• 1 PEN International was created in London in 1921. The organisation, registered as a charity in Engla (...)
• 2 “About the Trust”, Siobhan Dowd Trust website: https://siobhandowdtrust.com.

2This ambivalent vision of Ireland, at once a dreamland and a hellhole, is representative of Dowd’s approach to her own roots and origins. Born to Irish Catholic parents, she grew up in South London, returning to Ireland for the holidays. As a second-generation emigrant, she repeatedly stated in interviews that she did not consider herself a Londoner but rather an Irishwoman. As a writer, she was also hailed by publishers, critics, librarians and young readers, as the talented Irish author of four novels and one picture book for children (11+): A Swift Pure Cry (2006), The London Eye Mystery (2007), Bog Child (2008), for which she was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Medal, Solace of the Road (2009), and The Ransom of Dond (2013) with art by Pam Smy. Before she started writing books for children, four of which are intimately connected to Irish identity and history, Dowd lived in New York where she worked as a human rights activist for PEN and finally returned to Oxford, England, where she had studied classics.1 When dying of cancer, she founded the Siobhan Dowd Trust, the purpose of which is to promote reading and books, and “[t]ake stories to children and young people without stories”.2

• 3 The editions used in this article are the following: A Swift Pure Cry [2006], Oxford, David Ficklin (...)

3Dowd’s works as an author reflect her commitment to freedom of expression. Oscillating between realistic stories and mythical tales, Dowd was intent on constructing the voices of her young characters, however stifled they may originally be, by society and / or family. In her stories, Irish children often appear as sacrificial figures whose ritual death is meant to save their community: in Bog Child, the well-preserved body of little Mel, killed in the Iron Age, is found in the peat bog during the Troubles by Fergus, whose brother’s slow and painful death in Long Kesh prison is compared to the ancient sacrifice; in The Ransom of Dond, thirteen-year-old Darra is to be drowned to death to appease the god Dond and bring prosperity to her small island community; in A Swift Pure Cry and Solace of the Road (hereafter referred to as ASPC and SotR),3 Shell and Holly have to build an identity and a voice for themselves, unhindered by the social discourse and behaviour of previous generations.

• 5 Ibid., p. 63-64. In contrast, ten Ireland-based Irish-language publishers of children’s books can b (...)
• 6 Rebecca Long, “Reimagining: Pat O’Shea, Orla Melling, Jim O’Leary, Kate Thompson, Siobhan Dowd. Myt (...)
• 7 They had to compete with publishing conglomerates such as Penguin Random House, which set up a divi (...)
• 8 The International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) is a non-profit organisation which represe (...)
• 9 Jane Suzanne Carroll, “Children’s Literature and Young Adult Literature in Ireland”, Oxford Bibliog (...)

Until the 1980s, few books for children were published in Ireland: most of them were imported from Britain even when they were written by Irish authors. In the last two decades of the 20^th century, when the traditional notion of Irishness was being challenged, children’s literature became the locus of some cultural resistance. A growing number of books were written and published in Ireland, which allowed for the examination of contemporary Irish identity. In the 1990s, children’s books were produced by seven Ireland-based (English-language) publishing companies, only two of which remained active in the 21^st century.5 Quoting then President of Ireland Mary Robinson’s foreword to The Big Guide to Irish Children’s Books (1996), Rebecca Long identifies the two decades as a period of “revival” of Irish literature for children, giving significant weight to myths, legends, and folklore.6 Fantasy novels recycling Irish mythology were particularly well represented (with Eoin Colfer and his Artemis Fowl series for instance). Although Irish children’s book publishing was on the wane when Dowd started writing,7 Irish children’s literature was recognised as worthy of academic attention, with the formation of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Ireland in 1998,8 of research societies such as the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature (established 2002), and of specific courses in universities.9

• 10 Ibid.
• 11 Dowd’s writings are mostly realistic, but she nonetheless authored stories that may be considered e (...)

