Annie Dunne

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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 Much of Annie Dunne's difficulties stem from her loyalty to English rule. Is Annie Dunne implicitly a political novel? 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? Sleepless in Seattle. Tom Hanks will never marry again. Except his son finds him 'Annie'. "You're 'Annie'?" And they hold hands forever after as Jimmy Durante sings 'Make Someone Happy'.

As a wordsmith, Barry is at times amazing, his descriptions poetic and insightful.”— The Philadelphia Inquirer Looking at a crab-apple tree, with its “generous, bitter arms,” Annie Dunne thinks “this is the happiness allowed to me” (p. 43). Why does Annie identify with the crab-apple? How does Sebastian Barry use the hills and trees of Kelsha to describe the people who live there, especially Annie? Billy Kerr would harass the deer if there was any profit to himself in doing so, as he is a man without qualities. There is probably a Billy Kerr, or someone like him, in all human affairs. Otherwise all would be well, continually.” 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).Annie, like us all, has been in history, in her own portion of it, so, yes, it is a political novel in that sense. But Annie’s views are not my own. Annie’s view of history, and she was given a glimpse of official history at the beginning of the last century by the accident of being a policeman’s daughter, is based on her own prejudices. Mine is based on my prejudices! I grew up in a bohemian family —my mother was an actress and my father an architect and poet. My father especially I think thought history, politics, and to some extent even family, redundant and unimportant. I loved him, but I thought differently. I yearned for family but couldn’t reach it. Outside of that, one grandfather had been in the British army in the second war, the other was republican by nature and had played some part in the rising of 1916 that he never made clear to anyone. This was just things as they were, unexamined. Later when I started to write it began to seem quite strange, and I became interested really in unspoken things, family members who didn’t fit the bill of conventional Irishness. I married a Presbyterian woman by chance, and that was a further insight into the consequences of difference. Then you notice that the erased history might imply tracts of yourself were simply missing, crossed out. So when I had children, how was I to tell them who they were? I suppose Annie Dunne is part of this, the sorting out of people from history maybe, rather than in history. When summer arrives, Annie’s widowed nephew brings his two children to stay for the summer so he and his new wife begin to turn their new house into a home. In the movies, Annies are always: cute/pretty/beautiful; perky/down-to-earth; inquisitive to intelligent/well-read; loyal/wholesome; a perfect woman for a good man. The personification of Ireland of course is an old tradition, and indeed the old woman, or “the hag” as the term went, often stood for Ireland in poetry, even as late as Yeats. But I don’t think I was after such a thing. Ireland as a landscape and a character…that’s an interesting notion. I don’t really know the answer. Sometimes, either in accusation or praise, it is said that I write poetically, but the truth seems to me to be that I listen for how the characters speak and try to be faithful to that, wherever it leads. Robert Frost said that dangerous thing: that he looked after the sound and let the sense look after itself. I suppose as a child I could make no distinction between inert matter and things with a beating heart and have held on to that ignorance. After all it is the apprehension of a person of their surroundings that makes up the material, the banner and the inner pictures of a life. Annie lives in a rich world, in the sense that it has daily sights to see that she approves. Such I suppose is the wealth of people that have few coins, the coinage of things as they are, as they show themselves, like those small animals that are familiar to country people but are like revelations, revenants and miracles to city people, or used to be. The wind goes on with its counting of the leaves in the sycamores, a hundred and one, a hundred and two.”

Much of Annie Dunne’s difficulties stem from her loyalty to English rule. Is Annie Dunne implicitly a political novel? 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.

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).

You said that The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty began as a play that slowly took shape as a novel. What was the genesis of Annie Dunne? What are you working on now—and in which genre are you writing? I am thinking about nothing, slipping from one idle thing to the next as one does beside a fire” (10). Superb...Annie emerges from the novel as one o fthe most memorable women in Irish fiction."— San Francisco Chronicle Barry’s first full length work of fiction was The Engine of Owl-Light (1987), which loosely weaves together the stories of six different fictional historical characters in one volume, using six distinct narrative strands. Each strand stylistically reflects its protagonist, so that the tale of a medieval Irish chieftain is related in Middle English and that of a young man’s growth to adulthood displays clear echoes of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The result is a complex and frequently confusing collection of meta-fictions, in which Barry’s characteristic engagements with questions of history, language and nationality become somewhat lost in a narrative hall of mirrors.Overboard. Goldie Hawn is Joanna Stayton, filthy rich and insufferable, until she meets a carpenter (Kurt Russell) who rescues her, but she has amnesia. He renames her 'Annie' and she becomes lovable, funny and, well, all the things she could not be as a 'Joanna'.

Oh, Annie – Annie Dunne. How my heart went out to you as you told me your stories – past and present – and how the future held such strong fears for you. 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. Two of Annie Dunne's siblings - Willie and Lily - have also been central characters in Barry's novels, and the Dunne clan is based on a branch of his own family. Sarah had inherited the farm from her mother “in the old days, so when Billy Kerr comes to speak to Sarah about selling her pony so that she might have more cash, Annie is concerned both for Sarah and herself, what would come of both of them in the chain of events she sees following should Sarah agree.Barry has given us a heroine of delicate complexity in a setting of rugged beauty. His flawless use of language and plot hold the reader rapt from beginning to end.— Jeanne Ray, Boston Herald And there is solace in the novel - both in her relationship - though occasionally uneven - with the children, and in the connection with nature and the countryside. 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?