Book Review: Dublin Four Essay Example

was starting to wonder if she was ok or if she was going crazy. It turns out that all of her preparations for the dinner were just a plan to find out some thing that she had suspected.Which was her husband having another affair.

He had had one a few years before then and now she had figured out that he was having one with Ruth O’Donnell. Carmel ended up getting her friend Joe who owed her a favor to go and act like a reporter and he tricked her into telling him about the affair with the married man. After that Ruth never went to the dinner that Carmel invited her too and she never saw the married man again. This story shows Maeves knowledge of girls relationships and her writing about what she knows. (Contemporary Popular Writers)In the story Flat in Ringsend the theme was about a girl moving out into the real world and having to do with real conflicts.

Her name was Jo. She moved out of her home into a flat with two other girls. There names are Nessa and Pauline. Nessa liked everything to be neat and organized. That is why in there flat everything from tea cup to shower hangers was labeled with their names on it or the first initial of the name.

The girls that Jo moved in with liked to keep there life to themselves. So after being in the flat for a few days Jo went out. She found a nice pub to go to one night, and the other night a concert.The night of the concert she went to waste time at the

pub before the concert started and met two guys that bought her drinks. They were also drinking and invited themselves to her house. That night she left them talking to her two roommates in the flat, while she went off and went to bed.

For the next few days she did not see Nessa or Pauline. Jo started making up stories in her head and telling her self it was all her fault for them disappearing when two other nice gentlemen came along and convinced her that it was not her fault if they did disappear.Binchy’s third story was Decisions in Belfield. This was about a girl named Pat and her family problem.

The main conflict in this story was that the two daughters that were older than Pat grew up and moved away and stopped talking to the family. Pat had a problem with this. She thought that her parents were the cause of it and she did not want the same thing to happen to her. Ethna was the first daughter who moved far away to become a nun. Her father did not approve of this so she stopped talking to her parents for quite a long time.

The second oldest daughter told her parents she was pregnant.Her father wanted her to marry her boyfriend Ian Kennedy but Cathy was not ready to be married or held down like that. She moved off to London to go to school a few days later. Cathy wrote to her parents and Ian about a week after she left and said that it was a false alarm and she was not pregnant. A year later she

wrote asking if she could come home for the Christmas Holidays.

Also Ethna asked to go home at that same time. After everything was settled between the families, Ethna quit being a nun and decided to get married and become a teacher.Maeve Binchy also was a teacher during her time. (World Book Online Reference Center) Cathy decided to stay home as well and married Ian.

The last story was Murmurs in Montrose. This story has the main conflict of alcoholism. Alcoholism is one of the problems that Maeve Binchy writes the most about women surviving. (Contemporary Authors Online) The main character was Gerry Moore. He was an alcoholic that made the whole town judge him and his family.

A few people thought he didn’t have a problem. Others thought he definitely did.The woman that was almost sure he didn’t was his mother. She did not want to believe that her son had that type of problem. Gerry went to get help from a nursing home for a few weeks and when he got out he stayed sober for five months. One night at a wedding Gerry decided to drink some champagne.

He ended up having too much and embarrassed his wife and kids just like he used to do. His wife Emma begged him to not drink that night and the next morning she woke up and took care of him instead of going to work.She also made up her mind that in about a year she would be leaving him for sure. She had to wait until the right time though.

She wanted to make sure her kids were old enough to deal with

everything and able to make there own decisions. Binchy wrote the novel Dublin 4 with the setting of the town Dublin. She wrote four short stories which all have different common aspects, conflicts, and characters. These four stories are Dinner in Donnybrook, Flat in Ringsend, Decision in Belfield, and Murmurs in Montrose.All of these stories deal with some kind of knowledge to Maeve and her life.

Maeve Binchy writes about familiar experiences and conflicts that she knows about. These mainly consist of women and what they had to deal with in the past as well as the present and future. Some examples are pregnancy, alcoholism, and forced marriages. Dublin 4 also focused on tedium of city life and protagonists. (Gale) she also starts every short story with a specific conflict.

Dinner in Donnybrooks conflict was an affair. The story Flat in Ringsend dealt with disappearance and guiltiness.Decisions in Belfield had the pregnancy conflict, and Murmurs in Montrose was alcoholism. At the end of each story Binchy does not tell you exactly what happens. She rounds it off and makes you imagine what you want too. Maeve does start the imagination off for you though.

Also in the two short stories Flat in Ringsend and Decisions in Belfield, Maeve Binchy used teenage characters and conflicts to relate to the teenagers who read her novels. And in Dinner in Donnybrook and Murmurs in Montrose she used adult problems to relate to the older audience.