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Book at Bedtime: On Canaan's Side

Book at Bedtime: On Canaan's Side: Episode 3

On Canaan's Side

Episode 3

BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime, On Canaan's Side, Episode 3

Lilly Dunne, now 89, recalls how she fled the violence of her native Wicklow.

Lilly Dunne, now 89, recalls how she fled the violence of her native Wicklow to find refuge in America.

In Sebastian Barry's latest novel, a secret life is revealed in the memoir of Lilly Dunne, 89 who is nearing the end of her days. Born in Ireland, Lilly has lived for 75 years in that place of safety known in the ancient hymn as "On Canaan's Side" - America. 

Forced to flee Ireland after a warning that the IRA were about to shoot her and her Black and Tan lover, Lilly has spent her entire life in fear that an old vengeance will catch up with her. And as this painful but exquisitely told history reveals, her fears are well founded.
Using false names Lilly and Tadg jumped a boat to Ellis Island and thence to a suburb of Chicago. The Depression looms but they eek out a living in mixed communities, taking care to avoid the Irish ghettoes, but always waiting for that knock on the door. And when it comes it is of course when they least expect it. On a visit the Museum of Art, Lilly and her now husband, stand amazed before Van Gogh's self portrait - when an IRA assassin appears and shoots Tadg right there on the gallery floor. 

In the uproar Lilly escapes, pursued by the killer. She escapes with her life, just, and flees to Cleveland where she meets a Cop, Joe whom she marries and rediscovers a kind of happiness. But unalloyed happiness seems not to be Lilly's lot in life. She bears Joe's child but Joe disappears, presumed dead in a gas explosion - leaving Lilly to work as a domestic servant and rear her son, Ed alone.

A true friend comes into her life - a man called Nolan, from Tennessee. He lives and works nearby and assumes the role of father to Ed and support to Lilly. It is profound but platonic alliance. He is Lilly's rock and Ed's moral compass. And when Ed, the talented and handsome son comes back from Vietnam, mentally broken, it is Nolan who seeks him out from an obscure commune in the hills and brings home not Lilly's son but her grandson, William; a child the fragile Ed is no longer able to manage. 

And so Lilly begins once more to raise a child - this time a child who is the distillation of the entire journey of her life. She loves this child more than life itself. So when William hangs himself from the washroom door in his old high school she feels there is no worst can befall her. But there is a final twist to her life's story. 

Nolan falls ill, and on his deathbed, reveals to her that is was he who was sent all those years earlier to Chicago to assassinate Lilly and her husband. But he was unable at the last to kill her in that gallery. And since then he has lived only to atone for his sin and to help make her life bearable. But Lilly is by now resolved that she cannot forgive Nolan, and that she can no longer linger on Canaan's side. Her life is at an end.

Reader - Claire Bloom
Abridger - Neville Teller
Producer - Eoin O'Callaghan.

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By Sebastian Barry. A secret and tumultuous life is revealed in the memoir of Lilly Dunne

By Sebastian Barry. A secret and tumultuous life is revealed in the memoir of Lilly Dunne. Read by Claire Bloom

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