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Overview
In the present day, the artist Oisin MacDara lives in self-imposed exile on Tiranogue — the small island where the shipwrecked Irish settled. The past is Oisin's curse, as memories of the twin sister who died tragically when he was a boy haunt him still.
Then on a quiet All Hallows' Eve, a restless spirit is beckoned into his home by a candle flickering in the window: the ghost of the girl whose brief life ended on Tiranogue's shore more than a century earlier. In Oisin's house she seeks comfort and warmth, and a chance at the life that was denied her so long ago.
For a lonely man chained by painful memories, nothing will ever be the same again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060937744 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 03/05/2002 |
| Series: | Harper Perennial |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In the Country of the Young
Chapter One
In the palm of his hand, beneath ink stains and scars from careless splatters of acid, Oisin MacDara has three life lines.
He has known this since he was twenty-two, when he paid ten dollars on the street in Portland for a palm reading. The young woman who held his hand and traced its lines with a flirtatious stroke that left him half hard did not look like a spiritual adviser. Instead, she could have been one of the female students whom Oisin had seduced during his year of teaching art at the community college. Which was half the reason he'd stopped and put his hand out in the first place.
"Your life line is broken into three," she said. "This is the first part of your life." She pointed to the indented half moon in the curve between his thumb and forefinger. "It's the deepest line: your life as a child." She smiled at him, and the tiny green stone in her nostril rose slightly out of its hole.
"This is the second part of your life," she said, running her thumb over the center of his palm, where a fierce Jumble of slices converged, like brambles attacking the skin.
"And this is your last life."
A line so smooth he could have etched it himself, reaching all the way to the pale skin that barely guarded the blue veins of his wrist.
"You are here now," she told him, pointing to the thicket of brambles. She had a Maine accent. She was trying to disguise it, but it leaked into her words, he-ah for here.
She looked up at Oisin, narrowing her eyes. It occurred to him that he could have sex with this girl. At twenty-two, such opportunities were still new enough tosurprise him, and sometimes he forgot to ask himself whether he was interested before his seduction reflex took over. This time, he resisted.
I'll give her a miss, he thought. It was superstition more than anything that made him walk away. He was afraid of jinxing the palm reading, of disrespecting that small psychic moment. For she had recognized what he had always known-that there was a gap, a clear divide between his childhood and his life now. When he was young, he could see (he'd had a gift, a second sight), and in the years that followed, everything, even the tangible world, had seemed indistinct. As though, sometime during puberty, he'd gone blind.
Though his neighbors think he is a cynical, faithless man, Oisin is actually highly superstitious. It's his demeanor that's misleading. He is intensely Moody, his eyes seem to search faces for evil motives, and he has a sarcastic, sometimes harsh humor. People tend to assume that he would not be open-minded to the spiritual or supernatural aspects of life. Nobody realizes that Oisin knows more than most about such things.
If he were as cynical as he appeared, he would have tossed the moment aside, denounced it later as a whim and the girl as a New Age student desperate for hash money. But Olsin, who is secretly hopeful above all else, in the twenty years since he had his palm analyzed in Portland, has been waiting for his sight to be returned, and for his last life to begin.
The haunting begins with an open door and missing tobacco, though Oisin, who has grown lazy from so much waiting, does not recognize it at first.
Oisin has been smoking since he was a teenager, but in the two years since his fortieth birthday, he has rolled his own cigarettes from imported blond tobacco. He rolls them partly because it is cheaper, partly because he enjoys the ritual of creating each smoke, and mostly because he considers it a step toward giving up smoking altogether. Rollies are healthier, he tells himself, pure tobacco, none of the burning agents, glass fragments, or formaldehyde you find in filter cigarettes. This pure tobacco leaves brown streaks where his two front teeth meet, which he scrapes off with a paring knife every few weeks.
This is the second time he has lost the eight-dollar tin that is supposed to last him a month. He's too much of an addict to be careless about where he leaves the tobacco. He has considered the possibility of schizophrenia and imagines that he is experiencing blackouts during which he chain-smokes and then disposes of the evidence. Perhaps he has a second personality that is not getting its fair share of nicotine.