5It is in that commercial and academic context that ASPC and SotR were written and published. Focusing on place and space, but also on the Irish history of child abuse, they seem at odds with the fantasy trend highlighted by Jane Suzanne Carroll.10 Although the two novels are apparently realistic,11 addressing historical and / or social issues, they are nonetheless subjective narratives charged with affects, leading the readers to question the reliability of the stories’ young narrators, whose immature voices struggle to be heard. The ambiguities of these two tales of Ireland, set in different times and locations, will be explored in this article. The author seems to conceive her works as both declarations of love and of defiance to a country failing to protect its children. Ultimately, the purpose of this analysis is to examine whether the author, who identified as an Irish writer, despite living most of her life in London, Oxford, and New York, managed to reconcile a fantasised and nostalgic vision of Ireland with the harsh realities of the country in two books aimed at international child readers in the context of a globalised publishing industry.

• 12 Robert Dunbar, “Rarely Pure, Never Simple: The World of Irish Children’s Literature”, The Lion and (...)

6In his review of The Big Guide to Irish Children’s Books, edited by Valerie Coghlan and Celia Keenan, Robert Dunbar interrogates the Irishness in / of children’s books and insists on their complexities, “most of them deriving from questions of definition and origin”.12 In that Big Guide and elsewhere, Valerie Coghlan has repeatedly shown how, in Irish children’s literature, the young characters’ sense of loss was connected to emigration and absent mother figures. In Dowd’s ASPC and SotR, Shell and Holly are motherless teenage girls. Shell’s mother died and Holly’s left without warning, leaving her very young daughter to fend for herself. Ireland symbolises the body of the missing mother, which haunts Shell, preventing her from moving on and emigrating. Holly’s glamorised memories of Ireland are promises of family bliss, thus prompting Holly to return to her motherland, which is also her emigrant mother’s native land.

• 14 French philosopher Gaston Bachelard distinguishes between dormant water and running water. Water, h (...)

8As a liminal space, the Irish Sea is not a threshold but a boundary that cannot be crossed. After taking the underground, the coach (the Oxford Tube), cars and motorbikes, and after walking and running, Holly eventually gets on the ferry that is to reunite her with Ireland and her mother. However, trapped in the car where she is hiding, unable to move forward on her own, she is forced to stop and reinterpret her memories of her mother. The Irish Sea and the ferry that sails on it are in-between spaces, neither Britain nor Ireland, where the girl’s uncertain identity is put to the test. Symbolically, Holly, who has lost her bag containing what little money she had, her mother’s amber ring, and her iPod, is covered in mud, a literally impure substance as it is a mixture of water and earth. Bachelard interprets that sticky, viscous goo as something that can be kneaded and shaped, like clay. What is at stake here is the formation of the girl’s identity. The ferry crossing the Irish Sea is the last stage of the teenage girl’s long and perilous journey. She realises that she was wrong about her mother, about Ireland, and about her own self. Her unnamed mother was not a loving, nurturing woman but an abusing parent, who played sleezy adult jokes on her, which the little girl could not understand, and who beat her with a hot iron. Instead of providing the comfort she expected, the experience of that liminal space brings painful truths to the surface. As a result, Holly no longer needs the persona of Solace. The girl takes off her wig and goes back to her original identity: she is not a sassy blonde young woman, but a sad brown-haired girl named Holly. The initiatory journey is one of dispossession and ambiguous self-discovery that leads to melancholy verging on the “Ophelia complex” such as defined by Bachelard.14 The water of the Irish Sea does not help Holly to reach a better self, but symbolises her being stuck, at least temporarily, in a liminal, undecided adolescent state. Her alternatives are to jump off the boat into the sea and drown, like Ophelia, or to remain on the ferry and go back to London and her foster parents, without ever setting foot in Ireland. Ireland as the land of her mother symbolises her past trauma and is thus left behind.

• 15 Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage [1909], Monika B. Vizedom, Gabrielle L. Caffee (trans.), Chicag (...)

9In Arnold van Gennep’s theory,15 liminality is one of the three stages in a rite of passage, which leads to the transition from one status to another, from one social role to another. The two novels under study seem to offer a truncated version of van Gennep’s rite of passage, which is conventionally composed of three steps: separation (from their mothers), transition (from daughter to mother, from childhood to adulthood), and incorporation (social integration and recognition of their renewed identity). In ASPC and SotR, the final post-liminal stage is denied to the girls as they fail to cross the Irish Sea. Shell does not become a mother as her child is stillborn. Symbolically, she does not give birth in the sea but, more prosaically, in her bathtub. As for Holly, she is stuck with her old self and does not reunite with her mother and Ireland. Instead, she goes back to London. However, Dowd does not represent those incomplete rites of passage as failures. Holly’s final backward journey is no regression but offers the possibility of building a family with her foster parents. In ASPC’s conclusive chapter, Shell is at last allowed to be a sister and have fun at the fair, like the child she still is, freed of her early pregnancy and of her mother’s haunting figure.

