Molly’s debut novel shaped by years spent in Galway

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Molly Aitken has created a compelling world in her debut novel, The Island Child, which was part inspired by Synge’s Riders to the Sea and part by Homer’s Odyssey, but which has its own unique identity and a strong central female character, Oona.

Molly, who was born in Scotland in 1991, and reared in Ireland, had encountered The Odyssey and Riders to the Sea while she was studying Literature and Classics at NUI, Galway. Both stories made an impression on her. But it wasn’t until later, when she was studying Creative Writing at Bath University, where her tutors included the legendary novelist Fay Weldon, that Molly developed this novel.

Molly wanted to tell a story of a strained mother-daughter relationship since revisiting Eavan Boland’s poem, The Pomegranate, which she had studied at school. It interweaves classical myth and personal story as it explores the parent-child dynamic.

Molly initially thought that a mother-daughter plot would allow the story to be set anywhere. But, as she tried different locations, she found that wasn’t the case.

“It wasn’t working. Then, as soon as I set it on the island and around Galway, the landscape really came alive and began to influence the characters,” she says.

The novel moves between Oona’s childhood on Inis and her life as an adult in Canada, where she still carries the legacy of her island past, and the various, often-complex relationships from that time.

The book is set in the past – from the 1960s onwards – but Molly deliberately didn’t create any timeframe, “because I wanted that timeless, magical feeling of childhood”.

She succeeds, although Oona’s childhood couldn’t be described as especially happy. The ties that bind her to her mother are complex – born out of maternal love and fear. But the young girl doesn’t see those emotions. Instead, she envies her brothers for the freedom they enjoy, fishing, farming and being allowed to travel to the neighbouring island of Éag, where the Inis folk bury their dead.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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