Annie Dunne

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How does Sarah’s and Billy Kerr’s “understanding” threaten Annie? Sarah and Annie are as close to each other as two people can be, but they see their relationship differently. What does Annie’s “marriage of simple souls” (p. 127) mean to Sarah? What prompts her to put it at risk for Billy Kerr? The wind goes on with its counting of the leaves in the sycamores, a hundred and one, a hundred and two.”

The murk of the darkened daylight hangs in the room. It is they who own the stormy sunlight outside” (71).

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This was the only Sebastian Barry novel I had not read to date, but any devotee of his will be familiar with the families that have formed the basis of his work.

Into this scenario come two children, Annie’s nephew’s children, to stay for the summer while their parents relocate the family to London. Their presence stirs Annie’s memories and sensibilities, and heightens her awareness of the vulnerability of her age. There is also an undercurrent of bewilderment about the presence of children in this world of disillusioned adults--can Annie even know what innocence is any longer? a b Mastrogiorgio, Tony (August 25, 2002). "Sebastian Barry pulls new gems from familiar Irish ground". San Francisco Chronicle. A subtle but powerful novel of a spinster's life in the Irish countryside rises to great emotional heights...this is a deliciously poetic book."— The Washington Post Annie Dunne, ανύπαντρη και άτεκνη, ζούσε στο σπίτι της αδερφής της και βοηθούσε στην ανατροφή των τριών παιδιών τους. Όταν μετά τον θάνατο της αδερφής της ο χήρος γαμπρός της ξαναπαντεύεται, αυτή αναγκάζεται να μετακομίσει. Βρίσκει ασφάλεια στο αποξενωμένο αγροτόσπιτο της ξαδέρφης της κι εκεί ξανακάνει τη ζωή της. Δύο χρόνια αργότερα κι ενώ φιλοξενεί τα δύο ανίψια της, ένας άνδρας απειλεί και πάλι να της στερήσει τη μοναδική θαλπωρή που της έχει απομείνει.

Sebastian Barry

Hopefully heaven itself will consist of this, the broadening cheer of light when I walk out into the morning yard. The stones already hot, softened by dawn. The rain deep in the earth seeps further down, and a lovely linen-like dryness afflicts the land. Grass becomes bright and separate, like a wild cloth. . . . You can almost hear the work of the sun on those long, patient things, the buds of the crab-appple tree, the little hinges of the sycamores. How fresh and alive the leaves even, shouting with green, delighting in life." Taken in by her cousin Sarah Annie finds some peace and self-realization. "I thought I was so safe in my prejudices". A summer-long visit by Annie's niece and nephew bring her a new awareness. Who could not be changed by the love and innocence of young children? "Is there not eternal pleasure and peace in the facts of human love, that overrides present difficulties? I do think so." And there is no thrashing about of branches to disturb the children, who, after all, are city children, and need time to adjust, and not just to the butter. Salted, unsalted, that is the difference, salted and unsalted life” (9). Drawing heavily on the experiences of his own family, his choices of subject matter, including most notably a long-running interest in the displacement felt by Catholic middle-class loyalists in the early years of the Irish Free State, are often awkward and unfashionable. He has said that he didn’t intend to locate forgotten characters of history, "But by the accident of being born in Ireland into families who had lived in Ireland through this past century, everywhere I looked I found people mired in history", The Guardian (11 October 2008). It is a strange chance for happiness for Annie. But against that happiness moves the figure of Billy Kerr, with his ambiguous attentions to Sarah, threatening to drive Annie from her last niche of safety in the world. The world of childish innocence also proves darkened and puzzling to her, and she struggles to find clear ground, clear light – to preserve her sense of love and place against these subtle forces of disquiet.

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. The world of my youth is wiped away, as if it were only a stain on a more permanent fabric,” thinks Annie. “I do not know where this Ireland is now” (p. 95). Annie Dunne is a novel about the loss of old ways, but by referring to past times as a place, how does Annie complicate conventional notions of nostalgia? It is a strange chance for happiness for Annie. But against that happiness moves the figure of Billy Kerr, with his ambiguous attentions to Sarah, threatening to drive Annie from her last niche of safety in the world. The world of childish innocence also proves darkened and puzzling to her, and she struggles to find clear ground, clear light - to preserve her sense of love and place against these subtle forces of disquiet. Stade George. Encyclopedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present, Volume 1 Facts On File. 2nd Revised ed. 15 April 2009. ISBN 978-0-8160-7385-6 There is not much between the characters of Billy Kerr and Billy the pony” (p. 33), thinks Annie, and yet although we see Billy through Annie’s eyes as a foolish lout, the events of the story suggest another side to him. How do Billy’s actions —both kind and cruel —contrast with Annie’s description of them?A very moving and often lovely story; intense and exciting at times, occasionally horrifying and terrifying. Barry writes beautifully. Although I struggle with phrases like ‘tired as a wolf’ and ‘pensive as daffodils’, at least his writing gives me pause for thought. This is a book to savour. Following the incongruous monologic and highly topographical play, The Pride of Parnell Street (2007), which uses Ireland’s loss to Italy in the 1990 football World Cup as a springboard to relate a harrowing tale of domestic abuse on a Dublin North Side, left behind by Ireland’s 1990s boom years, Barry published the novel The Secret Scripture in 2008. A masterful return to familiar themes, it tells the life story of 100 year old Roseanne Clear, a peripheral yet pivotal character in the earlier novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, incarcerated for most of her adult life in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital – it seems as though Barry sees Ireland’s mental institutions as repositories for much of the nation’s lost history. The narrative is divided between the secret, lyrical memoirs of Roseanne and the journal kept by her psychiatrist Dr Grene as he investigates her past. Another of Barry’s Irish historical outsiders, as a working class Presbyterian from Sligo, Roseanne subverts the Republican trope of the nation as old woman, whilst her great age enables him to chart traumatic episodes in the birth of the Irish nation as they relate to one 20th-century life. It is like Eden, my own father used to say, in the bright dispensations of the summer months. These days that, even as you live through them, seem like memories, caught up as they are in the lost happinesses of other, similar days” (168).

Sarah sleeps, the old embroidered blanket over her face, its hart and hounds forever caught hunting across the low, unstable hills of her breast” (82). Much of Annie Dunne's difficulties stem from her loyalty to English rule. Is Annie Dunne implicitly a political novel?

His academic posts include Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995-6). His early plays include Boss Grady's Boys (1990), which opened in 1988, and won the BBC/Stewart Parker Award. His play The Steward of Christendom (1995), was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in March 1995, an Out of Joint Production with Donal McCann in the title role, which subsequently transferred to Broadway. It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the Ireland/America Literary Prize, the Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play and the Writers' Guild Award (Best Fringe Play). Sebastian Barry also won the Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year award in the same year. Our Lady of Sligo (1998) was joint winner of the Peggy Ramsay Play Award, and was seen off-Broadway, and Hinterland premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Royal National Theatre, London in 2002. Whistling Psyche (2004), and The Pride of Parnell Street (2007), are two interweaving monologues. His latest plays are Tales of Ballycumber (2009) and Andersen's English (2010). I took an immediate liking to Annie, who finds beauty in the simple, ordinary tasks of life and in the world of God’s creation. It is this that buoys her and keeps her afloat in a world that has truly not been kind. A day of hardship is a long day, good times shorten the day, and yet a life in itself is but the breadth of a farthing” (10).