It’s now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was used as a location for two of the recent Star Wars films.Ĭormac, the most practical of the three, believes that their immediate priority should be to build shelter for themselves ready for the winter, but Artt – or ‘the Prior’ as he now calls himself – insists that there will be time for this later and that their time should first be spent on constructing an altar, a chapel and a stone cross. Skellig Michael is a harsh, remote and inhospitable place looking at photos, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live there, but monks (not the ones in the novel, who are fictional) really did build a monastery there. I found it interesting to see how the three men set about establishing their own little settlement on the island and how different their views were on what is necessary for survival. There’s really not much more to the plot than that, but what could have been an extremely boring book is surprisingly absorbing in the hands of Emma Donoghue. The three monks set off in the boat and eventually come to the uninhabited rocky island of Skellig Michael, where they prepare to live in seclusion together for the rest of their lives. To set out on pilgrimage with two companions, find this island, and found a monastic retreat.’Īrtt persuades the Abbot to let him take a small boat and go in search of the island, accompanied by two other monks: the elderly Cormac, who came to religion late in life after losing his loved ones to plague, and Trian, a young man given to the monastery by his parents as a child. ‘The dream is an instruction to withdraw from the world. ‘I was with an old monk, and a young one.’ The Abbot shows no sign of understanding him. As if I were a bird or an angel, looking down on the three of us.’ His name is Artt and he claims to have had a dream, a vision sent by God:

The setting is 7th century Ireland and the novel begins with a stranger arriving at the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóis on the banks of the River Shannon.

I’ve read four books by Emma Donoghue now and each one has been completely different from the one before! Haven is a particularly unusual novel and even after finishing it I’m still not quite sure what I really think of it.

Haven emma donoghue book review