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The Banyan Tree (Paperback)

by Christopher Nolan (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Phoenix; New Ed edition (6 April 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0753809427
  • ISBN-13: 978-0753809426
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.2 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 292,553 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #5 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > N > Nolan, Christopher

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
The renowned winner of the 1987 Whitbread Award, Christopher Nolan, has fashioned an extraordinary epic set in rural Ireland, spanning three generations of the O'Briens who own a small dairy farm in Westmeath. Minnie O'Brien stubbornly clings on to life, her five fields and her "long-agos" that take root like a banyan tree and feed her lonely old age. Her husband Peter is long dead and her three children scattered in a typical Irish diaspora--Brendan is a priest in Africa, Sheila is a nurse in London and Frankie is a sheep-shearer in Australia and odd-jobber around the globe. Will Frankie return in time to save the farm from the avaricious grasping of the next door neighbour, Jude Fortune, and will Minnie discover the betrayal Peter has kept hidden from her?

In many ways, The Banyan Tree is a conventional tale of births, weddings and death set against the land and the lure of emigration. What makes it unusual however is Nolan's flexible, fickle and often fantastical use of the English language. Not only does he use colloquialisms to locate the characters very specifically, but he invents verbs from adjectives, making them come sparklingly alive. The butter churn is a "druidic dark drum" that comes "Sundaying into life". Minnie's memories are noisy things that clutter her mind like "local attaboys" at the races. On the day after her wedding, "morning songed the reading of the streets" as Minnie experienced her "vulved awareness" and "funky heart". Some of Nolan's alliterations and hyphenated words bring the whimsical beauty of Gerald Manley Hopkins to the novel, but occasionally his inventions collapse into the absurd.

When he describes a pony drinking for example, he writes, "slurping her grizzled credentials, she effected a long draught". Although these circumlocutions can trip up the meaning, the narrative works up to a moving climax that will have any offspring far from home reaching for the phone or a plane ticket. --Cherry Smyth

Product Description
On an overgrown and rundown farm in Ireland in the late-1980s, widowed Minnie O'Brien remembers the past: courtship and marriage to Peter; life on the farm; and the births of her three children and what became of them.

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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Maybe it is Joyce who should be compared to Nolan., 10 Oct 2003
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: The Banyan Tree (Hardcover)
Although Nolan's prose has often been compared to that of other, more famous writers--James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example--his style is more accessible, making his story more readable, more emotionally powerful, and more personally involving than anything I've read by these other great writers. Minnie O'Brien lives, loves, ages, aches, and ultimately haunts. She's an extraordinary character presented in an extraordinary way by an equally extraordinary author.

The basic story line is simple: Minnie O'Brien, an Irish countrywoman with a love for the land and her family, watches her three children grow up and leave the farm. As she ages into her eighties, she tries to keep the farm going, waiting for her youngest son, from whom she has never heard a word since his departure at age 17, to return to claim the land.

To describe the book in these terms, however, is like describing Ulysses as a story about a man walking around Dublin. Nolan brings Minnie to life by following the first rule of fiction: "Don't tell about something; recreate it." He does this, in part, by using vivid, emotionally charged words in new ways, sometimes using adjectives and nouns as verbs, conveying not only the emotional sense but also an action: In describing Minnie's actions at the death of her husband, we find that her cries were "cartwheeling around the room," before "she sacked her voice of screams" and dried her eyes, going downstairs to "perform the miraculous loaves and fishes reenactment," for the neighborhood wake. Minnie's connection to the land, her love for Peter, her devotion to her children, her commitment to what is good, and her ability to keep dreaming of the future, even as she is dying, are all part of the banyan tree of her life, one which will continue to bloom long after one finishes this book. Mary Whipple

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Unicorn Stick And Half a Million Clicks, 15 Dec 2002
By taking a rest - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
This is a truly special literary work, a gift from the author who spent 12 years creating it.

If you enjoy any of the great authors of fiction from the 19th and early 20th century you will love the book.

Mr. Nolan won The Whitbread Award in 1987, for the work he penned prior to this one, "Under The Eye Of The Clock".

If you enjoy rich enveloping detail that never is tedious, the book is for you. If you enjoy the scope of a work that takes the needed time, that brings to mind the word "epic", and the phrase "sure to be a classic", get this book.

If you are new to his work as am I, you are probably the rule rather than the exception. The last work published by Mr. Nolan was in 1987, and this new work took 12 years. And this leads to the title of this review.

Mr. Nolan is paralyzed and he is mute. He cannot read aloud what he has crafted so as to hear his prose as he means it to be heard. Mr. Nolan has what is called his "Unicorn Stick", attached to his forehead and with the assistance of a helper; he types his works one letter at a time.

"The Banyan Tree" required 500,000 taps on his typewriter over a 12-year period. The book is a remarkable work by any standard, and is made more astonishing by the method he uses to communicate this tale of a Family's History.

The book deserves your full attention, and a bit more time to read. Rushing through the story would lessen the impact of it, and fail to acknowledge the extraordinary effort it took to create.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A poignant story of famiy life in rural Ireland, 18 Jul 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Banyan Tree, the (Paperback)
This must be one of this years' novels worthy of consideration for an award. The story of Minnie O'Brian unfolds with first the courtship of her parents and then her own with her beloved husband Peter. They have three children which they bring up on a farm in rural Ireland. There is Brendan the priest, Shelia the nurse and the wayward Frankie.It is a story of love and family disintegration. Minnie and Peter remain devoted to each other until they are cruely parted. The children soon leave their home to make their own way in life and have their own personal crises. Minnie on her own fights to maintain and keep the farm with little contact from her children. Her battle for survival so that her youngest Frankie can inherit the farm becomes her main preoccupation. As death approaches closer contact is made with Brendan and Shelia, but will Frankie get to see his mother for the first time in 30years? This book is written with outstanding prose.almost poetical evoking the strength of love with superb descripitive writing of magical power conjuring up a sense of rural Irish family life and conflict.The changes in pace make this a book that is difficult to place down.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars A Truly awful book!
I am truly amazed that a publisher could even consider publishing this book. Although the idea of tracing a family in a story works quite well (and not for the first time in... Read more
Published on 8 Jul 2000

4.0 out of 5 stars If you like your hot toast dripping with butter...
This is a grand story, it keeps you gripped and is loaded (possibly overloaded for some) with metaphor and simile.
Published on 9 Nov 1999

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