repose and the often harsh
remedies that the treatment of the day insisted on. The
heartbreaking narrative of early death - often
brother and sister are dying on different floors of the
same institution - is interspersed with wry and faintly
bitter cameos. The best of these is of a careless and
domineering female doctor who verbally trounces nurse
and patient alike. A retired naval officer who hugs a
bottle under the bedclothes is another memorable
portrait. The full and awful poignancy of the novel is
realised in the tentative amorous strategies resorted to
by the young patients as they attempt to
circumvent the strict sexual segregation imposed by the
authorities. Though characterisation can at times be
flimsy and the prose marred by poeticisms, the angry
passion that informs this novel is triumphantly
vindicated. McGrath has elaborated on Keats, who knew
all too much about consumption and has given us a
fiction that could have had for epigraph "
here...... where youth grows pale and spectre thin and
dies." This horrific is caught in detail form Munch
on the cover. Once again, Blackstaff have got everything
right and have given this grim, thoughtful reissue the
sort of production it deserves. The real epigraph is
from Turgenov on the rough point that illness and
poverty prevent us from becoming arrogant. It is
with a chastened sense of humility that one puts down
this account of grief and courage.
New
York Times - Sunday September 7th 1991
Fiction
The
Charnel House
By
Eamonn Mc Grath
Blackstaff
Press / Dufour Editions,
Paper,
$14.95
Most
good writers ultimately are trying to say something
about death that isn't banal. For the people in Eamonn
McGrath's excellent and moving second novel, who are
suffering from tuberculosis in the Ireland of the
1950's, death is always as near as the mist in the woods
around the Ardeevan sanatorium - and as close as the
inedible breakfast, a nurse's evasive answer. In those
days there was no reliable treatment for the disease,
and the patients at Ardeevan, while well cared for, were
guinea pigs for painful surgical techniques like cutting
away ribs and pumping air into the chest cavity to float
diseased lungs. "The Charnel House" is about
Richard, an engineering student; Frank, a cuckolded
schoolmaster; Arty a practical Joker; Phil, a furtive
homosexual; Lily, a love-struck young woman - and about
their nurses, who sometimes flirt and fall in love with
their patients. They are as real and engaging as the
characters in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel "The
Cancer Ward." "Why me?", is the novel's
central question. There's no simple answer, but the
young engineer thinks that the disease "thrived on
bad housing, appalling working conditions, exploitation,
poverty, ignorance.... As long as bishops lived in
palaces and tinkers in tents, as long as some rode high
in limousines and others crawled like insects in the
gutter, as long as men could view with complacency the
degradation of their fellow men, it was the worst kind
of hypocrisy to ascribe evil in the world to an
indifferent or malicious deity. The fatal flaw in human
society was the ice at the heart of man himself."
James
F. Clarity
COLERAINE
TIMES - 31 October 1990
The
Charnel House.
By
Eamonn McGrath
Published
by the Blackstaff Press.
Eamonn
McGrath's first book, 'Honour Thy Father' looked at the
boyhood and adolescence of a young boy growing up in
rural County Wexford. McGrath earned rare accolades for
his ability to breathe new life and vigour into familiar
subject material through his freshness of expression and
insight.
The
insight is also to the foe in his new book 'The Charnel
House', although this is more sobering stuff, set in
Ardeevan, a sanatorium for those suffering from
Tuberculosis in the 1950's, the book is described
by its publishers Blackstaff as 'a powerful study of the
twilight existence of the chronically and terminally
ill.'
The
book brings together a varied cast of characters against
a backdrop that appears to be bleak to the casual
observer; but McGrath's light touch with dialogue and
comic and romantic touches provided by some of the
inmates lifts story above the chronic-illness weepie
bracket.
The
novel also acts well as a social document detailing
tuberculosis and the devastating effect that it had on
Ireland in the 50's. The detailed description of the
symptoms of the disease and the primitive methods used
in its treatment serve as a record of historical fact.
It also examines the pioneering work of Dr. Noel Browne,
the Irish Minister for Health, whose enlightened
policies went so far towards alleviating the disastrous
effect of the disease. Raging 'against the dying of the
light', this is not only a novel about tuberculosis, but
is also a deeply felt examination of the nature of
suffering and the unexpected strength of the human
spirit.
He
would dwell interminably on the beating of hailstones on
the corrugated roof of an outhouse where he had been
isolated once in childhood during a sudden thunderstorm.
The exact form and flavour of his fear soured his memory
like the taste of vomit as he huddled there awaiting
rescue. , the lightning penetrating his closed eyes and
the thunder rolling and cracking until the world seemed
to be riven apart and crashing ruins about him. Then the
stilling rattle of hail, softening to sleet through
which he ran , crouching across the whitened road to
safety.
