Haven

Haven by Emma Donoghue is a quiet, but harsh examination of the way religious devotion to institutions or individuals can mislead and lead good people to do awful things in the name of God.

In 7th century Ireland, Artt is a saintly priest visiting a local abbey and finds himself disgusted at the way the monks have allowed themselves to fall into lives lacking discipline and piety. During his visit, he has a prophetic dream where he and two of the monks live in complete isolation on an unknown and undiscovered skellig off the coast. Taking this as a directive from God, he demands the two monks in his dream accompany him to find this skellig to start their new lives. So Artt departs with his new, small congregation comprised of Cormac, an old monk who formerly had a family and was a fighter in his young years, and Trian, a young man brought to the abbey at 13 by his parents for a mysterious reason. Following Artt's (their Prior) direction, they bequeath almost all of the resources they planned on bringing to their new home including rations, tools, and even instruments that were to be used exclusively in praise of God. After coming upon their newly discovered home, the monks begin their brutally secluded and desolate life on a tiny island with nothing but rocks and puffins (fun fact, this is Michael Skellig, the skellig that Luke is found on in the Star Wars sequel trilogy). As resources dwindle, illness and injury affect the men, and under the thumb of Artt's blinding piety, the other two monks start to question the reason God has sent them here and consider that their Prior's interpretation of their scarce life is perhaps misguided.

As someone who has an adversarial relationship with religion, this was a difficult book to read. Obviously it was written in the modern day, but it did such a good job of mirroring modern debates about religion in a 7th century setting. And while it was triggering in a way, it was SO well done that I couldn't help but be thoroughly engaged as much as I was angry at everything that was happening. This story was fairly surface level in the sense that it is more of an account of everything that happened, and less of an introspective exploration of what was going through the character's minds. There was some of that, but mostly it was "watching" them rather than "listening in", so if you expect a fully fleshed out philosophical exploration of the way that religion influences the individual, you won't see those conversations happen, but you will see it play out.

I found the characters simply fascinating. Again, we don't sit with the characters internally all that much, but they still felt so well developed and fleshed out. The character development was so visceral, I loved seeing each of them grow, for better or for worse. Cormac's stories, Trian's sense of adventure, and even Artt's over-reliance of scripture to inform his every decision, I'm very very impressed with how Donoghue was able to develop such strong personalities in these characters while also giving them each a compelling narrative.

This is one of those books that I think can really be widely recommended, as I think most people would, and should, get something out of it; religious or otherwise. Lovers of history or Ireland will definitely enjoy!

This book does a great job of making sure the narrative moves through detailed descriptions of hunting, cooking, planting, building on an island not fit for any of those actions. On top of everything else, the monks engage in the work of creating manuscripts of the bible, and the description of that process shows how the medium sometimes pushes back against writing and sometimes gives in:

"With the ruler and his knife tip, he measures and pricks the margins around the square that will contain his text, with bounding lines to stop the words from spilling. Twenty-seven lines, he decides, just under half an inch each. He rules them in hardpoint, scoring firmly with the back of his knife. (In training, he cut a page right through; Brother Óengus called it an error ever scribe makes once, but that didn't ease Trian's guilt when the page had to be thrown away.)" (149)