Irish author Clíodhna O’Sullivan makes her debut with the Irish-mythology-inspired YA dystopian fantasy Her Hidden Fire, launching a trilogy. In the book, male magic users called Channellers have ruled Domhain for centuries, served by less powerful, typically female Keepers. Rather than use her unusually strong abilities to become a Channeller herself, orphaned 17-year-old Éadha elects to save her childhood friend, Ionáin, from disgrace, passing her magic off as his and stepping into the role of his Keeper. As Éadha struggles to maintain her deception, she finds an unexpected ally in Gry, a male Keeper who seems to know more than he lets on about the Channellers’ power. In a conversation with PW, O’Sullivan reflected on the exploitative nature of contemporary society and the importance of empathy in shifting one’s own perspective.
Domhain’s magical class system intersects with traditional gender roles. How did you build these interweaving dynamics?
The structure of the society in Her Hidden Fire treating males as the superior offspring was a little bit rooted in my own experience. I went to a small, rural mixed primary school when I was a child, so there were boys and girls in the same class. But while the girls had to sit inside and sew, the boys were let outside to play football. I hated sewing. I was academic, I was good at math, but I was useless at crafts. Irish culture, in those days, was still pretty misogynistic and hierarchical. Being a girl in Ireland, growing up in the 1980s, you were treated as a second-class child. In theory, boys and girls were equal, but there was always the sense that having a son was better than having a daughter.
What did you hope to convey through Éadha and Ionáin’s relationship?
Ionáin was raised to expect that as the male heir he was going to be the powerful one. So when, as he thinks, he turns out to be powerful, that’s just the natural order of things. He doesn’t question his power or how Éadha fits into it. Through him, I wanted to reflect on a common relationship situation, where you can have people who watched you grow up, and who grew up alongside you. They love you. You have this deep relationship with them where they know why you have that scar on your elbow from the time you fell out of a tree when you were seven. They have a history with you that nobody else is ever going to be able to replicate. But it also means that their view of you has kind of already been set. Ionáin just sees Éadha as a kid, and so he’s possibly the last person to see that she’s actually changing as she comes into her power.
Sometimes, those people are the ones who are almost reluctant or slow to see that we’re not the same person anymore; whereas, when Éadha meets Gry, he meets her fresh. He just looks at her as she is now, without any of that baggage. Ionáin needs to take off the goggles of seeing Éadha as just his childhood best friend and realize what an amazing person she’s growing into as well.
What parts of Irish geography, culture, and mythology did you incorporate into Her Hidden Fire and how did you make them your own?
When I sat down to write, I was primarily driven by wanting to create a sense of wonder, which is what I could remember getting a huge sense of when I read stuff like the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin when I was a teenager. One way, I think, to inject a sense of wonder into the world you’re describing is if you love the place yourself already. I used Lough Gill Castle [Parke’s Castle], which is on the east coast of Ireland, and Lambay is a real island, and I sort of smooshed those two together. I grew up looking at the Blackstairs Mountains, so it’s a mountain range that I know really well. All these things are big features in the book.
As for the Irish language stuff, I mean, if you’re ever in Ireland, you’ll see that all the signs and everything are bilingual. And we all learn Irish in school from the age of four. It’s not exactly a stretch to just throw in a few Irish words. There’s what’s often referred to as a tree-based language called Ogham that used hieroglyphics or symbols rather than letters we would know. It would be marked out on very, very old Standing Stones that you can still find around Ireland today. I came across a poster that sounded out those symbols, and I thought I could use them to make really cool names for my characters.
Fundamentally, I was writing for myself. I’d like to pretend that I did massive research, but no, it was all just stuff that I loved and knew already.
In your acknowledgements, you write that you wanted to make sense of “the extraction economy... and how you hold on to your humanity in the middle of it.” How did this inform Her Hidden Fire?
Growing up, my father was an alcoholic who was addicted to gambling, so we were quite poor. I was very much your cliche eldest daughter who tried to be really good to make up for all the trouble that her parent was causing. I had a place to study medicine in college that I had to give up because my father’s gambling debts were so high that I just couldn’t afford it. That meant that when I was 16, I was stuck at home and working a bunch of low-paying jobs. I worked as a fruit picker, on a production line in a factory, a singer, a cleaner, a waitress. I would be cleaning up after these big farewell parties for people who were heading off to college, and I wasn’t going anywhere. I did eventually save up enough money to put myself through law school, which was cheaper than medicine, but the experience of working a whole bunch of jobs at that level, the amount of exploitation that you encounter [stuck with me]. It doesn’t matter that you had perfect scores; you were literally just a resource to be used up.
I realized how much of our society is based around the exploitation of people whose pay is so poor that they can’t live life with any kind of dignity. And then, on the other hand, there are people at the top of these businesses who are strutting around as if they’re these amazing innovators when really, they’re leaning on the oldest trick in the book: hire a bunch of poor, vulnerable young people, pay them really bad wages, and get rich off their backs. Because it bothered me so much, I thought it would be interesting to build a world where that’s more explicit, where power is made by literally drawing the life force out of other people.
What can readers expect to find in the rest of the trilogy?
Book two [Her Rising Flame] deals directly with the consequences of the decisions they all make at the end of Her Hidden Fire. But a certain amount of it is also about allowing readers to see some of the characters from new perspectives. Sometimes, when you’re reading a book, you can become annoyed at a character: “Why did you do that?” It’s interesting to come to the second book, as happens here, and actually see their decisions from their perspective. Writing this series has been such a learning experience for me because, I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’m always as empathetic as I could be. I have to remind myself to always put myself in the shoes of the other person in the conversation, and to think about where they might be coming from.
Her Hidden Fire by Clíodhna O’Sullivan. Viking, $22.99 Mar. 3 ISBN 979-8-217-04050-6
