Regina McBride’s Stranger From Across the Sea is a fascinating, multilayered novel rooted in Irish mythology.
Margot Livesey wrote of the book:
“As soon as Violet O’Halloran arrived at St. Dymphna’s school and met the blind girl, Indira Sharma, I was captivated by this gorgeous and evocative novel. Regina McBride is a master of suspense and Stranger from Across the Sea is a deeply satisfying story.”
In her own words, here is Regina McBride’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Stranger From Across the Sea:
The blind girl from India, Indira Sharma, “…treated me at first like an audience and said odd or enigmatic things. Or she treated me like a student upon whom she was imparting wisdom: One face does not need to look into another face. Listening happens more with the whole body. A person is more a throng of feelings, a host. A person brings their own weather system into a room.”
This is a story about passionate friendship and about the thin curtain between the living and the dead. When she is sixteen, an American girl, Violet O’Halloran, goes to Ireland with her mother to meet her grandmother. When her grandmother dies unexpectedly, Violet’s mother leaves her with the nuns at a Catholic boarding school in the north, empty for the summer except for Indira Sharma, a blind girl from India. The beautiful but ultimately catastrophic friendship that forms between the two girls will permanently haunt Violet.
Thirteen years after returning to the United States, Violet meets an Irishman, Emmett Fitzroy, at a party in New York City and is swept into an intense romance that brings her back to Ireland. While there, she unearths the stunning answers to mysteries left unresolved when Indira vanished from her life.
Set in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, Stranger from Across the Sea explores place, displacement, and exile and ways in which the personal and the political are inseparable. At its heart, this is a story about a friendship between two young women, one that transcends the limits of time and distance.
Raggle Taggle Gypsy, Planxty
When they land in Limerick, Violet’s mother rents a car and they head northwest toward the small village of Carrickmacross near the border. Breathing the promise of rain through the passenger window, Violet is struck by barley quivering in the mild sunlight, the patterned ground of a potato field. Ireland is unfamiliar to her but she recognizes the hits on the car radio, maybe Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones, Question by the Moody Blues, Band of Gold by Freda Payne. There would also be the occasional new recording of a traditional Irish song, a ballad or a fast paced reel, energetic and spirited like Raggle Taggle Gypsy, about a woman with a rich husband and a fine house, who leaves everything behind to travel with a gypsy. “Yerra, what do I care for me goose feather bed?/ Yerra what do I care for me blankets-o?/ What do I care for my only wedded lord?/ I’m away with the raggle taggle gypsy-o.”
Cantus Ecclesiae, The Benedictine Nuns of Saint Celia’s Abbey
Much to Violet’s anguish, her mother leaves her with the nuns at St. Dymphna’s convent, which is empty in the summer except for Indira Sharma, a blind girl from India, whose mother also left her there. Violet goes with Indira to Vespers in the evenings where they listen to nuns hidden in a choir loft, singing the medieval composition, Cantus Ecclesiae. The voices are gentle and uplifting and each girl, feeling abandoned by her mother, finds comfort in the calming sweetness of the music.
Later, when Indira tells Violet that she is first and foremost a Hindu, Violet says that she thought Indira was a pious Catholic because she went every night to Vespers. Indira responds by saying that she goes only for the Cantus Ecclesiae, that music has no dogma.
The memory of the nuns singing the Cantus Ecclesiae will stay with Violet throughout her life. She hears them sometimes on the verge of sleep as if they are somewhere above, in the distant sky.
Krishna, Kavya Limaye, with Deepak Pandit and the Budapest Symphony Orchestra
Indira tells Violet about her boyfriend, who she calls Ishta Devta, which means Favorite Deity in Sanskrit. She compares him to the blue god, Krishna, lover of many women. She tells Violet tales of the god Krishna’s prowess in war, but mostly about his sexual adventures, particularly a night that he made love to a thousand women in a field. “Do you ever feel like a thousand girls?” Indira asks and when Violet doesn’t answer, Indira says, “I do. I feel like a thousand girls waiting for Krishna to come to me in a field.”
In this piece, a young woman sings her devotions, full of gentle affection and erotic longing, to the blue lover god. Traditional Indian instruments, backed by orchestra, produce an atmospheric affect, like an exotic garden at night, fragrant with jasmine.
Into the Mystic, Van Morrison
This has always been my favorite song by Irishman Van Morrison, and I choose it here because it expresses some of the joy that Violet and Indira find together. We were born before the wind/ Also younger than the sun.
When adolescent girls grow close, they talk about ways in which they are the same. They twin themselves, one to the other. Together we will flow into the Mystic.
Because Indira is blind, Violet too wants to experience blindness. “I tied one of Indira’s scarves around my eyes. For hours, I was completely blind, holding tightly to her with one arm, stretching the other out before me, feeling the air for obstructions. She led me through the hallways, downstairs and outside, both of us laughing, often bumping softly into things. ‘We are one girl,’ she said.”
Merry Go Round, Miranda
When Violet commits a betrayal against Indira, their friendship comes to a halt. Violet is confused by what she’s done and filled with remorse, but Indira will not forgive her.
In this song, Merry Go Round, things are tenuous with the beloved and the relationship might be completely lost. It is a song clearly addressing a lover, but it fits the depth of passionate friendship between Violet and Indira. The break between them feels as devastating as a break between lovers. The backdrop of the song is rich with echo and reverberation, almost light and wistful in feeling, while the voice is replete with pain. What strikes me so powerfully in this song is the honesty in the singer’s voice; her naked, heartbroken surrender.
