Scala Radio Book Club: Haven by Emma Donoghue
Three men vow to leave the world behind them and start anew...
In the Scala Radio Book Club this week (Thursday 18th August), Mark Forrest is chatting to Irish-Canadian playwright, screenwriter, literary historian and novelist Emma Donoghue, on her brand-new book Haven.
Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and was an international best seller. She went on to write the screenplay for the film adaptation in 2015, where she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Haven is a haunting, luminous meditation on isolation, faith and survival inspired by real historical events, as a trio of seventh-century monks found a monastery on an impossibly remote island.
Three men vow to leave the world behind them and start anew...
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks - young Trian and old Cormac - he travels down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. Their extraordinary landing spot is now known as Skellig Michael. But in such a place, far from all other humanity, what will survival mean?
Haunting, moving and vividly told, Haven displays Emma Donoghue's trademark world-building and psychological intensity - but this tale is like nothing she has ever written before...
Mark began the interview by asking why Emma decided to explore the lives of three monks in 600 A.D.
‘Well, I got the idea well before covid, when I was on a boat trip around the Skellig’s off the coast of Kerry in 2016,’ said Emma. ‘It was the perfect lockdown project for me because with all the modern worries about masks and rules, to be able to go somewhere completely different and think about the different problems the monks had like, how do we survive the winter? Where will we find some firewood? Also, the great existential questions like am I here on earth to please myself or am I just a slave to God? It couldn't have been a better transporting experience for me to get me away from the boredom of life under covid.’
Mark was interested to know more about the setting of the novel. ‘One of the first things I did when I started reading the book was go online to see if Skellig Michael existed. Skellig Michael is a real place. Some people do visit it. Why is it so special?’
‘It doesn't look like any other island I've seen,’ said Emma. ‘It's extraordinarily pointy and jagged, and it reaches up into the sky like pointed fingers. Irish monks settled there to try and get away from the world and to live purely. It's like a barren new planet and nobody had ever lived there before. Yet it was absolutely covered in birds.’
Emma wrote the screenplays for the films Room and The Wonder. Mark asked, ‘Many writers hand over their novels to be adapted into films, and get someone else to write the screenplay. Why didn’t you go down that route?’
‘Why would they hand over such an exciting task!’ said Emma. ‘You know, the book will be what the book is forever. The film is a whole new thing and a whole new art form. Like many writers, I absolutely love cinema and TV, and I think that screen arcs have come to a glorious height today. I think Shakespeare probably would be writing a long-form television drama if he was around.
So I have seized the opportunity to adapt Room and then more recently The Wonder, which is coming out on Netflix later this year. So in both cases, I really enjoyed the challenge of telling the story all over again in visuals. You just get to be part of the team who are engaged in this fascinating process.’
Emma’s novel Haven is out now. The film adaptation of her novel The Wonder is set to be released on Netflix later this year.
Find out about more Scala Radio Book Club guests here >>
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