{"id":384,"date":"2021-03-21T18:59:21","date_gmt":"2021-03-21T18:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/?p=384"},"modified":"2021-03-21T18:59:21","modified_gmt":"2021-03-21T18:59:21","slug":"flight-by-oona-frawley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/2021\/03\/21\/flight-by-oona-frawley\/","title":{"rendered":"“Flight” by Oona Frawley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Irish novelist, Oona Frawley\u2019s debut novel Flight <\/em>is a beautifully observed portrait of four lives intersecting. It\u2019s set just outside Dublin in 2004 as a referendum on citizenship approaches. Sandrine is a pregnant Zimbabwean women who has left her husband and son at home seeking to better herself and ultimately gain citizenship for them all in Ireland. Sandrine finds herself working as a live-in carer for Tom and Claire, a rich retired couple who have lived in Ireland, America and Vietnam, following Tom\u2019s career as a spice importer. Tom is now living with advanced dementia and their daughter Elizabeth hires Sandrine to look after him and also keep an eye on Claire, who is increasingly confused herself. Tom is soon moved to a residential care facility and passes away soon after. Within a few month\u2019s Claire\u2019s conditioned deteriorates in a similar way and she too passes away in a nursing home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I really enjoyed reading Flight<\/em>. The prose is so carefully crafted and evocative. As the perspective moves between the protagonists it\u2019s really easy to imagine the same situation as slightly different when seen through their eyes. It\u2019s very much a novel concerned with the idea of memory. Whilst Elizabeth struggles with how she was brought up, flitting between various countries and various homes, Claire longs for Vietnam and the lifestyle of her younger days. As her memories merge and become confused, her senses frequently take her back to Vietnam. Sandrine is also constantly interrogating her understanding of the past and what it means to belong to a place. Thrown together, the big quiet house the three women inhabit, comes to feel like a kind of dream scape where time and reality are both confused. There\u2019s also a sense that the women are struggling to connect. They all seem to be lonely, though they\u2019re constantly together. They don\u2019t seem to know how to communicate with each other. It\u2019s only when Sandrine has her baby that she and Elizabeth finally connect, bonding as equals over the baby and talking honestly about their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a dementia narrative, Flight<\/em> is intriguing. There are very few of the common tropes played upon here. Neither Tom nor Claire is prone to wandering. They don\u2019t seem to forget each other or confuse their daughter for someone else. Their journey with dementia is more of a kind of gentle erasure. They are less and less present as the novel progresses. Both pass away calmly in their sleep as if succumbing to the last stage of what\u2019s been a kind of extended dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flight was published by Tramp Press in 2014 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Irish novelist, Oona Frawley\u2019s debut novel Flight is a beautifully observed portrait of four lives intersecting. It\u2019s set just outside Dublin in 2004 as a referendum on citizenship approaches. Sandrine is a pregnant Zimbabwean women who has left her husband and son at home seeking to better herself and ultimately gain citizenship for them all in Ireland. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5,6,49,9,4,17,14],"class_list":["post-384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-carers","tag-family","tag-irish","tag-man","tag-novels","tag-residential-care-facility","tag-woman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":385,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions\/385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}