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...