Ghost Light

Publishers Weekly

O'Connor (Redemption Falls) presents a turbulent love story loosely based on the relationship between Irish playwright John Synge and actress Molly Allgood. The story opens in post-WWII London, where Molly is a spinster with a fondness for drink, but through a series of reminiscences the reader learns that, in her youth, she was a promising actress out of the poorer quarters of Dublin. Working in a theater group that included her more talented older sister and W.B. Yeats, Molly soon develops an attraction to the significantly older playwright Synge. She is pugnacious and ambitious, he circumspect and introverted, but the two secretly fall in with one another, and over the course of years they struggle with the differences in their age, class, and religion, and with their respective temperaments and expectations. The voice of old, broken Molly is an impressive creation, and the narrative convincingly plunges the reader into a tumultuous and tender account of a tortured romance, though some of O'Connor's stylistic choices (notably abrupt tense and perspective shifts within Molly's head) impede narrative momentum and yield a reading experience that feels heavy and too hazy. (Feb.)

Library Journal

In theaters during a play, the sole light left burning is called the ghost light. For washed-up actress Molly Allgood, the sole light left burning is the memory of her former lover, the actual touted Irish playwright John Synge; the bulbs of reality and truth have been extinguished. Synge has been dead of cancer for nearly 50 years, so we instead witness a day in the life of Molly as she narrates her journey from a shabby London apartment to the BBC, where (according to her) she's scheduled to perform. But to O'Connor's (Star of the Sea) credit, Molly is unreliability at its best. In fact, her narration is so full of the mirage of success perpetuated by her glowing self-regard that we almost miss the hints of alcoholism and destitution. We are too enamored of her charm and acerbic wit and understand too readily her chronic suffering as reexperienced by her memories of Synge and his angry, prejudiced mother, who kept the lovers apart. Eventually, though, we must abandon feeling and question the logic of Molly's reality. And this—the subtext—is just one of the many pleasures of Ghost Light. VERDICT Forbidden love, humor, and O'Connor's attention to the sentence highly recommend this. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/10.]—Stephen Morrow, Ohio State Univ., Columbus

Kirkus Reviews

An impassioned tribute to the actress who secretly loved and outlived Irish playwright J.M. Synge.

Bestselling Irish author O'Connor (Redemption Falls, 2007, etc.) divides his powerfully imagined, poetic narrative between two eras and cities, Dublin in 1908 and London in 1952. Molly Allgood (stage name Maire O'Neill), central to both, is 65 in the London episode, a half-starved alcoholic dependent on begging, selling off her remaining scraps and a bit of acting to survive. Her salty stream of consciousness is narrated in the second person, lending an additional layer of self-consciousness to the meticulously composed prose. The earlier, third-person Irish sections mix love of landscape with scenes from the unsuitable secret engagement between the beautiful but less well-educated 18-year-old Molly and the older, ailing playwright, a liaison disapproved of on all sides. In Synge's most celebrated yet scandalous play, The Playboy of the Western World, Molly plays her greatest role, Pegeen Mike, "a woman who loves a storyteller and loses him too soon" as Molly does when Synge dies at 37 of Hodgkin's disease. O'Connor's impressionistic, intense style delivers a mismatched love story and a social landscape dominated by forceful characters such as W.B. Yeats and Synge's formidable mother, but it is Molly's perspective which prevails, the voice of a comical, intuitive, irrepressible life force.

An empathetic act of literary homage offering nuggets of emotional intensity.

Christopher Benfey

Ghost Light is O'Connor's vivid and sometimes visionary reimagining of the love affair between Molly Allgood and the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge, much of it told in flashbacks from 1952, when an aging and broken Molly, mired in London, looks back on her brush with greatness…O'Connor keeps the narrative compact, as though he's writing a play rather than a novel.
—The New York Times

Wendy Smith

…Ghost Light is not merely a fictional rendering of factual events, although it contains razor-sharp portraits of William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory and a nuanced assessment of the riotous Dublin premiere of "Playboy." This is Molly's story as imagined by a sensitive, empathetic artist, and the conclusions O'Connor draws from it have less to do with her professional life than with her qualities as a human being.
—The Washington Post

From the Publisher

"A rare and wonderful book." —Michael Cunningham

"Ghost Light is O’Connor’s vivid and sometimes visionary reimagining of the love affair between Molly Allgood and the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge….O’Connor rides the wave of Irish eloquence….A jagged lyricism redolent of Seamus Heaney." —The New York Times Book Review

"[Molly’s] story comes alive in brilliant bursts of poetic language. She loves, hates, longs for vengeance, and despairs of redemption in luminous prose." —The Boston Globe

"O’Connor’s novel itself is an outstanding example of what the written word can achieve." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Enchanting...Moving...Rhapsodically Joycean...Wickedly comic...Readers will be delighted."
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)