IRISH
ECHO - August 7-13, 1991
Patrick
Campbell
Of
Plague and Peace
The
Charnel House By Eamonn McGrath. Blackstaff Press.
Distributed by Dufour. $14.95
The
Charnel House, by Eamonn McGrath, is a book you are not
likely to forget. It is certainly one that will make you
wish that, when your time comes to die, death comes
quickly and not be the drawn out affair described in
horrific detail in this book.
"The
Charnel House" is set in Ireland in the 1950's in a
TB sanatorium. It provides a graphic portrait of how
this disease, which was incurable at the time, wasted
away the body and the soul of the patients. It shows how
it turned the medical personnel, who became very used to
death, into insensitive humans.
Although
this is a fictional account of the life in an Irish
"fever hospital," it has the credibility of a
book based on the reality of life in such a place. It
comes across as an Irish version of "One flew over
the Cuckoo's Nest."
Mc
Grath has assembled a memorable array of characters in
this book all of them unforgettable in their own right.
Presiding
over the sanatorium is a female physician who runs the
place like a concentration camp. She is patronising and
intolerant to everyone except those she considers her
social equals. She dismissed all deaths that occur as
events of little importance, events "to be
expected," and she is a tyrant to both the patients
and the staff.
The
physician is only polite to one patient, an Anglo-Irish
aristocrat who is down on his luck. She treats him with
a certain degree of politeness, although she has his
room searched periodically to ensure that he is not
hiding the contraband liquor he is son fond of.
Other
noteworthy characters include a prankster who can find
humour in this desolate place, and an old man who says
he will be "leaving soon" but is so sick it's
obvious he will leave in a coffin.
Perhaps
the most memorable character of all in this ensemble is
an older man named Jack Carbery, who has chronic TB, is
homeless, and who sees the sanatorium as a have where he
is provided with a warm bed and three meals a day.
Carbery never wants to leave the place and when he is
finally evicted it is to take up permanent residence in
the "county home," the government operated
facility for the homeless. Carbery is delighted to move
there, believing he has found a home at last.
This
is, in many ways, a very moving book that will provide
you with a graphic portrait of a place where death is
the overpowering reality and where sickness is normal
and good health is cause for eviction,
I
suppose that life in this sanatorium, as portrayed by
McGrath, compares to life in the AIDS health care
facilities of the 1990's in the USA. One hopes that the
AIDS patients fare a little better than the TB patients
of the 1950's in the USA. One hopes that the AIDS
patients fare a little better than the Irish TB patients
of the 1950's and are treated with a little more
humanity.
EVENING
PRESS - 31 October 1990
Survivor
from a death sentence
IT
SEEMED as if Eamonn McGrath's life was happily charted
when he left the family farm in the late forties to
study Arts at University College Galway.
But
his entire was thrown into the balance when he fell foul
of the one disease that, in those days, every family
feared.- TB.
No
sooner had he settled into the new freedom of university
life, than he found himself lying in a bed in the
sanatorium in Wexford.
For
nine months he went through the horrendous experience
that was a tuberculosis cure in the days before
antibiotics. More often than not, a TB diagnosis was a
death sentence.
He
underwent the rigorous treatment which involved having
air put into the cavity between the lung and the chest
wall. The discomfort was often unbearable.
Fear
But
the greatest fear of all was knowing that, if that
failed, the alternative was to remove the ribs
altogether, leaving people with a curiously lopsided
shape. Finally, the worst did happen. He had some of his
ribs removed when a recurring bout landed him back in
hospital for a further year.
Still,
he was one of the lucky ones. He survived the illness,
and went on to become a teacher, married his wife Joan,
a nurse and raised a family.
But
the memory of that time in his life is as fresh today.
He has put his whole experience into his second novel, The
Charnel House.
It's
a tragic story about young people in the 50's who fall
in love, who laugh and joke like others of their age,
but who have no future because it has been robbed by TB.
"I
felt it was bigger than any one person. I didn't
want to write about my own experiences. It was a huge
thing at the time. Worse than AIDS, because it took all
ages and it thrived on poverty, ignorance and
deprivation. It tended to be the poor and the badly off
people who ended up with TB. The well-off could go off
to California or Switzerland or somewhere dry, and
healthy.
"But
in the sanatoria they were just turning out
corpses."
in
spite of this bleak summation of the times, Eamonn says
that he never felt afraid that he would die. "Oddly
enough I always felt pretty optimistic."
"Everyone
smoked away, both patients and visitors", says
Eamonn, as an indication of how times have changed.
