This is a wonderful book. Passion in the title has the ambiguity of sexual and religious passion.
Judith Hearne, a lonely spinster in 1950’s Belfast moves into a boarding house for reasons unclear at first. Quite a vain woman, she makes sure she is well presented and made up for her first breakfast there and sure enough she meets a man who appears interested, the brother of the landlady who has lived in New York and gives some impressions of wealth.
Judith decides he is the man for her, and misunderstands his overtures as an interest in her as affection. When she is spurned by him she turns, as it becomes slowly apparent not for the first time, to alcohol and upsets the rest of the household. It also becomes clear that her apparent friends the O’Neils also hold her in contempt.
But her Christianity has, she thought, been a constant, but by the end she realises that God has also forsaken her and the book ends with her in a nursing home, funded by the O’Neils, presumably with little life left in her and nothing to live for. And that is just a summary of the main plot; no time for all the nuanced details.
Brilliant.
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