This Magnificent Desolation: A Novel

by Thomas O'Malley

Overview

Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains of northern Minnesota. Aged ten in 1980, he has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to him at his birth and gave him a special purpose.

Duncan is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him. Maggie Bright, a soprano who was once the talent of her generation, now sings in a San Francisco bar through a haze of whisky cut with sharp regret. She often finishes up in the arms of Joshua McGreevey, a Vietnam vet who earns his living as part of a tunneling crew seventy feet beneath the Bay. He smells of sea silt and loam, as if he has been dredged from the deep bottom of the world - and his wounds run deep too.

Thrown into this mysterious adult world, Duncan finds comfort in an ancient radio, from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts who never came home, and dreams of finding his real father.

A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel, This Magnificent Desolation allows a child's perspective to illuminate a dark world, and explores the creeping devastation of war, the many facets of loneliness, the redemptive power of the imagination, and the possibility of a kind of grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608194711
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	03/19/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Thomas O'Malley is the author of the novel In the Province of Saints, selected as one of the best books of 2005 by Booklist and the New York Public Library. He earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and teaches at Dartmouth College. Raised in Ireland and England, O'Malley currently lives in the Boston area.
Thomas O'Malley is the author of the novel In the Province of Saints, selected as one of the best books of 2005 by Booklist and the New York Public Library. He earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and teaches at Dartmouth College. Raised in Ireland and England, O'Malley currently lives in the Boston area.

Read an Excerpt

This Magnificent Desolation

A Novel

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By Thomas O'Malley

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright © 2013Thomas O'Malley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60819-279-3

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The knowledge of reality is a secret knowledge; it is a kind of death.

—W. B. YEATS

December 1980

Upon a vast, snow-covered plain in the Minnesota wilderness in the late hours of the night, Duncan Bright and Brother Canice sit by the woodstove in the monastery's kitchen with the wind howling through the cracks in the stone and mortar, and the ancient oak and pine joists that hold the slate roof above their heads moaning like an old sleeping animal. The rest of the children will have long been bathed and placed in their beds; there may be an odd creaking or grumbling upon the ceiling wainscoting as they shift and shudder in their halfsleep, but they will be the only two awake, thin slivers of red and orange flame flickering from the woodstove's grate and moving across both their faces in the dark. Brother Canice is a squat, rotund little man with wispy orange-red sideburns that cover the entirety of his jaws. The rest of his face is shaven so severely and stringently that it shines like a pink, polished stone and Duncan is often surprised he has not drawn blood. On a shelf lined with canned goods—Bristol's peaches, Hammond baked beans, Labrador sardines— Brother Canice's black Vulcanite transistor radio glows amber, humming lightly with static and the odd pip or squeak, as if it were searching out the void for some signal from the stars.

Tell me, Duncan asks him. Tell me again how I came to be here.

Brother Canice picks at something at the front of his teeth: the sunflower seeds he always seems to be chewing. The flameglow is orange on his yellowed caps, which replaced his front teeth a decade ago; he likes to say that he lost them when he challenged the bishop of St. Paul to a fight when they were both young prelates, but the truth is less rebellious and less heroic and perhaps more beautiful. After being bedridden with influenza for three weeks, he'd climbed the tower's stairs to inspect the bells, to greet them, he says—he was responsible for their tone and timbre and when dust and grime built upon them they lost not only their luster but also their pitch. As he leaned forward—his face widening and shimmering familiarly in the ancient brass—a novitiate pulled on the heavily wound cottonstave ropes from below and the bell's lip suddenly came up to greet Brother Canice's face with a violent kiss, slicing into his gums and severing his two front teeth at the root. He laughs as he spits seeds. Just like that, he says, just like that. Two resin-stained teeth spiraling down into the darkness of the bell case. Like bloody yellow pearls.

Tell me what you remember, Duncan, he says now.

I remember being born, Duncan says, and God speaking to me.

And what did he say to you?

I can't remember.

Shadows seem to find the narrow lines of Brother Canice's weathered face, until only the regal cheekbones, the large, moist eyes, and his mouth are visible. His breath smells slightly of wood, a damp teak, as if he's been chewing on bark. Duncan finds it a comforting smell.

And you have no memory of anything else? Brother Canice asks.

Duncan shakes his head and Brother Canice grunts and pokes at the grate, stirring the coals with the ornate, cast-iron poker.

This, then, shall be your story.

Duncan looks at him questioningly and although Brother Canice cannot see the boy's expression in the dark, he shrugs. Brother Canice runs his tongue along the gums of his front teeth and spits sunflower seeds into the stove's grate with impressive accuracy. They watch the seeds boil and hiss and pop and then dissolve, and in the hiss of evaporation Brother Canice says: Until something better comes along, Duncan. Only until something better comes along.

Wood is splintering in the woodstove but the room grows cold and the light from the grate dims. Brother Canice shifts on his stool, opens the grate, and a square of orange-colored light pushes back the darkness. As he leans forward to poke the embers and lay another log on the flames, his pale arms and face are turned crimson by firelight. He closes the grate and the room is in darkness once more; slivers of amber light from the grate flickering on his face and sending shadows dancing around the room.

Brother Canice settles himself comfortably against the kitchen wall and sighs. It was the winter of 1970 and there was a terrible storm, he begins, and Duncan closes his eyes and listens to the wood crackling as it burns and the children murmuring in their dreamsleep in the coffin-dark above them. Brother Canice's ancient voice box seems to wheeze in cadence with the wind beneath the window clasps and the sound of the frames shuddering and cracking with shifting splays of ice and the sense of morning still many hours away.

