The Christmas Tree (Paperback, New Ed)

Johnston, who has sent us some of the finest recent fiction on growing-up-in-violent-Ireland (Shadows on Our Skin, The Old Jest), is up to something quite different here - in a small, spare novel that uses perfect detail and disarming, plain-edged prose to transcend its rather familiar outline. Constance Keating, 45, is dying of leukemia; she got the bad news in London, just after giving birth to a baby girl (result of virgin Constance's. first affair, in Italy, with Polish/Jewish/British writer Jacob Weinberg); so now she has come back to the deserted family house in Dublin - turning baby Anna over to sister Bibi but refusing to go to the hospital for treatment. And, as death and Christmas approach more or less together, narrator Constance - visited by Bibi and doctor/old-flame Bill, tended by convent-reared orphan Bridie - remembers (in the third person) pieces of her taut, empty life: her adolescent refusal to join Bibi in the upper-middle-class social swing (all those "old, old young men"); her rejection of Bill's proposal ("Me heap big trouble," she advised him); dropping-out of university, leaving for London with literary ambitions - but quickly settling for a risk-less, pain-less life as an unattached ad-agency copywriter; and then the brief encounter with older, earthy Jacob, a Holocaust survivor with broken hands, a big nose, and unpossessive tenderness. All this, then - the flashbacks-while-dying, the desire to have a strong, honest death after a weak, fretful life - is far from original. But Johnston invests every predictable moment here with fresh, true, crisp coloration: the relationship with young servant Bridle (who's timidly reveling in her first days out of the convent) is especially irresistible - as is Constance's series of confrontations with the ghost of her disapproving mother. . . who hasn't changed a bit "with several years of death." And, when Constance very quietly dies and Bridle takes over the story - Jacob Weinberg's appearance at Constance's deathbed, his claiming of the baby and Bridie - a sad, pinched tale strangely blossoms into something warm and joyous. From start to finish: an impeccable piece of realistic fiction, with routine material transcended by art at its most clear-eyed and unpretentious. (Kirkus Reviews)

Constance Keating has lived a life of internal exile, alienated from her family and from Ireland. Now she has returned to her family home to die. While that painful, messy process takes place she replays, like a home movie, the fragments of her past. And, as the festooned Christmas tree awaits its day, so Constance also waits, hoping her child's father will come and that the final outcome will be on her terms.

General

Imprint:	Headline Review
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	October 1999
First published:	October 1999
Authors:	Jennifer Johnston
Dimensions:	198 x 129 x 16mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	192
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-7472-6258-9
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-7472-6258-6
Barcode:	9780747262589

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