[In the following excerpt, Moorehead offers a positive assessment of The Christmas Tree.]

Jennifer Johnston's great strength has always been that she makes her characters matter: however confused, they are strong people, with clear and sympathetic identities. Her spare, tight novels, with their few people and scenes, also always manage to convey a larger canvas, a great deal more, usually about her own country, Ireland.

Having said that, The Christmas Tree could well have turned out unacceptably bleak. It is, with little respite, the story of a woman dying of leukemia. More than that, she is 45, alone, having just given birth to an illegitimate daughter, who now she will never see again. The baby was a conscious decision, a plan for the coming 25 years. That she will not live to enjoy this future does not particularly appal her: Constance Keating, as she says repeatedly, is not afraid of death itself. It is how she handles the last weeks that is the subject of the novel.

If The Christmas Tree manages to avoid relentless horror, and it does, it is due to Jennifer Johnston's particular gift for combining convincing cynicism with pathos. She is a skilful writer, using short flashbacks—most often dreams and memories produced under the influence of pain-killing drugs—in such a way that each page widens the picture. You start with a solitary woman, dying alone; you finish with a past, a history, great tenderness and no sentimentality. Afterwards, it is hard to remember what was written, and what was added by the imagination. …