Not the Same Sky
Evelyn Conlon
Wakefield Press
Effectively a modern epic, Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky weaves together the stories of several young Irish women fleeing the famine and travelling to Australia with those of the surgeon Charles Strutt in charge of them on board the ship and the 21st century Irish stonemason commissioned to create a memorial for the girls. The vivid portrayal of the girls’ fundamental commitment to survival makes the novel a compelling read. We first meet Honora, Anne, Julia and Bridget at the workhouse. Conlon delicately outlines the stark realities of life at this time: bereavement, hunger, disease and complete poverty. She exposes the new colony’s recruitment of these young women as the exploitative enterprise it was, and strikingly describes their powerlessness. Faced with leaving behind their country and their families, the girls are forced to show strength beyond their years. Throughout the voyage, their arrival in Australia and their new lives once there, the girls resolve to look forward, which involves painfully rejecting their collective past.
Perhaps inevitably for a story of this scale, there is some disjointedness. Strutt is our lens for most of the novel, which distances us from the girls; minor characters disappear; the modern-day frame feels peripheral. Conlon succeeds, however, in counteracting the abstract familiarity of the Irish emigration narrative, and in reconstructing the lives of the girls with compassion.
Words: Anna-Grace Scullion
