Abstract

Plenty of Harm in God explores the themes of rescue, escape, madness and hope. It is a story about the damage people inflict on themselves and each other, and the things we do to make survival possible. When the narrative opens, Clare, the protagonist, twenty years old and pregnant, is about to return to Inisheer, Ireland, to fulfill a suicide pact that she made five years ago with her cousin Gillian. As the story of the conditions under which the pact was made unfolds, Clare struggles to find a reason to go on living, but her despair and her belief that her genealogy is "poisoned" make it at first impossible for her to justify her own existence or even that of her unborn child. Her search brings her back to people from her past who believe in her potential to achieve some sort of "happiness" even in the face of suffering. My main technical considerations have concerned the novella as a hybrid form combining the succinct, poetic nature of a short story with the broader thematic scope of a long narrative. I feel the semi-epistolary form provides the novella with a purpose and a clear vehicle for the development of character. In writing Plenty of Harm in God , I have come to a deeper understanding of how narrative voice can structure, cohere, and direct a work; once the narrator's voice asserts itself, the story seems in many ways to take care of itself.