Paula Xiberras
‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ Roisin Meaney’s latest novel is the perfect Christmas gift for both Australian and Irish readers, with its chief protagonist Tilly, a Brisbane teen seeking her family connections in Ireland, the story centres around family because, as Roisin tells me, when we chatted, there is probably nothing more important to the Irish, particularly so at this time of year.
Aside from the traditional Christmas unwrapping there are all sorts of secrets being revealed and sensible solutions baked up with a sprinkle of the supernatural thrown in for flavour.
Rosin sets her novel on the fictional island of Roone, loosely based on the island of Valentia on the Kerry coast. The name Roone appropriately means secrets.
The island of Roone symbolises the starkness of reality and the isolation the characters feel as they have fought and survived illness and loss. The brutal reality of life is juxtaposed with the promise of hope from the other worldliness of the island, with its mysteries that defer rationality, a tree that bears fruit all year round and then falls on the stable housing the farm animals, the remarkable survival of those same animals (due to a thoughtful ghost) including a donkey which reminds us of the Nativity story and the snow fall unknown to the island.
Hope in the future is personified in the novels cast of babies, born or yet to be born, including two sets of twins and if that is not coincidence enough more can be seen in the the arrival of a doll, long afloat on the oceans between Australia and Ireland which seems to mirrors Tilly’s own journey to find her other family and home.
The blurb on the cover of the book asks us ‘will there be room at the table for an unexpected guest this Christmas’ again drawing comparisons to the Christmas story and where in that story the room was a stable, in Roisin’s story, as we have already seen there is definitely room for all including many babies and assorted kin at the table.
Roisin’s novel reminds us that even in the sometimes raw and wrenching realities of life there is hope especially so at Christmas. Perhaps the image of the tree that flowers all year can be compared to the family at the heart of this novel and families everywhere that continually flourish and bear all things in their branches.
I’ll Be Home for Christmas is out now published by Hachette.
