Special Intentions, by Mary Pat Kelly, New Island Books, 380pp, £6.99
Blessed Art Thou a Monk Swimming, by Miriam Dunne, Routledge, 218pp, £14.99 in UK
Nun but the brave who sink to rest . . . And they did sink, the nuns who answered their vocation in those days before it all ended. They sank into a silent other-world, living sacrifices to the living god. Special Intentions is ex-nun Mary Pat Kelly's fictional story of a girl who goes into the convent as a good American Catholic, and comes out six years later a fiery, principled radical.
This youngster, Margaret Mary Lynch, brings her black chiffon scarf to graduation day, to add drama and clarity to the annual declaration by the girls who announce their vocations. It's a school record - eleven of the graduating class have answered the call, including the popular Margaret Mary, who has two boyfriends plus another boy who has a tendresse for her. Poor Margaret Mary leaves the world and enters the cloisters, and comes slap bang up against the convent's scrupulous rules - custody of the eyes; silence but for specific reasons; obedience. She struggles through the life of a postulant and a novice, under strictures gradually relaxing under the rule of Vatican II, until the day in 1963 when she really gets cabin fever.
An aged cellmate explains the procedure - she has to ask to go to the foot doctor. And of course, this hour - as she guzzles Coke and sweets in the doctor's waiting room - is the hour John F Kennedy is shot.
Special Intentions is an expert's tourist guide to a corner of that foreign country that is the past. When the author left her own convent she went to work in Hollywood (religious adviser on The Last Temptation of Christ and Sister Act; she wrote Martin Scorsese, a biography, and Home Away from Home, a book on American soldiers in Ireland during the second World War). There has been a crop of books about escapes from convents in the years since they began to fade away. This is the first I have read which does not concentrate exclusively on a single central protagonist. Margaret Mary's friends and enemies are living people whom you like or dislike - racists, radicals, gentle or funny or subtle or angry people; on the last page you remember the introduction, where she describes the convent reunion - 273 nuns and 542 ex-nuns, guests of a Reverend Mother in Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and Mexican silver earrings.
Blessed Art Thou a Monk Swimming is Miriam Dunne's first novel, and like its title (a misheard Hail Mary), it watches the world with a bewildered yet fetching insistence. In this magical coming-of-age story, innocent Marian O'Dea travels a long journey, from her childhood in Dublin's Bird Avenue to her boat journey away from Ireland to a lover in London. Marian is devoted to her father, and he (all too much) to her. They live in a kind of workers' republic, two unloved people who only have each other, separate from her down-to-earth mother and her truly awful sneering sister.
Dunne's hilarious realism lights up the pages, especially in characters like Marian's mother, so bored by housework that she brightens it up by throwing the cutlery into its drawer, trying to get the knives, forks and spoons into their correct compartments. The family across the road is really happy: one child eats dinner for months sitting on his father's shoulders with the plate balanced on his head. The boys next door, Rowan and Owen, come in to explore bodies with Marian.
Marian wants to get away, and persuades her parents to send her to a boarding school in Dalkey run by the scary Mother Borgia. Later there are attempts to set up jobs, using the usual Irish patronage system; there's work as an extra, where she meets a handsome but unreliable lover. This is a wonderful first novel, magically playful, underlaid with a dark wistfulness, and funny enough to make you burst out laughing every few pages. Miriam Dunne has a real gift for comedy - the kind of comedy that exists over a pit of despair, but thumbs its nose as it crosses the tightrope.
Lucille Redmond is a writer and journalist