• 16 Ciara Ní Bhroin, Discourses of Home and Homeland in Irish Children’s Fiction, 1990-2012, Cham, Palg (...)
• 17 Ibid., p. 215 (our emphasis).
• 18 Amanda Piesse, “Fictionalizing Families”, in Irish Children’s Literature and Culture. New Perspecti (...)
• 19 Ibid.
• 20 A small evergreen tree, holly has the ability to keep its leaves, which, the Celts believed, was ma (...)

13However, as Ciara Ní Bhroin contends, “nostalgia is employed by Dowd as a means of transmuting loss to reach a new level of awareness and understanding”.16 Far from validating the clichés conveyed by her delusional character, Dowd uses and debunks them, first to draw the portrait of a wounded individual, and then to shed light on the traumas of a country. “Dowd’s story of an Irish emigrant mother’s abuse and abandonment of her child relates to the wider history of child abuse that has exploded the myth of Ireland as the maternal isle”.17 In the end, Holly’s nostalgia for Ireland stems from her repressed memories of that history of “abuse and abandonment”. The circular structure of the novel also reflects this nostalgic or rather pseudo-nostalgic wish to return to Ireland and nurturing motherhood. The first chapter introduces the readers to Holly when she is on the ferry to Ireland. Chapters 2 to 42 are analepses: trapped in the hold of the ferry, Holly reminisces her journey, “falling backwards to where [she’s] started [her] journey” (SotR, p. 7). The narrative thus starts where Holly’s story is about to end and that narrative course is resumed from chapter 43 to the end, after a long loop of forty-one chapters. The text is thus thematically and structurally marked by the idea of a return, of a backward movement. Furthermore, Amanda Piesse notices that “each encounter takes [Holly] forward physically, but the emotional journey is regressive”.18 The text is punctuated by her “repetitive memories of when she was separated from her mother”,19 each encounter Holly (under the name of Solace) makes on the road shedding a new light on her reimagined past. Ironically, in the conclusion to her story, Holly (whose name is a symbol of rebirth20) is making efforts to turn “Mercutia Road”, where her foster parents live, into a home and a family. The mention of an adopted dog she named Thulle is not anecdotal. Thulle is not the smiling imaginary dog of her Irish dream, but a real dog living in a real house, even if his name introduces a certain ambiguity and / or hope: Thulle is the name of an island, north of Britain, mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman cartography but never precisely located, in other words another fantasy place and home to dream about.

• 21 Pádraic Whyte, Irish Childhoods. Children’s Fiction and Irish History, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambrid (...)
• 22 Ibid., p. 55.

14The reconstruction of the Irish past is also at the core of ASPC. Set in 1984, ASPC takes place in Ireland before the Celtic Tiger era. Dowd puts the stress on the dire poverty of the Talent family, on the father’s drunkenness, and on the threat of incest. Her Ireland is traumatic and has nothing in common with the “myth of a maternal isle” mentioned earlier. Like other authors of children’s literature such as Joan O’Neil, with her Daisy Chain War, Dowd “uses a fictional individual memory in the exploration of collective memory”.21 Yet she also distances herself as it is not “the position of the adult remembering that is to the fore of the narrative”, but rather the “exploration of the inner world of the child”.22 In Dowd’s case, it is to be wondered whether her Irish novels are instances of “post-memory” or not. The phrase was coined by Marianne Hirsh to refer to Holocaust survivors whose traumas were passed on to their descendants, who never suffered in concentration camps, in families where those intolerable stories were never told. To some extent, when Dowd reconstructs Ireland, she remembers a time she did not live directly but that she indirectly inherited: the Troubles and the hunger strikes in Long Kesh, the weight of Catholicism in Irish social and cultural organisation and its impact on repressed female bodies, for instance. Dowd’s reconstruction of Irish history is mediated through her teenage characters’ reimagination of the land.

