The Gospel of Orla, Eoghan Walls's first novel, is a coming of age story. It took me into the world of a tough, youthful narrator who must grow up quickly when she finds herself in extraordinary circumstances. Like his second novel, Field Notes from an Extinction, which I discussed just a few months ago in this newsletter, it features a young girl with ideas of her own trying to navigate a difficult situation. Fourteen year old Orla has recently lost her mother and she and her younger sister live with their grieving father in England, though the family has Irish roots. Their father, unable to cope, has turned to drinking, leaving Orla to look after Lily and understand, deep in her soul, that though she might have lost her mother to cancer, she's also lost her father, but to something more ambiguous.

One night, quite by accident, she encounters a man who is able to give life to dead animals. Watching him resuscitate the corpse of a rabbit, she hatches a secret plan to take him to her mother's grave in Ireland so he can bring her back to life. With the help of a friend, she steals a bike for the man who calls himself Jesus, procures enough money, and with map in hand, leads him along the canals towards their destination. Naturally, things get complicated, and along the way Orla faces difficulties, both of a practical and mythical variety, and as the truth about this man becomes more and more apparent, her plan to secure a viable parent starts to look impossible.

What I found remarkable about this novel is not only that Orla is utterly believable, but Jesus, a man with ghoulish qualities, is as well. It is Orla, our narrator, who keeps this wild and wonderful novel grounded in reality Her voice is a blend of twenty first century sophistication, punctured, every so often, with a child's moral outrage. It is a fusion that marks any adolescent thrust too early into adulthood, but in Orla it feels so precarious I was rooting for her from the beginning.

Who she is and what she believes determines the way her words form paragraphs and how those paragraphs arrange themselves on the page. She speaks in long, rambling sentences that are entirely lacking in internal punctuation and her desires—to see her mother again, to follow the map and bike the canals to get Jesus to Ireland—determine how the sentences sit on the page.

In the passage that follows, Orla has gone back to the barn where she first discovered Jesus and asks him to accompany her to the grave site so he can give her mother life. It is a long journey that will include biking along the canals to the ferry. She reminds Jesus of all she's done for him, remembering how she found him covered only by a blanket:

"'You owe me. I gave you all these clothes from my father's house. I washed them and cleaned them and brought them to you what are you going to do just walk to Roman Israel or wherever? Are you gonna go naked? They will arrest you for being naked that is stupid. Or in your blanket that is the same you will look like a moron they will not take you on a boat wearing a blanket! You need a boat! Have you thought of anything? Or are you gonna steal these clothes because that is what you will be doing. Trousers jeans T-shirts all stolen! From me! You said I should not steal but you are stealing if you take them and if you do not take them then you are just going to prison!'

"I am screaming at the end bending down picking up T shirts flinging them around him. Pants. Socks. The minging jeans. But Jesus does not move.

"So I stop.

"I stand looking at him.

"Breath all mad.

'-Please,' I say. '-Please.'

"He doesn't make a sound.

'-It's my mother. Please.'

"I have a weird impression for a second. I can feel the night growing behind me. The grass and trees. Canals. Nettles in the ditch. Clouds. Planets. The sky stretching upwards and outwards.

"Until he speaks.

'-Okay Orla. I will come with you'" (102-3).

The mad rush and spilling of words in the first paragraph take the reader into Orla's consciousness. I feel her anger and frustration, as well as her despair. These emotions create this tangle of language, her feelings determining the syntax. The absence of commas, repetition of exclamation points, run-on sentences—the prose line acts as a mirror, reflecting not only her adolescent anguish, but also her strength and determination.

Orla is perhaps one of the most unusual child narrators to come to fiction and this story, which is ultimately about the discovery of truth and morality, is a well-balanced blend of realism and myth. Her cockeyed plan to get her mother back takes the reader into a dreamscape of prohibited desires, a place where a young girl can assuage her grief and sense of abandonment with practical, forward-thinking action.

Walls, Eoghan. The Gospel of Orla. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2023.

Filed under: Creating voice-driven sentences