The Graces

 
Rosaleen Moore was born in County Clare and “touched by the Graces”, an ability to draw on second sight, gifted with the ability to see the future and heal the sick. Shortly after the celebrated anniversary of her death in 1915, her first-person story is related mainly in the form of her last confession to the monk, Brother Thomas.
 
Sent to Dublin to live with an aunt after causing scandal following a vision, Rose is drawn into a circle of mesmerists and becomes a sought-after seer and healer. Her success turns her head and a tragedy unfolds when medical treatment of a child is spurned in favour of hands-on healing. The group closes ranks and further tragedy ensues. There is an indication early on that the Abbot of a local monastery has confessed to an horrendous crime that must be connected to Rose in some way, but it is not until the end of the novel that this is clarified.
 
Also intertwined within this intense human drama, is history and Ireland’s fight for freedom with cameos by its famous individuals of the time such as W.B. Yeats, Countess Markievicz, Padraig Pearse and others.
 
With its format in the form of Rose’s confession, plus some third-person narrative featuring others including a degree of melodrama around the two romantic connections in her life, the novel can seem a little erratic, although that doesn’t unduly detract from its overall excellence. The writing is stylish and there is much here to contemplate that is always relevant when sects or blinkered individuals are convinced that only their way is right and everyone else is wrong:
 
“… I had been so swollen with pride, I believed sickness not a thing that comes unbidden, part of that very nature I so revered, but almost as if something chosen, over which we had command. I realised now that it was not [the doctor] who had been arrogant by trying to intervene in nature, outwit it with science, but me by believing myself master of it. By refusing to accept the fragility within nature – our own human nature. Strength we had, yes. But vulnerability too. I had thought us – myself – all powerful.”
 
Four stars.
 
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