IRISH UP Peter Behrens says his book has no political agenda. |
More than 150 years after the fact, the Irish Famine — the Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór — is little understood. Considering its stunning death toll (as many as one million) and the rippling geopolitical and demographic after-shocks caused by the exodus of as many as two million souls to the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, it still gets surprisingly little attention.Many are aware of images of expelled tenant farmers, cadaverous, ravaged with fever, dying on the roadsides with grass-stained mouths; tales of feasting landlords who shipped food out of the country; and the coffin ships. But Peter Behrens’s debut novel, The Law of Dreams (Steerforth Press), goes beyond such surface understanding. It’s not only sprawling, cinematic, exquisitely detailed, exactingly researched, and keenly felt, it’s also a powerful work of excavation that achieves what historical fiction often can’t — credibility, along with a sense of the transportive.
A family history
The blight comes quickly. Walking home one night, Fergus notices the smell: powerful, horrible, like the scent of an open grave.
Reaching his plot, Fergus immediately saw that his plants, healthy and green that morning, were withered and black. Falling on his knees, he pulled one up, then another, then another. The potatoes clinging to the roots were shriveled and wet. He dug up every plant in the row and the potatoes were nothing, purple balls of poison, and he heard neighbors’ screams floating in the dark.
It wasn’t long before the true toll of phytophthora infestans became horrifically apparent. Behrens is unsparing as he describes the slow wasting away, the “bitter taste of iron and salts” on dehydrated tongues, the hair loss, accompanied, with grotesque irony, by simultaneous sprouting of a black fur — “hunger fur” — on victims’ foreheads, cheeks, and hands.
When Fergus’s family is killed, he’s remanded to a fever-ridden workhouse. He escapes and falls in with a mob of parentless children, running wild across the bogs of west-central Ireland, thirsting for revenge. He heads to Dublin, then to the teeming streets of Liverpool, the railways of Wales, and finally onto a crowded, stinking ship toward “the Boston states.”
If that sounds like a familiar story, it’s told here like no other. When I visit Behrens at his home near the coast in Brooklin, Maine (E.B. White country), he insists The Law of Dreams is “not about the famine; it’s really about sex, death, and love.” True, but how richly he evokes time and place while telling his tale. Perhaps that’s because The Law of Dreams is his family’s story — at least as he imagines it. His ancestors entered the Saint Lawrence on a coffin ship and disembarked at Grosse Île, penniless and ill with typhus, in 1847. By the time Behrens was born, in 1954, his family had risen through Montreal society to become part of the city’s elite. But he was ever aware of their humble beginnings.
