#BookReview of Said The Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

[ About the Book ]

In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls.

Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE.

It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them – and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing?

[ My Review ]

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa published May 21st with Faber & Faber and is described as ‘a work of sublime intensity and tenderness… breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.’

If you look to the right of this photo you will see a grey gothic building in the background. This was Our Lady’s Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Cork, a building that casts a shadow over the River Lee that meanders below it. I grew up very close by to where I took this photo and I remember we used to have many alternative names for this facility, but mainly we just called it the Mental Hospital. The final patients were removed over a phased period from the 1990s until its final closure in 2002.

In this scintillating ‘hybrid’ novel, Ní Ghríofa blends the past and present in a haunting piece of work that I had initially intended reading fully over one weekend. But I didn’t. As different pieces of information were revealed I ended up down numerous rabbit holes, looking up information on various snippets, including that of Dr Lucia Strangman, assistant physician, appointed to the facility in the late 1890s.

I parked up nearby the facility three times, just looking across at that building and trying to imagine the voices that are still embedded in its walls. I read and I pondered, imagining what happened there under the guidance of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s compellingly beautiful words. Part of the building is now an apartment complex with more development planned.

If you have read A Ghost in The Throat you will already know that Ní Ghríófa writes in a most unique and exquisite fashion placing herself very much into the centre of her story. Ní Ghríófa, like many Corkonians, drove past Cork’s asylum regularly and felt drawn to its history. She accessed the archives and spent many hours walking through the ruins of this once majestic building that towered over parts of the city. It’s hard to separate Ní Ghríofa from the narrator known throughout the novel as ‘The Reader’. She is the author of this book but also a character as she walks us through where she walked and immerses us right there in the shadows of this haunting building.

Using historical facts blended with a startling imagination, Doireann Ní Ghríofa explores the asylum alongside women who both worked there and were incarcerated there. With the addition of photographs and descriptions, it is so difficult to decipher fact from fiction. I found myself searching for long lost names and places, learning more about my city with every turn of the page: The Botanical Gardens, The Mile House, the Ballycannon massacre of 1921, Christmas in the asylum, Lucia Strangman and her family, Dr. John Joseph FitzGerald, her husband, and the out-patient psychiatric clinic they ran together at The Mile House and so much more. Every detail, every sentence another trap capturing me within its beauty.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an exceptional writer, one who puts her whole self, every single molecule, into every word she commits to paper. Her approach is unconventional. It’s quirky and it’s truly special. Said the Dead is an extraordinary and extremely affecting read. Beautiful, yet tragic. Hypnotic, yet distracting. Historical, yet modern. Genreless and genius…

[ Bio ]

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer. Her most recent book, A Ghost in the Throat, won the James Tait Black Biography Prize and the An Post Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is also the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry.