Annie Dunne
By Sebastian Barry
Viking, Penguin Books
ISBN 0-670-03112-7 
Hardcover, $24.95

on't look for thrills. This tiny novel (only a tad over 200 pages) is hardly a page turner. Rather, it has the effect of a Homeric drama in miniature; after you've stopped at the end of every other paragraph to allow its harmonics to penetrate your imagination and lodge in your memory, it feels much longer.

Annie Dunne, an aging spinster who lives with her also aging and equally spinsterly cousin on the outskirts of a tiny village in late 1950s Ireland, ponders the eternal questions of faith and universe as she tries to imagine life on earth as seen through the eyes of a four-year-old child and his slightly older sister.

Not much happens. The elements of the actual plot could probably be outlined in ten sentences, but the overtones are what make it what it is. It's not what happens but to whom and how it happens and the wider significance of what doesn't happen that makes this novel sing.

Perhaps it is because author Sebastian Barry is essentially a playwright that he seems to expect the auditory and dramatic elements of every line to ring in his imaginary reader's ears. And they do, to the extent that it's not long before you don't care that much what happens. His gift is the ability to expand the resonance of each moment. Flashes of intuition enrich the deeper sensibilities of each actor so that even the most personal response by one character seems perceived and acted upon by all the others. It's a love story — not romantic love, but the half-conscious and even unsought-for affection that blossoms among those who share a small stage and struggle in common for the bare necessities of life.

The few epiphanal scenes take place in an ambience half giggle, half swoon—a pony cart that falls apart under its astonished driver; a furtive peek into a moment of sex play between the children, leading to bewilderment and ambivalence, and returning over and over again as an unbidden memory, like the lapping of a midnight tide against the pilings of an old dock. A missing hen is discovered beneath a bucket where it has stood imprisoned for two days after a moment of pettish spitefulness, unveiling a revelation which will lead to the grand resolution of the story as Annie comes to understand both the cost and the value of family loyalty. This novel, from beginning to end, is a symphony of the simple, the daily, made heroic by the author's astonishingly humane treatment of the human in all its grit and glory.

© Sandy McKinney