Gobsmacked by the Writing

For a student of historical fiction there is much in Peter Behrens’s The Law of Dreams, a novel of famine-era Ireland, to excite admiration. It offers delicacies for epicures of vanished sensory experiences, such as the observation that cartwheels not only grind on the cobbles, but also “snap,” presumably when the joint on their iron bands hits the pavement. There is also the thrilling momentum of imagery, like the simile that declares that Ireland’s savage poor have “woven themselves into [the] land like thistle,” accompanied by a rigorous flanking action of description so bald that even a horse cropping the grass with “blue gums and yellow teeth” takes on density.

Into this death-filled landscape where millions starved comes the sensibility of an orphaned boy named Fergus. It registers “terror; the world is terror. Terror stinging in your fingertips. Inside your mouth, the back of your throat. Terror like a cloud in your head. The world is just kills.”

Eloquent, isn’t it? The incantatory repetition lulls the reader, the better to ambush with the unexpected Irish-ism at the end.

Fergus’s family is stricken with typhus while slowly starving from the potato blight. He awakens from fever to find his sisters dead in their beds, his parents delirious and a crew of British soldiers pushing the shack down around their ears. Escaping a poorhouse whose warden has picturesquely fallen into a bonfire while also suffering from typhus, Fergus joins a wandering tribe of starving children. He leads them in a bloody attack on his old landlord, killing the entire family.

Excepting young Phoebe, his heart’s true love, who had fed him warm milk when his own family died. But Phoebe’s shapely jaw has been shot away during the fight. “‘Please, Fergus … will you lift me up to the Lord?’ … He squeezed the trigger…”

To this point I had been, so to speak, gobsmacked by the virtuosity of Behrens’s writing. But on this page my margin note reads: “Do I believe this?” Do survivors not generally desire to live, even with a damaged jaw?

Behrens’s strategy is to kill off everybody Fergus encounters just as he is starting to like them. A dab here and here—for example, a sketch of a mad, sad soldier who has accidentally killed a small girl by trying to have sex with her—effectively reminds the reader that civilization has departed. So, too, does Fergus, making his way toward the port of Dublin across a country where all sound is “shoveled off the mountain by the wind.” On the boat to England the captain orders the sailors to “spike them Irish blaggers out of there” when the rag-flap emigrants try to warm themselves among a flock of sheep penned on the deck.

The felicity of the writing seduces the reader once again, although sometimes it is marred by overexertion (such as “complex sounds” on one page and “complex darkness” on another). The incantations return—“The old world’s crushed. Life burns hot”—and multiply.

Having found work with a railway gang, Fergus tiptoes around the murderous boss named Muck Muldoon. The boss buys horses cheap, hitches them to wagons of dirt and shoots them when they falter. Although the boy’s humanity is much reduced by this point, he pities Muldoon’s oft-beaten teenage concubine, Molly. They run off together, launching the reader on a voyage to Canada.

At this point we are invited to make an emotional commitment to Fergus and Molly. Although devious and a card sharp, she fleshes out as a believable young Irishwoman who understands her compatriots on the Quebec-bound ship, both the ancient healing woman and the embittered nationalist. She tends the sick and survives an aborted pregnancy. Her love for Fergus, we think, will not be hatcheted as the earlier friendships have been.

But vultures hover to the end.

The Law of Dreams won a Governor General’s award last year for many good reasons, including richness of invention, elegance and surprise in the writing, and sharp and forceful dialogue. But isn’t the book’s bothered Irish speech played a stop too high for human conversation? Is the invention any more than a baited trap for prize givers?

No doubt British soldiers at some time pulled down a house with living people in it. No doubt at some time a strongman like Muck Muldoon killed a horse with his bare fists. No doubt a poor Irishman made his way to America, married an Indian’s infertile daughter, bought a child named Constant Sky, watched them both die, went back to Ireland to buy 42 panes of window glass, and now means to build the first windowed house in Athabaska territory. No doubt.

But this novel is certainly the only place where they all happen together.

There are problems with realism in historical fiction. The author Diana Wynne Jones has observed that our minds run in grooves cut by our society, while the minds of those long gone ran in grooves cut by other societies. To imagine what these were she judges beyond her ability. Many writers agree that documentary evidence and study of period fiction can take you only so far. If a single citizen of the past, arriving by time machine, denounced your novel as a travesty, not a living soul on earth could contradict that person.

This is especially true of drastic events like the Irish famine, which English-speaking writers of our time are not likely to have experienced.

One strategy, employed by Charles Foran in his novel Carolan’s Farewell, is to focus on human relationships likely to surface at any time or place. His book is set during an earlier Irish famine, but it is preoccupied with deep human needs such as friendship and status, rather than the passing horror of the event. For that reason the famine is briefly yet memorably sketched. I still think of a woman so far gone in hunger that she begs without noticing that her coat has fallen open to reveal her pubic hair.

The exposing of pubic hair also occurs in The Law of Dreams, but altogether too often and always for the usual purpose.

A credible test of historical fiction is whether its people resonate in the reader’s mind. By this test, Fergus and Molly recede rapidly. The admirable scaffolding remains. But that is not exactly what was required.