A few words on Thin Places, a book with illuminous power by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

It's rare, for me at least, to read a book that also listens. To be invited into conversation with a book and its author, to come away different from how you started--no longer uneasy, instead moved, calmed, hopeful.

I saw a news article recently discussing a pandemic project which unites young and old through the power of video calls. A lady from the project told the reporter it has been so successful because it allows the old to feel valued and the young valuable. The pandemic has seen me make new and strange associations, attach current events to past ones, to tangle up linear narratives and to, as in this case, make connections between events happening at the same time; this book, those calls.

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I admit I haven’t read enough stories, non-fiction, words generally about Ireland, and so I didn’t know what to expect from Thin Places by Kerri ni Dochartaigh, a book which handles deep, recent, wide and intimate histories of the place.* I wondered if it was not ‘for’ me, but then I opened it and found that exact conversation being had. In the first few pages ni Dochartaigh charts the process of making the unknown make sense, recognising the things we were never taught, and the things we cannot name. There is a magical air to this book, you open the covers and it joins you in your own world. The magic is present with every word, each diligently chosen, as well in the vast transformations that see this book and ni Dochartaigh move through different locations. It traverses the form of essay, appears like a letter to the reader and to past and future selves. A book which sits in the un-rootedness of ni Dochartaigh’s childhood, and follows her as she uproots herself and moves to Scotland, elsewhere and then back to Ireland again. What are roots, asks ni Dochartaigh with this book-- why are they important, what do they mean, are they real or imagined? Neither and both?

Some answers, or perhaps a better phrasing would be remedies, are found in the natural world. There are astounding moments in which ni Dochartaigh reminds us that not only are we drawn to certain places for what seems to be only illogical, instinctive reasons, but animals are too. Year after year they return to the same countries, boroughs, lanes, nesting sites for their own particular reasons. Nature, and observing the rhythms of the creatures we live amongst gives ni Dochartaigh a way, a confidence, to access her roots familial, ancestral, historical and geographical. Thin Places is an exuberantly human book, readily embracing story and emotion for access to time and place.

What immediately strikes as unique about Thin Places is its honesty and openness about life growing up on a council estate, the lasting marks of trauma and poverty which make ni Dochartaigh believe that good things don’t stay as they are for long. To read about this kind of life experience is a rarity compared to how many actually experience it in their lives. As I sat and read Thin Places in late December surrounded by financial worry only deepened by the pandemic, and tried to think about one day when things might be better, I realised how much I needed to read it. There is such understanding in Thin Places of how deep trauma lies, and it does not attempt to simplify anything; not the history and present of Ireland, not ni Dochartaigh herself. Complexity is let be, and ni Dochartaigh pays kind attention to it.

I’ve found it’s not easy to read Thin Places and write about it in an unemotional way, these words could never have been a straightforward review. In examining the deep and wide histories of place through the close and intimate examination of ni Dochartaigh’s life, I was sent delving back into memories of my own--perhaps it’s the events of last year and right now influencing me, but even so, how perfect that Thin Places is arriving at a time like this, when the gaps between safety and vulnerability, near and far, today, tomorrow are so absolutely thin.

I was most moved by the mundane moments of the book, the section in which ni Dochartaigh sits by the fire with her father on New Year’s Day stands out as the clearest example, because it captures the very essence of what Thin Places achieves-- that quiet, not-what-you-expected process of moving piece by piece, action by action away from despair in the face of trauma, and towards strength and hope in the face of it.

When you read Thin Places, be mindful to note the recurring mentions of objects ni Dochartaigh collects. Found along the path that starts with a scared child living in an unsafe place and leads to the author who wrote this book and who shares her story with us, they manifest each place and all places. They are quite naturally small fragments, things which seem like nothing but say it all, trivial, perhaps, but with so much meaning.

Don’t we all have a few objects like that, our own tiny collection? Here are just a few of mine:

A 'mermaid tail' collected on the Pembrokeshire coast, 2006. Scrap of wool from Goathland, North Yorkshire, collected 2019. Bleeding heart leaf pressing, one from a large collection of pressings collected from my garden, 2017.

Thin Places is published by Canongate on January 28th. Available for pre-order now, ask your local independent bookshop, or Bookshop.org

* I’ve since read Anne Enright’s The Green Road and Doireann ni Ghriofa’s A Ghost in the Throat and I very much recommend them. Kerri ni Dochartaigh's 'Why the Moths Came' featured in Place 2020, is also wonderful.