Galician Overture, The Chieftains (first movement, stop at 5:07)
Violet leaves Ireland changed by the months spent there, a time she will remember as both defining and catastrophic.
The first movement of this overture suggests departure. It is music of reflection and remembrance, music about time, not just a single event but an area in a life looked back upon. And it is music about place, that with distance and with the passing of time, becomes romanticized. For Violet, Ireland will be permanently associated with loss, even as she feels a longing for it that eludes words.
Diamond Dust, Jeff Beck
Thirteen years after leaving Ireland, Violet meets an Irishman, Emmett Fitzroy at a party in New York City. The attraction is intense and immediate, and she will discover that they are more connected by the past than she at first realizes. Meeting Emmett brings Violet back to Ireland.
Diamond Dust is genre bending, and has been called rock, blues-rock, jazz-rock. It has been called the “quietest track” on the Blow by Blow album. An intensely sensuous piece of music, symphonic in its movements, it is set before an expansive backdrop of orchestration. In places the emotion is airy and attenuated, in others physically intense, the clear voice of the guitar calling out, in one spot quivering, as the music reaches erotic heights.
The Kesh Jig/ Give Us a Drink of Water, The Bothy Band
Driving from Belfast to Emmett’s house on the north coast, Violet listens to the local radio station. Between news reports of bombings at custom huts along the border and popular hits by the Eurythmics and U2, the occasional old Irish reel plays.
Daydreaming, Anoushka Shankar
Indira, Violet discovers, lived for seven years in Fitzroy House, from the time she was nine years old when her mother brought her from India after her father’s death. Emmett is delayed and the more time Violet stays alone in the old house, the more she seems to find traces of Indira: a smell of sandalwood; a curiously damp seashell in a dresser drawer; a braille volume of erotic Hindu poetry that Indira had read to Violet from at St. Dymphna’s.
Anoushka Shankar, daughter of Ravi Shankar, has emerged as a leading figure in Indian classical music, adding elements of electronica to her melodies and beats. She has said that sitar is her first language. This is a tender and very daydreamy piece, moving slowly, moment to moment, languishing in its own reveries.
Come Down in Time, Elton John
Violet remembers Indira telling her that after her father’s death he could still affect matter; he could still cause a curtain to move, a door to close. Come Down in Time is a song about longing for someone elusive. The singer pleads with the elusive beloved to come down to him. The upper floors of Fitzroy House feel haunted to Violet. She stands at the foot of the stairs and summons Indira.
Emmett tells Violet that when he was eleven and Indira was ten, he played this piece of music for her. “She said it was a Russian idea of India, that anyone who had never been there would not understand India by listening to this. She pretended not to like it.” But years later, he said, when she was sixteen, the last time he saw her, he found her listening to it. She admitted to him that she loved it. She said she could actually feel India in it through a filter of melancholy and nostalgia. “Maybe,” she said to him, “I have gone romantic about India since I am doomed to live in exile.”
I have been haunted by this melody since I was a child and have always heard its rushes of orchestration as the swelling sea.
The Willow Tree, Padraigin Ni Uallachain, Len Graham, Garry O’Briain (from the album When I Was Young)
Indira had something to tell Violet, a painful secret she never got to reveal. The longer Violet is in Fitzroy House, the more she can feel Indira’s agitation and the more certain she becomes that the answer to what Indira wanted to tell her can be found in the upstairs rooms. At St. Dymphna’s, they used to soothe each other, telling stories, sharing secrets.
In a country known for its sad lullabies, I imagine Violet’s mother may have sung this to her as a child and now Violet finds herself remembering it, singing it quietly to soothe Indira.
On Lake Derravaragh there’s a white feathered Swan/ who sings of sorrow the whole night long,/ and it’s lay down, low, my love./ And it’s lay you down, my own true love,/ the shadows are falling and the night has come/ and it’s lay down low my love.
Caoineadh Cu Chulainn, Davy Spillane
Edna O’Brien expressed beautifully the Irish penchant for sadness: “You are Irish you say lightly and behind you is … the jargon about the proud melodious swans and the belling of the stag, plus the tendency to be swamped in melancholy and loss.”
This wrenching, deeply sad Uillean pipe music has a primeval quality, and for the listener who is willing to open to it and feel it in the bones and the nerves, it touches something expansive. And ecstatic.
Carry On Till Tomorrow, Badfinger
The Irish believe there is only a thin curtain between the living and the dead. In the end, Violet and Indira are, as Indira always promised, one girl.
There is a feeling in this music of departure, of having lived an important part of one’s story and moving to the next chapter. There is both the feeling of an ending and a beginning. And there is the sense of not being alone. The song refers to “we”.
Drifting on the wings of freedom/ we’ll leave this stormy day/ and we’ll ride tomorrow’s golden fields….
Each verse is layered with more resonant harmonies and counterpoint, building in intensity, giving the song a spacious feeling. In the third verse, strings come in. The affect is exaltation.
Stranger from Across the Sea is Regina McBride’s fifth novel. She is also the author of a book of poetry and, most recently, a memoir, Ghost Songs. Her novel, The Nature of Water and Air, was a Booksense pick (Independent Book Stores selection), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers book, and a Borders Original Voices choice. It was optioned for a film. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she lives in New York City where she teaches creative writing and fiction writing at Hunter College.