Before beginning the day's work in his studio, he drives to the island quay to buy another tin. Lined along the docks in a sheltered bay are Tiranogue's few businesses: a restaurant with picnic table seating, a pub with fishing nets catching dust on the ceiling, a husband-and-wife-owned store specializing in hardware and Irish sweaters, and a lobster hut rocking perilously on a small float, tended by local girls in bikinis who reapply suntan oil when they're not hoisting submerged traps of shellfish.
Oisin enters the general grocer, which 'is stocked with everything Moira, the proprietor, imagines an islander might need. In one corner is a soda fountain pharmacy, where locals can have a bowl of chowder while Moira's brother, Michael, fills their prescription. It has the same menu as the restaurant, and often Michael runs next door to fill orders for clam plates, but the locals never enter the restaurant--it is meant for the tourists.
Moira orders Oisin's tobacco specially; all the other islanders smoke one of four popular brands of filter cigarettes. He wants to explain to her that he just keeps losing his supply so she won't start ordering extra tobacco. He can imagine her unease as it slowly goes stale on the shelf But he's afraid of how this absentmindedness will look, and how rumors of his deteriorating brain will spread. He ends up buying two tins; it seems easier than explaining. He'll hide one from himself and test the sharpness of his errant personality...
In the Country of the Young. Copyright © by Lisa Carey. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Reading Group Guide
Introduction
In 1848, a ship carrying refugees from the potato famine of Ireland flounders and sinks near an island off the coast of Maine. The rescued are mostly children, survivors of eight weeks of hunger and hardship at sea. The island community absorbs the children and takes the name of the ship, Tír na nÓg or Tiranogue, an Irish name for the mythical land "The Country of the Young." One small girl, found lashed to the bow of the ship, dies almost immediately after she's brought to shore. One hundred and fifty years later on All Souls' Night in November, she accepts the invitation of an open door and flickering candle and enters the life of a 42-year-old artist working in isolation on the island. The artist, Oisin MacDara, still mourns the death of his twin sister Nieve more than 25 years ago. It is the ghost of his sister whom he hopes will visit if he leaves the door open. Instead it is Aisling who comes to him. She will haunt him for a year, a small girl who will begin to grow into an adult before his eyes as she gradually unfolds her tale. Like him, she lost a sibling--her beloved older brother, her salvation among a cruel family. Meanwhile, Oisin reveals the story of his own haunted childhood, made endurable only by the presence of his twin sister. Both Aisling and Oisin are stuck, but in each others' company, it begins to seem possible that each may grow beyond their loss. The story unfolds on modern Tiranogue. So fatefully connected to Ireland by the tragic shipwreck, the community is still a place set apart, a blendof American and Irish culture, a shelter for myth. The reader is in a special place, In the Country of the Young. Discussion Questions- Discuss the relationships between the two pairs of brothers and sisters -- Aisling and Darragh and Oisin and Nieve. How does each relationship develop? How is each different from an average sibling relationship?
- Oisin remembers that most other ghosts came back for "recognition," but he wonders if Aisling has "returned on a mission." Does she have a mission? If so, how well does she succeed?
- How would you describe Oisin's interactions with people after his sister dies, and how does he progress after Aisling arrives?
- At one point, Deirdre describes Oisin and Aisling as an "odd twosome, a girl growing up too fast and a man who stopped maturing too early." How would you describe the relationship between the two, and how does it change through the year?
- Aisling concludes that Oisin's etchings are richer because of all the layering that went into their creation. Can you relate this process of layering in printmaking to the way the author structures the book?
- The names of people and places are not chosen by chance. What names have meanings that add to the complexity of the person or place?
- Aisling thinks " there are two different kinds of people in the world: those who know themselves and others who flounder in a forest of cast-off definitions and dreams." How would you sort the characters into these categories?
- Compare this story to other ghost stories. What is similar and what is different? As you read, do you accept that dead people appear? Why or why not?
- How important is it that Oisin is an artist? In what ways does his art relate to the story?
- As a child, Oisin suspects that "women knew things that no one bothered to explain to men." Yet it is he and his grandfather who are the seers. Do you agree with these gender differences? Do you find others?