“A great ambitious novel about love and loss. Joseph O’Connor has the magic touch, and I can’t imagine many better—or braver—novels coming out this year.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

“A brilliant novel.” —Joseph O’Neil, author of Netherland

“When I think of Ghost Light, the words climb over each other to be first in the queue: brilliant, beautiful, exhilarating, heartbreaking, masterly. It’s that good.” —Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

“It has an astonishing command of voice and period detail, and offers an intimacy with the lives of others that is rare in fiction.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

“A spellbinding read.” —Aisling Foster, The Times (London)

“Ghost Light is a tender and compassionate love story, and a fine stepping stone to the majesty of Synge.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Remarkable, radiant, and captivating . . . On top of the biographical information concerning these two, Synge and his Molly, Joseph O’Connor has imposed a fictional overlay, and makes a vivid performance of it. . . .Deeply and resolutely imagined, Ghost Light casts its heroine as a charming and robust, playful and wayward young girl, committed to the well-being of the rather difficult and gloomy JM Synge. Molly Allgood, in this version, has a good deal of Molly Bloom in her make-up, and a lively intelligence to boot. . . . In this incarnation, [she] is a figure of great gaiety and aplomb; and O’Connor’s novel carries all the pungency and resonance of a particular era of the past.” —Patricoa Craig, The Independent

“An entertaining read that carries a touching tale.” —The Economist

“Masterful . . . With his previous novels, Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, O’Connor carved out a unique way of playing his storyteller’s hand over a wide landscape, with the use of invented documentation and textual adventure. Ghost Light brings that achievement to a new dimension, more specifically located and yet all the more masterful in its management of re-imagined lives and the time they inhabit. . . . The writing is lyrical and moving.’ —Hugo Hamilton, The Financial Times

“With his usual deftness and intelligence, O’Connor brings to life the intense love affair between young actress Molly Allgood and the great Irish playwright JM Synge . . . Brilliant.” —The Daily Mirror

“Joseph O’Connor’s seventh novel, Ghost Light, will give days of pleasure to tens and tens of thousands of readers. It is a great love story, with extras: a virtuoso display of literary talent, a tribute to the Hiberno-English heritage of lore and lyricism and an interpretation of the Irish literary revival as the fruit of settler and native, Protestant and Catholic. . . . One of the novel’s great achievements is not just to display imaginative power but also to show how the imagination works. . . . A stroke of genius.” —Adrian Frazier, Irish Times

“Engrossing stuff . . . Beautifully written and charming.” —The Independent on Sunday

“What shines in the end is O’Connor’s precise style bolstered by quick flashes of his wicked humour. Ghost Light is a careful, thoughtful story, the worlds of which are impeccably rendered.” —Irish Examiner

“Ghost Light is a sad and stirring story of love and loss, and O’Connor skillfully brings to life a brief affair that burned brightly and for Molly, was never extinguished.” —Claire O’Mahony, Irish Sunday Tribune

“A tender, haunting tale . . . An original and moving love story.” —Marie Claire

“O’Connor has fashioned a deeply moving, beautifully written story. . . . Admirers of his writing will take pleasure not only in the ambitious range of Ghost Light and its depth of feeling but also in the nods in the direction of the author’s immediately preceding novels, Redemption Falls, and, before that, Star of the Sea. . . . Ghost Light stands up to scrutiny on its own terms. It is a profoundly sad story, but triumphant.” —Scotland Herald

“The author displays typical imaginative virtuosity and emotional depth. . . . As well as being impressively well crafted, the novel is wreathed in language of Joycean richness. [O’Connor’s] prose is tuned to a singular lyrical frequency.” —The Sunday Times 

“Superbly written, magically evocative novel.” —The Scotsman

“Ghost Light is a spirited novel. . . . Like her namesake Molly Bloom, Allgood is an earthy, wily and sexually magnetic creation but O’Connor’s real feat is in his careful deployment of Hiberno-English by which he not only doffs his cap to Synge but gives flesh and blood to Molly’s neglected life story.” —The Metro

“Ghost Light will give days of pleasure to tens and tens of thousands of readers. It is a great love story, with extras: a virtuoso display of literary talent, a tribute to the Hiberno-English heritage of lore and lyricism and an interpretation of the Irish literary revival as the fruit of settler and native, Protestant and Catholic. . . . Brimming with sympathy and skill.” —Irish Times

“Joseph O’Connor occupies a special place in Irish life. The novel is artfully constructed. . . . O’Connor’s evocation of such a difficult, morbid and yet morally beautiful man through the memory of an earthy and vivacious woman is remarkably ambitious and imaginative. Ghost Light is full of . . . sly pleasures and there is a great deal of broad comedy.” —The Irish Independent

“Lyrical and moving.” —The Sunday Tribune

The Barnes & Noble Review

Growing up in the coastal town of Dún Laoghaire, Joseph O'Connor lived but a short walk from the Victorian house that had once sheltered the playwright John Millington Synge (1871-1909), and his immediate family. In the acknowledgements that close Ghost Light -- O'Connor's accomplished seventh novel -- the author notes that he'd fancied the Synge domicile "as a slightly decrepit embassy of literature, a headquarters where brave things had been attempted, some magnificently achieved, but also a hermitage of ghosts." O'Connor projects himself into that gothic space and, furthermore, into the theatrical society that blossomed around Ireland's Abbey Theatre, by fixing upon Synge's relationship with the spirited actress Maire O'Neill (1885-1952).

