Nobber by Oisín Fagan

 


The year is 1348 and we're traveling with nineteen-year-old nobleman Osprey de Flunkl who leads his three servants on a trek across the Irish countryside to claim as much land and property as humanly possible. Why not? - after all, sickness, disease and death reign supreme and Flunkl can take advantage of the prevailing chaos. Today we have a name for this phenomenon that reduced the population of fourteenth century Europe by nearly half - the Black Death.

Here's our young Irish author Oisín Fagan on why he finds the Black Death so fascinating: "Your immediate urge as a novelist is to draw narrative, meaning and sense out of every event, and dystopian writers, especially, are often guilty of destroying all humanity to make a political point or for amusement – the latter being far preferable, in my view. But the deeper I got into writing the book, the more I realised that my deepest fear was not that people could use an event like the plague for selfish purposes, but that the plague could happen at all, and that, happening, it might not mean anything; that it might just be pure destruction. The longer I inhabited the experience of the final moments of a person, a family, a society, the more I felt eclipsed by the huge non-meaning of it all; how it was a profoundly non-political event around which there could perhaps be no discussion or understanding. But perhaps this non-meaning I felt was just the birth pains of another type of understanding."

My writing this review in March 2020 has a definite edge since we're witnessing the coronavirus spreading day by day. Fortunately, thanks to modern science, we in the 21st century can pinpoint the causes of the virus and know what measures can be taken to better protect ourselves, our families and our communities. Not so in 1348 - not even remotely close for those suffering and dying in the medieval world of religion and superstition.

While making my way through this book, I kept asking myself: What other novel does Oisín Fagan's tale of extreme grotesquerie bring to mind? Aha! Of course: Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss where the entire continent of Europe had been subjected to LSD-like psychedelics and everyone is on an unending acid trip.

Likewise in Nobber - medieval Europe has been subjected to the devastation of plague and everyone is on an unending scrambled pain trip, so scrambled and so painful, one wonders where the hallucination stops and reality begins. Let's take a look at a quartet of examples:

Flunkl and his retinue encounter a group of Gaels emerging from the forest - all male, all bearded, all mounted on their horses and armed with spears. These Gaels are also stalking the Irish countryside for plunder and property. Following an exchange of insults, the Gael leader hurls a rat down on the retinue. Immediately thereafter: "The other Gaels are in a circle around the caped Gael, lifting fistfuls of rats out of the folds and throwing them down at them. One large rat sails by de Flunkl's shoulder and hits Saint John in the face." Does this sound like a combination of comedy and shock value right out of Monty Python? Welcome to the land of Nobber.

A mother in the town is driven mad since she cannot produce milk to nurse her babe. At one point this mother by the name Dervorgilla dips her finger in a water basin and "she realizes the water had not been covered by dust, but by many sleeping midges. Unsettled, they rise up at once in a hazy cloud and disperse around the room." Further along, she reflects: "All the houses have been closed up. Already, from so brief an exposure, her head is itchy, prickling with heat. This is a dead town, sealed and rotting. The dogs fled a month ago, or were cooked in communal fires." So, so sad, and horrific - the much documented fate of hundreds of medieval villages caught in the clutches of the Black Death.

Osprey de Flunkl and his not so merry band come upon a frightening sight - a figure twice the size of a normal man and black as pitch. Is it a demon? As they approach even closer, all eyes glimpse its true makeup: "a criciform of wood, nailed together into the shape of a man, but on it, thickly laid like a skeleton's musculature, are reams of dead crows, and they give the form a certain plumpness and lifelikeness from a distance. The dead crows are strung together with think sprigs, or nailed into the wood at the outer extremities. Their stony beaks poke out at strange angles like mussels sucking at rocks by the sea. Their eyes are uniformly closed. It is a monstrous, feathery thing, standing two heads taller than a big man. Atop this strange structure, encircling three crows' bodies sits a peasant's cap." If you've seen the film The Wicker Man, you have a general idea of this bizarre creation covered in dead and near-dead crows.

The retinue finally makes it to Nobber. But as they lead their horses to the still water of the town's fountain, they are taken aback by a striking sight. "On the other side of the fountain is a young woman, covered in blood from toe to top, washing twenty feet's worth of purple intestines, all thickly folded in on themselves, dunking and splashing them about in the water." We read these words knowing via a previous episode the intestines are from a horse disemboweled as an act of revenge.

The above quotes I've included illustrate the lushness and dark beauty of Oisín Fagan's language and images. Nobber is a novel of adventure, a difficult to categorize sojourn into medieval Ireland that compels a reader to contemplate the cruel twists of fate confronting our human species both then and now.


Irish author Oisín Fagan, born 1973