By Scott Thomas Anderson

When a people endure generations of invasion and oppression – when they’re forced against an ethnic washboard with its residue splashes on for centuries – the art of storytelling becomes more than a birthright or tradition. It becomes an act of cultural defiance. And it carries on as a means of personal survival.

This has been observed in Ireland since before the Norman conquest. The following eight centuries saw a parade of colonizing efforts, freedom clashes, armed rebellions and executed heroes. Throughout it all, stirring narratives were a force of endurance. They were also the reason that monarchy or religion never extinguished the memories of Gaelic people.

That hasn’t been forgotten. In modern times, Ireland produced four Nobel-prize winning writers, put an official writers’ museum in its capital city, and, prior to joining the E.U., had the faces of Irish writers on its paper money. Storytelling is fused to the island’s identity. That’s a phenomenon explored across lengths of time and characters’ minds in “Thirsty Ghosts,” the latest book by Emer Martin, a novelist from Dublin who’s currently living in the Bay Area.

The tale comes on the heels of Martin’s 2018 novel “The Cruelty Men,” which followed one family’s upheaval in the countryside north of Dublin after the Irish Civil War. “The Cruelty Men” is a story that is powerfully told, artfully rendered and strikes an impressive balance between imagined meditations and the cold, hard-hitting reality of common experience. For my money, it is one of the best contemporary novels in English in the last decade.

“Thirsty Ghosts” is partly a sequel to that tale and partly a more-expansive saga.

Martin starts this new journey by returning to one of the characters from “The Cruelty Men,” Maeve, a young woman who was thrown into a Magdalene laundry after being impregnated and abandoned in a society dominated by the Catholic Church. Historically, these ‘laundries’ in Ireland have been described as makeshift prisons of forced labor that were overseen by nuns. In one of several plot lines of “Thirsty Ghosts,” Martin pulls the lens back to introduce other girls and women who’ve been incarcerated in this soapy, steamy purgatory. Some have been deemed “fallen women.” Others have been locked away thanks to unstable parents. Still more landed in this euphemistically named asylum because of dire poverty. The females in the laundry are constantly told they’re unwanted, that they are “the trash of Ireland.” Martin deftly explores how the closed-off, monotonous existence of these women is made bearable by the stories they hear from Maeve.

“Thirsty Ghosts” also examines the Emerald Isle in the 1970s and 80s through prisms of two families living on different sides of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. South of that line, the traumatizing scars from institutions like the Magdalene laundries and the industrial schools for boys begin to feed a young nation’s challenges with drug-addiction and rising criminality. North of that line, families trying to enjoy a simple life find that it’s impossible to escape the political violence between Catholics and Protestants.

As Martin considers all this through the innocence of children’s eyes and the stoicism of poor and working-class adults, she also looks back to a blood-soaked history of suppression that’s crystalized by the Rathlin Island Massacre in 1575. That particular episode may be illuminating to California readers. Here in the Golden State, Sir Francis Drake is typically remembered as an ocean-navigating explorer who discovered the American West Coast for Europeans. But Drake’s legacy in Northern Ireland is much, much darker. Acting in concert with Walter Devereux, the 1st Earl of Essex, he led an attack force against the people living in Ireland’s County Antrim, slaughtering 600 inhabitants, including 400 defenseless civilians who were mostly elderly, women or children. Prior to that, Drake’s alley, Devereux, had engaged a level of trickery and treachery with the Irish that makes the succeeding massacre – to a current reader’s eye – reminiscent of the fictional the Red Wedding in “Game of Thrones.”    

Distant and modern violence are handled with a dream-like quality throughout “Thirsty Ghosts,” with the passage of time between those polarities continually dissolving until two of the most eccentric characters can detect the connections through one final, grisly vision on Dublin’s city walls. In writing this novel, Martin has sparked radiance through poetic monologues, taken readers through a geography of memories in bog mud, and conjured a compelling testament to myths, fables and lore being our closest approximation to a healing magic.   

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer of the documentary podcast series ‘Drinkers with Writing Problems,’ the first episode of which was written and recorded in Ireland and features an interview with Emer Martin.