“If Love’s a Country”: Transnationalism and the Celtic Tiger in Emma Donoghue’s Landing

Hints of a transnational sensibility appear in many of Emma Donoghue’s works, and, over the course of her increasingly illustrious literary career, her fiction has grown more global in its scope.¹ Her first two novels, Stir-Fry (1994) and Hood (1995), certainly explore metaphoric themes of blurred boundaries, but their geographic settings remain firmly nestled in Ireland and within the domestic sphere. Her historical novels, Slammerkin (2000), Life Mask (2004), and The Sealed Letter (2008)—as well as her collection of stories set in the British Isles between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002)—begin to explore the interplay of public and private identities and to engage with questions of national identity. In Life Mask, Donoghue deploys contemporary American post–9/11 language to consider the tense relationship between England and France in the late eighteenth century, and in Slammerkin, her heroine travels from urban London to the rural border of England and Wales, yet finds it impossible to leave her London identity behind. Donoghue views Slammerkin, Life Mask, and The Sealed Letter as a “sort of trilogy of investigations of the British class system.”² These novels reveal Donoghue expanding the scope of her fiction beyond contemporary Ireland and her focus on lesbian sexuality in Stir-Fry and Hood.

Donoghue herself, like many contemporary writers, leads a somewhat transnational life; she lived in France for six months in 2008, and explains in her online biography how “after years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 [she] settled in London, Ontario,” with her lover and their son and daughter. And yet, critically, Donoghue—like many transplanted authors—is considered an “Irish” writer, persistently linked with her nation of origin.³ Nonetheless, experiences traveling during the 1990s may have contributed to her 2006 collection of short stories, Touchy Subjects. In these stories, Donoghue moves beyond the United Kingdom settings of her earlier work; the stories are variously set in contemporary Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Canada.

The title story in Touchy Subjects, originally published as Donoghue’s contribution to the collaborative Ladies Night at the Finbar Hotel (1999), sets a transnational tone for the collection and explicitly employs Celtic Tiger Dublin for comic effect.⁴ It opens with an Irish-born American suffering jet lag in the recently renovated Finbar’s Hotel, a symbol of Dublin on the economic upswing. Donoghue plays up the awkwardness of the plot—Sarah, the Irish-born American, plans to conceive a child by having her friend’s husband donated sperm—through references to Sarah’s jet-setting career, Dublin’s expanding economy, and the cultural differences that persist despite globalized corporate culture. In a lighthearted way, the story engages with the global economy, national identities, and transnational culture clashes in a manner that Donoghue had only briefly touched on earlier in her career.

Donoghue’s latest novel, Room (2010), has brought the author to a new level of success. Vigorously publicized and much anticipated, Room was shortlisted for the Booker Prize shortly after its publication. The subject matter—a boy’s life in the room where he and his mother are held captive for years—and her decision to narrate the book in the voice of a five-year-old boy, require Donoghue to turn away from global concerns and to construct a world that is intensely and perversely domestic. It is only when Ma and Jack escape that Donoghue engages with the public sphere; even then, Jack’s perspective maintains the narrow focus on his immediate surroundings and his relationship with Ma.⁵

The first novel with a contemporary setting that Donoghue produced after Touchy Subjects, but prior to Room, was Landing (2007). Coming at a point when her fiction had become increasingly global in scope, this novel makes Donoghue’s return to the domestic appear less than dramatic; the 2007 book created little critical “buzz.” Unlike Room, Landing was received pleasantly but not enthusiastically. Some of the novel’s reviewers characterize Landing as merely a...