Book review: Anne Griffin's latest a compelling read with a speck of hope

Dublin-born Mullingar resident Anne Griffin has released her third novel

• The Island of Longing
• Anne Griffin
• Sceptre, £14.99

Dublin-born Mullingar resident Anne Griffin’s first book, When All Is Said, was something of a phenomenon. Popular with both critics and readers, it became the bestselling debut of 2019 in Ireland and won Griffin newcomer of the year at the An Post Irish Book Awards. Griffin’s second outing, Listening Still, was published in 2021.

The Island of Longing, Griffin’s third book, is a novel about complicated grief and unresolved aftermaths: How does someone pick up the pieces after the worst happens?

In the opening pages, we meet Rosie Driscoll, the “bereft mother of a missing child, Saoirse, [her] eldest, who had disappeared, right outside [their] Dublin home eight years previous, as if it had been predestined”.

‘The Island of Longing by Anne Griffin

A missing child is the premise of many a crime novel, including the 1998 Dennis Lehane classic Gone Baby Gone; more recently, Brian McGilloway’s extraordinary The Empty Room; and the CWA New Blood Dagger award-longlisted Breaking, by debut Irish crime-writer Amanda Cassidy, both published in 2022.

The Island of Longing is emphatically not a crime novel. During the first half of the book, Griffin concentrates on Rosie’s story, on her background as a native of the fictional island of Roaring Bay, on her childhood as the daughter of the local ferryman and on how, after studying for her captain’s ticket, Rosie works on the ferry, until she meets her husband Hugh and relocates to Dublin.

We learn about Rosie’s job in Dun Laoghaire ferry port, her married life as the mother of two children, and her recent return to Roaring Bay, at first short term, and then on a more open-ended basis, to ply her trade back and forth across the channel between the island and the mainland. Between life and death, too, as in Greek myth, because aboard the Aoibhneas is where Rosie feels closest to Saoirse: “I could sense her beside me at the helm.”

Griffin delays disclosure of the circumstances of Saoirse’s disappearance and, for much of the novel, it is referred to only obliquely. Although plot-hungry readers are given a scant trail of breadcrumbs, told from Saoirse’s point of view and dropped amid chapter breaks throughout the text, mostly we are left waiting, like Rosie, in a fog of not knowing.

A missing child is the premise of Anne Griffin's third novel 

Simultaneously, the writing is deliberately nebulous, and there is what feels like an unnecessary subplot about the family’s ferry business. While reflective of her protagonist’s rudderless limbo state, Griffin’s choices mean that, during the first half of the book, the pace can falter at times, and the narrative pull is not as strong as it becomes later.

Approximately halfway through the novel, we are granted some clarity. Although we do not yet learn the full truth, we are at last provided with the salient details from Rosie’s point of view.

Timings. Locations. Witnesses. The futile search. The Garda investigation that runs all too quickly into the sand. The daily grind of crushing fear. And, as far as everyone else in the family is concerned, Rosie’s delusional belief that Saoirse might still be found alive.

It is in the second half of the book that the

author’s considerable skill as a writer is most apparent. Here, The Island of Longing is a compelling read. Griffin navigates deftly past Rosie’s numbness, through searing emotional pain and its consequences, towards a kind of resolution and, ultimately, dimly visible on the horizon, a speck of hope.