At the time of his death from Hodgkin's disease, Synge was engaged to O'Neill (née Molly Allgood) who had been the lead actress in the original production of his mordantly droll comedy, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Their courtship met with resistance from Synge's family and social circle, which included fellow Abbey Theater co-directors William Butler Yeats and Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory. Of issue to the naysayers was not only the age difference between them -- Synge was thirty-five and O'Neill nineteen when they first became fond of each other -- but differences in station. Yeats and Lady Gregory, like the rest of those who frowned upon Synge's amorous leanings, were sensitive to the class markers that distinguished him from his beloved: O'Neill was the product of a working-class background, who had received a spotty education at an orphanage where she was placed for a time, after her father's death. Synge -- the offspring of a barrister and a landowner -- was a graduate of Trinity College Dublin who could read in six languages and was well traveled.

In his novel, Ghost Light, O'Connor pulls from such contrasts reasons for mirth and gravity. Frequently, such emotions spur one another on as they do when O'Neill reads a lyric that has been added to an oft-consulted map, which bears the stamp Ex Libris Trinity College Dublin:

If this chart -- thou steal'st away,
What shall thou say
-- On Judgment Day?
Yet if this map be -- wrongly drawn Trav'ller -- mercy -- from thy scorn.

She reads the final couplet aloud. [Synge] chuckles at her pronunciation. In his accent, it rhymes. In hers, it does not. For less have millions starved.

It is O'Neill's voice, by turns vulgar and classed-up, that centers the novel and invests it with a stubborn optimism.

"Life abounds with blessings." This motto comes to her at the beginning of the story, where we find O' Neill, aged sixty-five, hung-over and indebted, living in a dilapidated London flat. She bundles herself in that sentiment, as she does in the best of her few remaining garments, to see her through a chilly day in October, 1952. In part, she is made giddy by an afternoon appointment at the BBC, where she is to participate in a radio adaptation of a play by Sean O'Casey. As she goes about her preparatory rituals, she mulls over an interview request from a scholar who is eager to discuss her relationship with Synge, and to obtain for her institution's archives any personal documents relating to the literary artist. Having long ago sold off all but one of his letters, O'Neill, for dire want of groceries, decides to part with this last memento, though it's her intention to sell it to a London book dealer who has been kind to her in the past. Placing the letter in the pocket of her only coat, she goes outside to meet the day which will give her the occasion to visit a pub, a museum, Trafalgar Square, and a movie theatre, before heading off to work in a fog of alcohol and remembrance.

O'Connor is superb at holding the reader's attention across scenes drawn from O'Neill's youth as a rising actress at the Abbey Theatre, to her ominous middle years, to the waning moments of her life. There is a noticeable physicality to his writing. Peering at her aged knuckles, O'Neill sees "the fossil of a bird's wing." A clock, "placks solidly, adjusting its ratchets." An over-stuffed ashtray, "calls to mind a porcupine." The author's delineation of psychological states is equally sharp. Synge's ambivalence towards marriage belies a quality "many women have known: the suitor who craves you but secretly wants to be dismissed." As O'Neill shuffles about in the morning, getting ready for what is fated to be her final performance, she is keen to shrug off the memories that have stirred within her because "otherwise we pull into ourselves like snails . . . and you can lose thirty years in such a withdrawal. This is how time unfolds when you are old and susceptible. Wander into its spiral shell and it is hard to escape. The glisten that looks inviting to age-bleared eyes has a way of suddenly liquefying and then coagulating around your heart, and the womb in which you find yourself so numbingly cocooned is too enveloping to allow you to resurface."

Ghost Light imparts much of its joy by tracking O'Neill as she gallivants about London brushing off the slights and acknowledging the serendipities strewn along her path. It's regrettable that the novel falters for a brief spell, near the end, when she arrives at the radio studio and is introduced to a young fan eager for her autograph. What transpires is a schmaltzy incident that interrupts the otherwise unobtrusive current of pathos which carries the story along. Be that as it may, this Hallmark moment needn't deter readers in the mood for a literary work that is as inviting as a liquid indulgence.

--Christopher Byrd