Tho It Were Ten Thousand Mile: A Love Story
”Seamus O’Rourke’s obsession with a girl he discovers on You Tube turns into love when Fiona MacKenzie turns up on his Midwestern campus. While the sixty something Irishman’s pursuit of this twenty-one-year-old folk singer is against all reason, rhyme does play its role. Seamus is adept at marshaling poetry, as well as music, art, gourmet meals and fine wine, in his campaign for the heart of his green-eyed, auburn-haired beauty. For her part, Fiona steadfastly refuses to become Seamus’ version of a Yeatsean fairy girl and struggles to keep from being overwhelmed by his larger-than-life personality.
Gradually, Fiona’s skeptical common sense gives way before the onslaught of this unreconstructed Irish Romantic. During their brief months together, this age-mismatched pair discovers romance is a tightrope strung between loss and farce. These two head-strong and highly articulate individuals continuously collide, often comically, as they struggle to comprehend the nature of their love. As Fiona observes, “What strange ways love has of going about her business.”
In spite of moments of often bawdy comedy, serious questions of love, age, loss and death thread their way through the story. Fiona is haunted by the earlier death of her father and by the resulting loneliness, which she tries to hide beneath her usually self-confident exterior. These feelings are exacerbated when she has to leave Seamus and move to a distant university to take up the only scholarship available to her. Their relationship almost founders but is restored during a tempestuous weekend. Then, after hitting on a plan to reunite, Seamus returns home to a fatal a heart attack.
This is point where the novel begins. Following Seamus’ death, Fiona returns to his house to find a manuscript he wrote recounting their brief, intense life together. As she reads his account, her interjections, thoughts and alternative versions of events become a part of novel’s dual-narrative structure. Since the whole story is told through the voices of two lively, articulate and witty characters, the narrative moves along at a swift and entertaining pace. Seamus’ outsized personality and colorful Hibernian speech patterns, which dominate the first part of the book, are kept in check by Fiona’s more skeptical and realistic comments.
However, Fiona’s is the first and last voice the reader encounters, and, as the story proceeds, that voice becomes increasingly more compelling. By the end it is clear that this has been Fiona’s story all along. Her character grows and deepens. She emerges as a very strong young woman, who, with Seamus’ support, is able to triumph over an incident of date rape, to break through the loneliness caused by her father’s death, and then to deal with the loss of even Seamus himself.
Tho It Were Ten Thousand Mile: A Play in Three Acts.
In 2014, the novel was adopted for the stage and produced by the Irish American Theater Company of Cincinnati, winning the Adjudicator’s Award at that year’s Acting Irish Theater Festival. Interested parties should contact the author.