A Legend Brought to Life

I was born and raised in Ireland. When I was nine years old, the Doyles moved from the prosperous town of Nenagh, in County Tipperary, to a tiny place called Carrick-on-Shannon, in County Leitrim. Before we moved, we knew nothing about Carrick, except that it was small, with fewer than a thousand inhabitants, and situated on a great bend of the river Shannon. Before we moved, people commiserated with my father. His employer had moved him to a cold, damp place where farming land was poor and, worse, it was situated near that mysterious place called “the North.” Nenagh was a solid, ancient town of 5,000 people. Carrick-on-Shannon was a small dot on the map. Today, all of Ireland is prosperous and gripped by a nouveau riche vulgarity. But Leitrim is still separate from that.

We thrived in Carrick. It was indeed small, and cold in winter, but it had a desolate beauty and a peaceful atmosphere. The locals were welcoming, soft-spoken people who took great pleasure in song and music. On winter nights the bars were full of traditional singers and musicians performing music that was radically different from the Irish music I’d heard as a child in Tipperary. It wasn’t jaunty ballads and rebel songs. It was ancient, haunting, and it spoke of great hurt. Leitrim had suffered, I came to know. The famine of the 1840s had devastated the area. Mass emigration had followed, over and over again. Carrick-on-Shannon had a history that the locals spoke about hesitantly. They barely spoke at all about the famine; before the famine was what mattered. I heard that a cottage in Carrick had, in the early 18th century, been the home of Turlough O’Carolan, the man called “the last of the Irish bards.” O’Carolan had also lived with his wife and children in Mohill, a village a few miles from Carrick. There was also a story about O’Carolan’s head residing for a time near Carrick. People went to touch the skull of the long-dead bard in hope of curing ailments or for luck. The bard’s head had great powers, a teacher told me. If I remember correctly, the story was that the head was eventually stolen and disappeared.

From the bones of Turlough O’Carolan’s life (1670–1754), Charles Foran has constructed a flesh-and-blood character in Carolan’s Farewell. This novel is about the last days of “the bard,” and Carolan’s demise thus represents the dying days of the old Gaelic culture. Turlough O’Carolan—usually called Terence in English and simply known as “Carolan” in Ireland and in this book—was a great man, and a legend, but he was not, in the strictest sense, a bard. He was a harpist and composer. A bard was a poet. Carolan wrote verses but they were mostly doggerel; his gift was his skill as a composer. His music was folk-based but with a spritely, delicate sheen, much influenced apparently by certain Italian composers of his time. He travelled the low roads and high roads of Ireland, mostly in the west, where there were still remnants of the old Gaelic order—Catholic, Irish-born aristocrats and landowners who received him as an honoured guest and, in turn, he composed and played for his supper.

The basic elements of his life are easily summarized. Carolan was born of peasant stock in County Westmeath. When he was a teenager, the family moved to Leitrim. Exactly why is unclear. When he was 18 years old, Carolan had smallpox, which blinded him. The wife of his father’s employer recognized some musical ability, had him trained as a harpist, provided him with money and a guide, and sent him to earn his living as a wandering minstrel. Over the years he earned great fame as a composer, a wit, a ladies’man and a man of great gentleness and grace. He was a guest in Jonathan Swift’s house and in many more humble homes. He was honoured because he was the last of his kind, but as Ireland shifted around him and the remnants of the old order died out, he was as socially lost as he was blind. He was, after all, only a Catholic peasant in an Ireland run by a Protestant gentry.

Foran’s novel is ambitious. His aim is to capture Carolan, the culture he represented and the culture that was gaining control of Ireland when he died. This is a mammoth task. For a start, Carolan’s world was almost entirely Gaelic in its language. He knew English, and spoke it well, according to legend, but disliked its imposition. In this novel everybody speaks English, in a contemporary Hiberno-English sort of way. For the Irish reader, this is a disconcerting, distancing tactic. Yet, at its core, when Foran sticks with Carolan the man, the novel sings. It is rich in detail, plausible and engaging. When the novel strays, as it does at the beginning and end, it seems vaguely bogus.

Foran presents the reader with Carolan and his guide, one Owen Connor. Thus we have master-and-servant, genius-and-loyal-companion, like Quixote and Sancho Panza. Carolan is grandiose, self-regarding and given to mythologizing himself. Owen Connor is the commonsense guide, the de facto wife to the self-absorbed great man. As the novel opens, Owen collects Carolan after the harpist has completed an arduous pilgrimage at Lough Derg, the alleged site of St. Patrick’s own fasting and delirium. Irish readers will know that Lough Derg resonates. It is a place used often by Irish writers to compel their pilgrims to confront their spirituality and their relationship with the society around them. In Carolan’s case Lough Derg is where, in the dark of his blindness and the murk of a cave, he is convinced that he met again the girl he loved as a boy, and from whom he was separated by class and circumstance. Lough Derg also compels Carolan to ruminate on his life, his country and his role in it. He knows the end is near.

In the novel’s middle is its heart and soul. Sick and tired, Carolan travels to Tempo, once the mansion and estate of the Maguire family, old Irish aristocracy. There he finds the old owner is now the tenant of a few rooms in the house. The new man in charge is a colonel in the British army, a lowland Scot who has risen to power and privilege through army service, clever marriage and manipulation. The scene is magnificently staged, working like the dramatization of a Hogarth drawing of dissipated aristocrats. The Maguires and their servants are drunk, some on the floor, covered in their own vomit. They’ve given up. Foran presents this through Carolan’s unseeing eyes—it is all sounds, smells and hunches.

When the colonel finally arrives to greet the distinguished guest, a tense conversation ensues that encapsulates Carolan and Ireland’s shifting situation. The Colonel tries to be polite but cannot help himself. He says, in answer to Carolan’s remarks about the English in Ireland, “You are of common stock, are you not?” An Irish voice declares, “He is the bard.” On the stage, this remark would fall like a hammer on a drum. It is old Ireland speaking. But to the colonel, it matters little. The bard is an Irish peasant. After the humiliating visit to the Maguires, an ailing Carolan takes refuge in the home of his first patron. Foran shifts from Carolan himself to Owen Connor. Owen is much less interesting and, in truth, the novel becomes ordinary. It fades away, like the too-long fade to a lively Carolan tune.

Still, Charles Foran has, largely, pulled off a remarkable feat here. Carolan and his Ireland are as remote from us as Leitrim was when I was a small boy in Tipperary. Readers visit a vivid Leitrim in Carolan’s Farewell—a place of hurt, hunger, music and marvellous people. A place where, today, under the surface of new wealth and comfort, the music of the past—and its makers—matter deeply.