Soula Emmanuel’s excellent debut Wild Geese opens with an ordinary afternoon in the life of Phoebe Forde, a young Irish trans woman living in Copenhagen. She’s doing a PhD studying urban water and gender in sub-Saharan Africa but finds herself increasingly tired of the field. “Most people come to the faculty because they want to save the world,” she says. “I came to save myself.”
She is almost three years into her gender transition (“Having tried one life for ten thousand days, I couldn’t be said to have quit prematurely”), and lives a quiet, careful existence with her dog, Dolly. She has assembled this new life from components, but cautiously so, as if assembling a flatpack bookcase by laying out the pieces correctly, but never actually screwing the unit together.
This solitude is upended when Phoebe’s first love Grace appears unexpectedly at her door. They met in Ireland when Phoebe was 22, their eight months together fitting into the chronology of Phoebe’s life, “like a respectable existence punctuated by a short prison stay”. Phoebe remembered Grace as fiery and determined: “She had history, where I just had time.” Yet it becomes clear that Grace’s brash confidence has begun to seep away.
Grace works for an organisation offering mental health services, but hates her job, which she jokes, is “to cheer depressed people up just enough that they remember to pay”. In precise, witty and intelligent prose, the novel tracks the lively weekend that follows, as they navigate the couple they once were and the individuals they are now. The humour doesn’t always land (“we embrace unfully, like an old fridge door bulging shut”), but overall the writing is sharp and enjoyably self-deprecating.
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Emigration and its impact on relationships, particularly youthful romance, is a staple of the Irish novel tradition, yet Wild Geese breaks this classic form, remaking it in a new and invigorating shape. The novel sets out to dismantle the gender binary while also dissecting it, all the time riffing with energy and insight on nostalgia, lost love, and how to navigate an unknown future when the past too, feels uncertain. When Grace says to Phoebe, “You deserve to be loved, and to be happy,” I was cheering for them both.
