Pearl (Hardcover)

With a strange mixture of anticipation and dread she listens and discovers that the message is from an officer from the State Department in Washington. The voice tells her that Pearl has chained herself to a flagpole in front of the American Embassy in Dublin. She has not eaten in six weeks; refuses all offers of assistance, and seemingly might die.

This premise sets the scene for a deep and intense psychological study of three main characters: Pearl, Maria and Joseph, Maria's best friend and confidant, and the man who must come to Pearl's rescue. Discarding the traditional linear narrative, author Mary Gordon instead, infuses her story with a challenging and often obtuse stream-of-consciousness style.

As the narrative gradually unfolds, the reader is witness to the interior lives of the story's three main protagonists whom are gradually forced to confront their inner most presumptions about love and life. Gordon also bombards readers constantly with her own questions and ruminations, and permeates the narrative with her own thoughts on the events as they transpire. She is telling us that her aim is to write a "chronicle" of three very different lives.

Pearl has inadvertently become involved with a misfit group who are sympathetic to the IRA. The republicans and the unionists are on the verge of signing an historical peace agreement, but certain members of Pearl's circle feel that they have been let down. When Pearl unwittingly causes the death of fifteen-year-old Stevie Donegan, the nephew of an IRA bomber serving time in an English jail, she assumes full responsibility and her guilt-ridden conscience leads her to this methodical imitation of Catholic martyrdom on the front steps of the Embassy.

It doesn't help that Stevie's father, Mick, an American sympathetic to the Irish cause, and Breeda, an Irishwoman from the North who has witnessed a lifetime of slaughter and carnage, obliquely blames her for Stevie's death. Maria, however, while horrified at what she's done, is quite sympathetic to her daughter's plight, and she realizes that Pearl had probably learnt by example.

Maria was a quasi-flower child and civil rights activist of the 60's. Empowered by an unjust war, Maria spent most of her formative years going to demonstrations and protests. But this is different, because Pearl has got herself caught up in someone else's cause in someone else's country. Pearl believes that her death will have some kind of strange transformative effect; she rationalizes that her suicide will be altered into an act of hope. It is her death, not her life, that promises to give her life meaning.

The other important character is Pearl's repressed childhood friend Joseph, who is also beckoned to Dublin when he hears the news. All his life Maria has treated him like a servant, but "there is no name for what he is to Pearl." What Pearl had done was divide his life inexorably. He was not the man he was yesterday. "His past had no importance to him, and the future is something he dares not contemplate."

There's no doubt Pearl is an ambitious novel, and it brims with issues of timeless universality: For what cause should one give up one's life? And is there anything truly worth dying for? Death, religion, political activism, and the irrefutable bond that exists between a mother and her daughter, are all themes that are addressed.

But in the end, these noble thematic aspirations get in the way, and Pearl begins to become repetitive, over-wrought and not that terribly engrossing. The endless interior monologues eventually become exhausting, and, at times, the novel seems to read more like a rhetorical college essay, than as a complete and fully-fledged work of fiction. This is a pity, because Mary Gordon is a highly accomplished, lyrical, and prosaic writer; it's just that she tends to let her own intellectual self-importance get in the way of good storytelling. Mike Leonard April 05.