Depending on your taste for this kind of dilemma, this scenario represents either the height of romance or a situation to be avoided at all costs.A charming romance starting with a 'Meet Cute' aboard a transatlantic Canada-to Ireland flight.

The two are locked into a frustrating stalemate when they contemplate a shared future. Of course, Sile takes the opposite view and she believes that movement is necessary and highly desirable. Jude and Sile have endless discussions about the importance of history - Jude is an archivist and an historian after all - and the value of remaining rooted. But the book’s emphasis is on the nature of identity and the possibility of change. It’s hard to avoid romantic clichés under the circumstances and there are more than a few of them here. Long-distance relationships, in novels anyway, are bound to be difficult, expensive, unpredictable and sexually explosive during the handful of times that the lovers end up in the same location. Having set the story in motion with all of the various contrasts, Donoghue doesn’t have to do much but sit back and have things unfold. The same is true during the segments set in Dublin, with the constant noise of the city, the complaints of all the Irish characters about how expensive everything is and how hard it is to find a place to park the car. When she’s describing a typical day in the life of Jude, say a trip to a video store on an uneventful night in March, it’s so vividly small-town and consistent with the character and the place. Not just the differences between small town life and urban life, although that’s made very clear, but also the more subtle elements. Is all the near-obsessive scrutiny that only the newly infatuated can inflict on each other, the kind that can be tedious to witness when it’s happening to someone else and yet utterly thrilling when it’s your turn.ĭonoghue does a fabulous job of presenting the cultural nuances of both Dublin, Ireland and Ireland, Ontario.

The novel conveys the heady, exhilarating energy that marks new relationships.

That’s an impressive catalogue of obstacles which makes for some interesting tensions, all of which give the novel a great deal of momentum even if on the whole it seems overwhelming. She spends most of her time moving from airport to airport because of her job and, when not in the air, she is a classic city dweller (in this case Dublin, Ireland) who juggles a busy social life, is lost without her Blackberry and can’t imagine how anyone can function without a decent espresso.ĭonoghue sets up the two characters as absolutely unlikely lovers with distance, temperament, race, culture, past and present entanglements and nearly a generation between them. The object of her attention, Sile O’Shaughnessy, is similarly set in her particular routine, albeit a much livelier one than Jude’s small town life.

Landing by Emma Donoghue