He
has a huge respect for Noel Browne and the way he
conquered TB in Ireland and has dedicated The Charnel
House to Dr. Browne for the enlightened policies
which contributed so greatly to the eradication of the
disease.
It's
also a novel for today. The incidence of TB has been
steadily rising in the last few years, and is now also
associated with Aids. It is not the spectre it was in
the times of The Charnel House when whole
families were wiped out, but it should not be
understimated.
Today,
Eamonn McGrath combines teaching and writing. He lives
in Clonakilty by the sea, where he and Joan always
wanted to be.
IRISH
NEWS - 21 November 1990
Flights
of fantasy amid the blight of consumption
By
James Kelly
Credit
for the eradication of the scourge of tuberculosis in
Ireland has long been attributed mostly to the
enlightened policies of Dr. Noel Browne, the courageous
Minister of Health in the Republic's inter-party
government (1948-1951)
Since
the "Mother and Child" controversy which
toppled that government Dr. Browne has largely faded
from sight in politics., but a tribute to the memory of
his pioneering efforts in those days has come in an
unusual form.
The
author of "Honour Thy Father", Eamonn McGrath,
acclaimed by leading critics in 1970 for a vivid and
moving bestseller has produced a new book "The
Charnel House" dedicated to Dr. Browne , and to
"the few who survived and in memory of the many who
did not".
It's
a gripping narrative in spite of the seriousness of its
theme. The author, a teacher, currently living in
Clonakilty, County Cork, brings together a wide and
varied set of characters against the background of
"Ardeevan sanatorium," in the 1950's when TB
was still a major cause of death in Ireland with whole
families blighted by what we call consumption.
Eamonn
McGrath who was born into a farming community in County
Wexford in 1929 and graduated in English literature at
University College Galway in 1952, brings to life the
tragedy and humour of the clash of characters - The
snobbish Dr. O'Connor-Crowley whose patience, brittle at
best, was most fragile when dealing with the poor and
uncouth, Richard Cogley, and his sister Eileen; the
eccentric Commander Barnwell; young lovers, Vincent and
Lily; hospital joker, Arty Byrne; homosexual Phil
Turner' and the embittered Frank O'Shea. The writing is
of a high order, vivid and compulsive reading as he lays
bare the thought processes of his characters.
"Sometimes
now the outside world and his previous existence seemed
a chimera. The inly reality was the room with its
apple-green walls and white sloped ceiling. His family
were intruders, insubstantial wraiths out of a dream
world, coming and going through the mist, solid and
corporeal enough while they there fading into tenuity
when they left."
Then
there was the poor old Jack Carbery, the chronic who
enjoyed the comfort of the ward in contrast to his life
as a farm labourer with a family who condemned him to
sleep in a loft at night. An orphan and unwanted now
that he was ill, the blow was about to be struck as Dr
Staples, at his wits end to find beds for those awaiting
treatment, targeted in on the hopeless old man.
Before
that the author paints a vivid picture of the old man
revelling in the sealed-in cosiness of the ward when
darkness fell and the comfortable feeling what a wram
meal was near a dream soon to be shattered.
The
publishers are fully justified in their claim that this
is not only a novel about Tuberculosis but also a deeply
felt examination of the nature of suffering and the
unexpected strength of the human spirit.
The
author's dedication is intriguing . It says simply:
"With grateful thanks to Dr. Noel Browne, Minister
for Health in the first inter-party Government
(1948-1951) without whose enlightened policies this book
- and so much more -would not have been possible."
The
Irish Times - August 3rd 1991
Magic
Mountain
Victoria
White
Perhaps
if I make mention of a vague similarity between Mc
Grath's career and that of Molly Keane, I will succeed
in generating some hype; McGrath was born in 1929 and
his first novel, Honour Thy Father, was published
by Allen Figgis in 1970, but then languished, until
Blackstaff reissued it last year. Now comes the Charnel
House. A tenuous similarity, yes, but it seems rising
from the ashes is a writer's best hope of butting into
the limelight if he has left his twenties behind. And
limelight is something McGrath most assuredly deserves.
For
the Charnel House, set in a rural tuberculosis
sanatorium in the 1950's. is a superbly crafted novel of
great beauty. I use the word 'beauty' advisedly; it is
the lyric quality of the writing which impresses most.
McGrath's prose is gentle and poetic, but always brings
his sentences home without overshooting the mark. In
some ways the pleasure of the reading is similar to
watching a diver complete a perfect dive. For instance,
here he is describing the developing love affair between
fellow TB sufferers Vincent and Lily:
And
so the correspondence continued, a tentative revelation
of self, tedious to linger over, but fascinating to
themselves (especially in retrospect) as the opening of
a play, where their personalities emerged from the
shadows and circled warily, creating flesh and blood and
forging character from words on a page.
The
novel follows its characters, Vincent and Lily, the
student Richard, the Anglo-Irish Commander Barnwell, the
joker Arty Byrne, the homosexual Phil Turner and the
cuckolded Frank O'Shea, through illness and pain to
death, recovery or stasis. Mc Grath's characterisation
is sure and sympathetic, whether in the drawing of a
young girl like Lily or an embittered man like Frank.
His
belief in what he calls the "healing
synthesis" of physical love is strong throughout,
and it is in love that the characters find their
happiness, or lose it.
The
disease eats away at the healthy flesh of the inmates
and, by contrast, the countryside smiles, the hedgerows
flower. Mc Grath has a very sure sense of the inherence
of death in nature and the effect can be startling.
When
I asked myself why the The Charnel House felt
like an English novel, I realised it was because the
writer felt the lives of the people from our past
mattered in themselves, not only in their role as
political allegories. Mc Grath has a confidence, which
is surprisingly original, in the importance of the Irish
people.
This
novel won't change your life, because it isn't big
enough - I urge Eamonn McGrath to attempt a larger
canvas. In the meantime The Charnel House is a
delightful way to make the acquaintance with of a
wonderfully talented writer.
PUBLISHERS
WEEKLY - PAPERBACKS
FICTION
ORIGINALS
The
Charnel House
Eamonn
McGrath
Blackstaff
Press (Dufour Dist)
This
painfully truthful novel chronicles a year in the life
of the tuberculosis patient s of Ardeevan, a sanatorium
in Ireland. It is the 1950's, when the disease is still
one of the major cause of death in that country and when
effective treatments were still coming into use. McGrath
relates his story in brief and fragmented chapters,
constantly shifting the focus and point of view from one
patient to another. The center is 19-year old Richard
Cogley, a student who enters Ardeevan near death; after
being treated with the new drug streptomycin, Cogley is
well enough to venture tentatively back to the outside
world. The snapshot-like chapters also reveal doctors,
nurses and other patients, each tellingly brought to
life by McGrath's (Honour Thy Father) wise prose.
The world of a torturous, incurable disease, fraught
with shame and stigma, recalls the AIDS crisis, as does
Richard's reflection that "as long as men could
view with complacency the degradation of their fellow
men, it was the worst kind of hypocrisy to ascribe evil
in the world to and indifferent or malicious deity. The
fatal flaw in human society was the ice at the heart of
man himself."
(Aug.)
Review
of Contemporary Fiction, 1991
Eamonn
McGrath. The Charnel House. Blackstaff
Press/Dufour Editions 1990, 232 pages Paper: $14.95
"The
captain of all these men of death that came against him
to take him away, was the consumption, for it was that
that brought him down to the grave" Bunyan, Life
and Death of Mr. Badman). Though consumption is no
longer the scourge it once was, it was particularly
devastating to the Irish populations both in Ireland and
abroad, up until the use of drugs such as streptomycin
and para-aminosalicylic acid during the period just
following the events of McGrath's novel. The subject of The
Charnel House is the "con," consumption,
TB, tubersulosis, phthisis, tubercle bacillus, its
victims both known and unknown - the Brontes, D.H.
Lawrence, Chopin - its greatest literary character Hans
Castorp. His stay on the "Magic Mountain"
lasted seven years;
Eamonn
McGrath's RIchard Cogley, aged nineteen, thinks he'll be
at the Ardeevan sanatorium, the "charnel
house," the house of death, for three months in the
1950's: "A raging scream inside his head. Three
months. I'm only here for three months. I'm different
from the rest of you. I'm not going to die." He
stays a year, at the end of which he believes "he
was a survivor. It was possible to think of a future
away from the place." But just as Hans goes down
the mountain, a sadder and wiser young man, to fight in
the trenches of WW1, Cogley's prospects are equally
ambiguous - "He would be going out soon, but an
umbilical cord would still tie him to this house of
death. Once a fortnight, he would come up the avenue and
round that last bend - with a tightening in his bowels -
see it there, becalmed in the grass." The
Charnel House is written " for the few who
survived, and in memory of the many who did not."
The reviewer for "Fortnight" writes that
McGrath's "rage against the suffering and death is
the novel's engine and heart.....It is of vital
importance to the author that these people, their
suffering and strength of spirit, the ravages of the
disease and the Dickensian treatment which were all that
were available until shockingly recently, be not
forgotten." The characters surrounding Richard
Cogley are a successful blending of Irish types, al of
whom, whether they live or die, hold our attention from
beginning to end.
Jack
Byrne.
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