Flight
Oona Frawley
[Tramp Press]
It has been said that the experience of exile cannot truly be expressed, as the condition of exile necessarily eliminates any possibility of an audience. If so, Oona Frawley has a gift for empathy. While slight in plot and dialogue, Flight is probing in its exploration of characters’ desires for homes they leave or envision. Set in 2004, with the referendum on Irish citizenship on the horizon, the novel follows the interlaced narratives of Clare and Tom, a couple in their seventies beginning to suffer from dementia; their daughter Elizabeth, whose formative years in Vietnam with her parents have affected her sense of home and family; and Sandrine, a pregnant Zimbabwean immigrant employed to care for Clare and Tom. Frawley’s engagement with the theme of displacement is always compassionate, and she resolutely centres on the particularities of individual experience – specifics all too often abstracted in discussions of diaspora and cultural hybridity.
Frawley’s greatest achievement here is the temporal link between pregnancy, senility and integration, carrying the reader through the narrative at a meditative pace. Images of minute but unstoppable movement, like plant growth, suggest a sense of slow flux without the neatness of facile cyclicality. In deftly manoeuvring between time periods without resorting to the comfort of a distanced perspective, Frawley succeeds in delicately evoking the pain that can accompany change.
Words: Anna-Grace Scullion
For more, see our reviews of Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart and Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis or our preview of Tramp Press’ Dubliners 100 collection.
