Landing opens with Jude Turner and Síle O’Shaughnessy sharing a disturbing experience on a transatlantic flight. Back in Dublin, Ireland, and “Ireland”, Canada, Jude and Síle start a correspondence that rapidly becomes central to their lives. The two women fall in love through email; telephone calls and visits deepen the relationship and increase the tension of the distance between them.
Contrasts
Síle and Jude are drawn as such opposites that the contrasts become a little tiresome, though they never become caricature. Indo-Irish Síle, 39, leads a big-city life in Dublin and loves to travel. Canadian Jude, 25, lives in her childhood home in a town of 600, two hours from Toronto. Síle is into gadgets; Jude is a techno-phobe. Síle is involved with a refined blonde Irish woman; Jude with a rough-edged half-Mohawk man.On the other hand, Donoghue uses these contrasts well in writing about Jude and Síle’s passion for each other. This is the first time I’ve read a love story between two women that shows a wide array of loving feelings, not emphasizing the “feminine” side of love or the couple’s common experience as women. Landing has what Nicola Griffith calls "triple girl cooties: a girl writing from the POV of a girl who likes girls", but this triple-whammy doesn’t render the story bland. The characters’ differences create a varied dynamic, and Donoghue writes about their feelings in ways that I often find touching and real. The darker side of relationships is missing--Jude and Síle don't spend enough time together to argue--but their love is well described.
Why, then, am I unsure that Jude and Síle have what it takes?
A lack of togetherness
Jude and Síle have a far more dimensional relationship because of their differences. At the same time the contrasts are so strongly drawn that I have trouble imagining a happy ending. The long-distance relationship plays into this uncertainty, adding layers to the story but also keeping the women's relationship somewhat superficial.
Jude and Síle's letter-writing provides a lot of opportunity for quotation and allusion. In a metafictional touch, Jude often excerpts letters from the museum’s archive. However, many of the allusions are rather bleak stories, such as the Nathaniel Hawthorne story of the snow-child who couldn't thrive outside her natural setting.
At the same time, the epistolary structure of the book keeps Jude and Síle physically apart. The reader never sees them become comfortable in each other’s sphere and the relationship stays at the level of a honeymoon, so there's little conflict.
Real life = emotional life
There’s a persistent theme in Landing that “reality” consists of what’s most emotionally vibrant in life, not simply the habitual or the near at hand. Without that emphasis, I suspect the story would fall flat. If our "nearest" were necessarily our "nearest", who would ever try a long-distance relationship or an on-line flirtation?This theme is particularly explicit when a written “I love you” changes Síle’s perceptions about where her “real” life lies: not in routine and familiarity but in emotional connection from afar.
She’d made the mistake of thinking that dinners out and traffic jams were her real life, and this connection with Jude was just a transitory preoccupation. But now she saw that she’d been living out her real time onscreen [via email]….”As the relationship progresses, both women find their everyday lives receding:
They rang each other at any time of day or night…. Síle had started taking occasional baths now, to remind her of Jude, and because there seemed more time to kill.
Different styles of cleaving unto
The style of commentary in Landing reminds me of an article by Elizabeth Campbell:[Epistolary] novels have always been about sexual politics.... [They] use the letter as a subversive and freeing agent and also as a mirror in which they not only seek themselves and/or another but attempt to change their lives to reflect the mirror image.Donoghue integrates several ideas of femininity and gay culture into the story. Both Síle and Jude are openly gay, and comfortable with themselves, which adds a great deal of honesty to their developing relationship. Both women have close friends and supportive communities, but at times experience prejudice.
Síle's relationship with her partner is more comfortable than sexual.
Kathleen had silently forwarded her a link to some online journal article about the high incidence of "what is popularly known as bed death" in long-term lesbian relationships.Having lived celibate for several years, Síle is occasionally disconcerted by Jude’s past relationships, and seems alarmed that Jude still considers herself bisexual.
”Did it feel any different with the girls?” Síle wanted to know.
No answer for a second. Then, “Sex is always different, depending on who you’re with.”
“Your generation’s really ditched the old labels, haven’t you?”
I found Landing well written but a little static in places, slightly sterile in the first half’s letters, and I don't completely believe the ending. I plan to try Donoghue's historical novels: I'm curious to hear her voice in a different setting without the epistolary form. Her Slammerkin is the story of Mary Saunders, a servant who murdered her mistress in 1763. Life Mask fictionalizes a (possibly) historical love triangle between playwright Richard Sheridan, actress Eliza Farren, and the Earl of Derby in 1790s London.
Grade: B- because I wasn't convinced. But I really am interested in trying Donoghue's other books.
2 Comments:
There’s a persistent theme in Landing that “reality” is what’s most emotionally vibrant in life, not simply the habitual, or the near at hand.
Does this also work the other way round in the novel? It's just that you've said that
Síle's relationship with her partner is more comforting and intimate than sexual.
Kathleen had silently forwarded her a link to some online journal article about the high incidence of "what is popularly known as bed death" in long-term lesbian relationships.
This makes me wonder if the novel is saying not just that reality is measured by vibrancy, but also that distance/lack of habituation is needed to keep relationships alive/feeling vibrant. If so, that would also tend to reinforce your sense that this isn't a relationship with a long-term future.
if the novel is saying... distance/lack of habituation is needed to keep relationships alive/feeling vibrant..., that would also tend to reinforce your sense that this isn't a relationship with a long-term future.
Yes, that's an obvious concern about the setup, and Donoghue reinforces the issue in a number of ways. The excitement of falling for each other by email (Jude's first declaration of love is after one shared coffee and months of email). The worry about "bed death" (the full quote talks about it creeping up on one over time). A Hawthorne story about a snow girl not thriving out of her element. The story structure, the allusions, and the contrasts all set up doubts that I don't think Donoghue sufficiently lays to rest by the end.
Jude and Síle spend a few short vacations together--honeymoons, as Jude's ex puts it. That doesn't persuade me that it's a passion that will stand up to proximity, let alone the upheaval of emigration. Particularly since they really aren't comfortable in each other's milieux. The final solution depends on their both leaving their communities and homes--something that doesn't seem to suit the characters Donoghue has built up.
I found some of the book a little sterile, in part I think because while there's a great array of tender feelings, the two women don't spend enough time together to argue. There are brief moments of impatience, but little real conflict. (They argue over external issues, like Jude's ex, but that's more a phase of getting-to-know-you.)
However, I really am struck by how Donoghue voices the women's love. It rings more true to my experience than the (few) other lesbian romances I've read. It may be that the contrasts between the characters are more like what I've experienced in the hetero-world, or simply that Donoghue has a turn of phrase that speaks to me.
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