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
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