At dusk the sky above the farms and pastureland of Stockholdt, Minnesota, roils as if it were a living thing, twisting and writhing toward the northeastern horizon, where, briefly visible are small towns, windows glinting nacre in the tallow light, and black ash, yellow birch, and evergreen-lined slopes upon which rust-colored buildings, tin mining shacks, logging camps, and pyramids of dead timber bloom. Above the glacial Iron Range, the sky is a sheet of flat gray steel and the mountains merely an outline stamped upon this background: a picture taking shape, trembling momentarily, and then becoming fixed in its bath of silver halide. Animals, sensing the storm, are still. Not a thing moves. And then at the farthest edges of the sky, a slight undulation begins like a wave far out at sea, and with it comes a slow, rushing blackness as of night. A great wind rises up from the north, and from the deep, leaded bellies of clouds, it begins to snow.

The annual Festival of Lights Holiday Train, a vintage 1928 Great Northern Railway Empire Builder steam engine, leaves Holdbrundt with the first strakes of snow drifting across the tracks, white billows of steam venting from the engine's exchange as the hydraulic rods and pistons stretch and contract and, in ever shortening revolutions, turn the great wheels, and move them forward toward the wide plains of St. Paul.

During the last leg of its four-hundred-mile journey across Minnesota, the train tows two flatbeds upon which bands and other performers have played, three boxcars filled with donated food, clothes, and children's toys, and ten red-and-green turn-of-the century Pullman railcars decorated with wreathes and lit by a hundred thousand miniature Christmas lights. It is two days before Christmas, and meteorologists in St. Paul and Duluth predict a few inches of festive snow covering for those leaving school and work, with heavier snowfalls in the distant mountain and valley ranges of Stockholdt and Thule.

Father Magnusson, who attends this pilgrimage every year from the Capuchin monastery, the Blessed House of the Gray Brothers of Mercy, in Thule, settles into a wide horse hair chair aboard the tenth Pullman and watches the land stretching into darkness beyond the lights of the train, the snow spiraling gently down in shimmering electric, incandescent light. He imagines how this train must look to children and adults waiting on various closed station platforms along the Holiday Train's route: mere way-stations now, boarded-up grain sheds for local villages and towns, gone the way of the train age itself but for this one night, as the Holiday Train, burning coal from its tender at a rate of one hundred pounds per mile, steams along the old Great Northern Railroad, a hundred thousand miniature lights aglow about its fifteen trailing cars like the bright curving tail of some glorious Christmastime comet hurtling across the snow.

For a moment the sound of a tr
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from This Magnificent Desolation by Thomas O'Malley. Copyright © 2013 by Thomas O'Malley. Excerpted by permission of BLOOMSBURY.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Raised in a Catholic orphanage in Minnesota’s Iron Range, Duncan, the youthful hero of O’Malley’s unrelentingly grim second novel (after In the Province of Saints), grows up listening to the story of how his mother left him there during the storm of the century in 1970. Eleven years later, Duncan’s mother, once-promising opera singer Maggie Bright, returns to take him back to San Francisco, where she works as an oncology terminal ward nurse, moonlights as a saloon singer, and drinks too much. In his new home, Duncan, who finds a kind of surrogate father in his mother’s friend Joshua McGreevey (a Vietnam veteran employed 70 feet under the city digging the San Padre Tunnel), is obsessed with the Apollo space program, especially Apollo 11, whose astronauts he believes never returned from the moon. Over the next four years, Duncan deals with suicide, sickness, violence, and catastrophic accidents while navigating between an unknown past and an uncertain future. Some readers might feel that this novel’s emotional landscape, populated by characters haunted by their personal histories, fulfills astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s famous description of the moon as “a magnificent desolation,” while others may find the endless litany of despair hollow and forced. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A beautiful, floating novel. Thomas O'Malley writes with grace and style and bravery. There is not an ounce of cynicism here. While most of us remain earthbound, O'Malley allows us to believe that we can, at various times, go to an imaginative elsewhere. Even the desolation can have its own magnificence. O'Malley is a great talent, reminiscent of another Irish writer, Sebastian Barry.” —Colum McCann

From the Publisher

O'Malley (In the Province of Saints, 2005) crafts a sensitive portrait of lost souls who desperately try to reconcile their pasts with their current realities. Duncan Bright is 10 years old in December 1980 and living in a northern Minnesota monastery with other orphans. He has no memory of the first years of his life, but kind Brother Canice, who constantly chews sunflower seeds, provides him with a story, which becomes Duncan's mantra: Ten years earlier, the Festival of Lights Holiday Train became stranded in the midst of a terrible snowstorm. Many people in the area froze to death, including those on the snowbound train. Early in the morning, Duncan's mother appeared outside the Blessed House of the Gray Brothers of Mercy and left him on the flagstone, then disappeared. She continues to inquire about him and loves him, but she feels he's better off at the Home because she can't take care of him. Duncan, who claims to remember his birth and the voice of God speaking to him, desperately dreams that one day his mother will come and reclaim him. He prizes an old transistor radio, given to him by Brother Canice, and he listens to recordings of the Apollo 11 astronauts at night--voices of men Duncan believes were doomed to never return to Earth. When his mother finally comes, she takes Duncan to San Francisco, where they live a bleak existence. Maggie Bright's a former opera sensation who's now a burned-out alcoholic who sings in a bar. Her boyfriend, Joshua, is a Vietnam vet, but the three scarred individuals draw comfort and a tenuous strength from one another. Haunting and dark, O'Malley's narrative is profoundly moving. His characters bear the wounds of their imperfections, but no matter how hard they struggle to change direction, to reinterpret the past, the reality remains: They cannot heal themselves or each other. O'Malley manages to take some of the ugliest aspects of human existence and, through the magic of his words, infuse them with beauty and light.

Kirkus Reviews