• 23 This is the case of Fergus in Bog Child, who leaves Ulster to go study (and grow) in Scotland.
• 24 The expression is ambiguous as “bog” is polysemous, both referring to the “peat” and, more prosaica (...)

15Failing to let go of their traumatic pasts, Shell and Holly literally wish to impersonate their mothers. They symbolically put on their clothes: Holly becomes Solace, a persona reminiscent of her mother, as she imagines her, seductive and adventurous. Shell wears her mother’s pink dress, and as a result is nearly raped by her father confused by his drinking. She also wears her mother’s perfume, named “Je reviens”, “I’m returning” in French. The theme of return is thus at the heart of both novels, stopping any forward momentum. This is particularly true for Shell who is emotionally tied to her dead mother, who keeps “returning” as a ghost Shell repeatedly sees and hears. The chapters of the novel follow the passing of the seasons and the repetition of yearly rites and rituals: September means the return to school and the moment when she understands she is pregnant; December means Christmastime and her giving birth to her baby girl. Yet, it seems that, because she is haunted by her mother’s death, Shell is symbolically unable to protect her daughter’s life. Ireland appears to be marked by deadly stasis, causing the stalling of the cycle of generations. That is made manifest in chapter 22, where two conflicting visions of the country are defended. When Shell thinks of Ireland, she sees a familiar and natural landscape, “the copse, the fold of slope, the wild things all around” (ASPC, p. 136), whereas her lover Declan sees the country in terms of disease and waste: “Ulster is Ulcer”, Ireland is a “hellhole”, “a load of shite”. The short poem he composes goes along the same vein: “Put Munster in the dumpster / Feed Connaught to the dog / Tie Leinster up in Limericks / And flush down the bog” (ASPC, p. 135). Just like Dowd’s other male characters,23 Declan has to “flush down the bog”, to leave the stifling peat of Ireland behind to survive.24 He leaves one island to settle in another: he flees to Manhattan in the United States to work in construction, which in this case takes on a particularly significant meaning. Manhattan is where things are built, enabling the boy to earn money and get a life, whereas Ireland means poverty, misery, and death.

• 26 Anne Markey, Aedín Clements, “Preface to Children’s Literature: Changing Paradigms and Critical Per (...)
• 27 Ibid.

18Anne Markey and Aedín Clements have already pointed out that Dowd’s novels offer a critique of the role of religion and patriarchy in Irish culture and society.26 As mentioned earlier, Dowd eventually rejects Ireland’s traditional, mythical past. Her fictions promote the agency and subjectivity of young people, threatened by the culture of silence and repression.27 In ASPC, besides her father’s mental instability and the indifference of her local community, Shell’s freedom is limited by two dominant and (supposedly) authoritative discourses, that of the press and that of the Church. On several occasions, the flow of the narrative is interrupted by excerpts from newspapers covering the story, indented and reproduced in italics. Those texts offer misleading and fragmented reports on the alleged crimes in parallel with Shell’s actual story, that narrative device highlighting the spread of misinformation: the two dead babies (Shell’s stillborn daughter and her friend Bridie’s boy left to die of exposure on the beach) are turned into twins, potential fathers are conjectured about. The ungrounded hypotheses are then relayed in the community and taken for truths, raising suspicions about young Catholic Father Rose or incestuous father Joseph Talent. Religion weighs heavily on people’s lives. Ironically, Shell gives birth at Christmas, when alone at home with her siblings, playing the piano and singing Christmas carols and hymns telling of the birth of Jesus. Unlike “Mary, full of grace”, celebrated at mass, the “fruit of [Shell’s] womb is [not] blessed”. The religious lessons taught by the tunes sung by her siblings and the sacred words quoted in italics in the text (“Star of wonder, star of the night”, “We three kings of Orients are”, “Star with royal beauty bright”) are confronted with the more prosaic, medical vocabulary of the girl’s inner thoughts when she realises she has gone into labour: “contractions”, “dilatations”, “episiotomies” and “caesareans”. Shell’s harsh reality is less sacred and beautiful than the promises of the Nativity (ASPC, p. 220).