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Central to Kate O’Brien’s novel is her refusal to pander to the reader’s longing that Marie-Hélène and Anna should express their mutual dependence, gratitude and, we assume, love in the language of romantic fiction, thereby offering closure and a neatly happy resolution. Anna knows that she has touched Reverend Mother’s heart, but she did so inadvertently, without motive, simply by exercising the vulnerable charm innate to an anxious six-year-old. For Reverend Mother, the encounter is more significant:
Reverend Mother heard, on the little voice, wild floods and cataracts of memory. Much more than a memory. She heard a storm break in her hollow heart, which was not her own storm, for that was over, but rather an assault, a sentimental menacing appeal, from past and future and from nowhere, from the child’s voice and from her father’s.
Through Anna, Reverend Mother revisits her past, ‘the land of spices, something understood’ of George Herbert’s ‘Prayer’, and reaches, like Herbert’s postulant, that state of understanding. Internally, if not visibly, she allows the ice around her heart to thaw, a significant breakthrough for one ‘who had forgone alike the sweets and the schooling of self-expression’. Ironically, having attained this breakthrough, she is promoted within the international order of which the Mellick convent is the Irish outpost, and prepares to take up a position in which her daily human contact will be greatly reduced. Anna, too, exchanges one institution for another, at the end of the novel departing the convent for university.
In prose of incantatory elegance The Land of Spices weaves its subtle spell: sophisticated and complex, irradiated by kindness and wisdom despite the chill of its chief protagonists. Of Reverend Mother’s father, O’Brien tell us, he was ‘so obsessed by the beauty of personal freedom, and the human obligation of non-interference’. Having lost her own personal freedom through her father’s wantonness, Reverend Mother seizes an opportunity for interference in Anna’s life, and restores to the child she loves that gift of personal freedom she has spent her religious life denying.
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