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In many ways, The Banyan Tree is a conventional tale of births and deaths, weddings and funerals, all set against the land and the lure of emigration. What makes it unusual is Nolan's flexible, fickle, and often fantastical language. Not only does he use colloquialisms to locate the characters very specifically, but he brings verbs, nouns, and adjectives to sparkling life by allowing them to change places at will. The butter churn is a "druidic dark drum" that comes "Sundaying into life." On the day after Minnie's wedding, the "morning songed the reading of the streets." Even a description of a sleeping baby erupts into Joycean music:
Breathing soundlessly, the baby slept as though he had been there since the house was built. Waves of tenderness winked from her immaculate eyes as she facted where her baby but slept away his drabness.... His minutes were building into hours and his plumbed hours were nearing that transom hour, that bragging hour, when he might bubble burst just to hymn his daylong lifetime.Nolan's alliterations and galloping hyphenation evoke not only Joyce but the whimsical beauty of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And like Hopkins, he can sometimes overindulge his penchant for verbal shenanigans. But while the author's circumlocutions may clog the narrative from time to time, The Banyan Tree nonetheless works up to a moving climax, and offers a surfeit of linguistic riches along the way. --Cherry Smyth
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