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3.59 AVERAGE
3.59 AVERAGE
I received this pre-publication e-book from John Murray Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. (Review posted on NetGalley, Goodreads and Amazon.)
It is the summer of 1348 in rural Ireland – stifling and oppressive, and the plague is rampant. A small group of travellers – an opportunistic young English nobleman intent on buying up land from plague-ravaged communities, his translator, a servant and a boy – arrive at the tiny town of Nobber. Their journey has been interrupted by marauding Gaels, and as they approach the town they come across a surreal sculpture, a wooden cross with live crows nailed to it.
You’d think this would be enough to warn them off, but no – they enter the town and meet the inhabitants. The mayor and priest are gone, killed or driven off by the townsfolk in some unspecified but violent incident, and an unnamed man is controlling the town on behalf of a sinister but absent figure named de Fonteroy, aided by the deranged blacksmith Colca. The inhabitants have been placed under strict curfew, ostensibly to stop the spread of the plague, although it seems Colca also has other motivations.
This book is an odd, dreamlike thing. It meanders and weaves, with prose at once vague and startlingly, shockingly lucid – a fever dream of a narrative, echoing the context of oppressive heat, madness, sickness and rot that pervades the story. We meet more of the inhabitants of the town, some locked in their homes in the stifling heat, and we follow some of them as the town descends further into madness and arrives at a final shocking denoument.
This hallucinatory quality is at once a strength of the book, and a weakness. The overbright, surreal quality of the writing is driven throughout the book, which is quite the feat by the author, but it is not easy to read for long periods, or to keep in memory – it twists and slips in one’s consciousness, with details and threads being lost or half-remembered. I had to backtrack a number of times, and even now, having finished the book and allowed myself a few days to process it, I don’t feel I have entirely come to grips with it.
As a debut novel it’s an impressive project, taking on themes of oppression, occupation, insanity and decay in a hyper-real narrative that challenges and ultimately shocks. I can’t honestly say it’s an easy read, but it certainly repays perseverance.
It is the summer of 1348 in rural Ireland – stifling and oppressive, and the plague is rampant. A small group of travellers – an opportunistic young English nobleman intent on buying up land from plague-ravaged communities, his translator, a servant and a boy – arrive at the tiny town of Nobber. Their journey has been interrupted by marauding Gaels, and as they approach the town they come across a surreal sculpture, a wooden cross with live crows nailed to it.
You’d think this would be enough to warn them off, but no – they enter the town and meet the inhabitants. The mayor and priest are gone, killed or driven off by the townsfolk in some unspecified but violent incident, and an unnamed man is controlling the town on behalf of a sinister but absent figure named de Fonteroy, aided by the deranged blacksmith Colca. The inhabitants have been placed under strict curfew, ostensibly to stop the spread of the plague, although it seems Colca also has other motivations.
This book is an odd, dreamlike thing. It meanders and weaves, with prose at once vague and startlingly, shockingly lucid – a fever dream of a narrative, echoing the context of oppressive heat, madness, sickness and rot that pervades the story. We meet more of the inhabitants of the town, some locked in their homes in the stifling heat, and we follow some of them as the town descends further into madness and arrives at a final shocking denoument.
This hallucinatory quality is at once a strength of the book, and a weakness. The overbright, surreal quality of the writing is driven throughout the book, which is quite the feat by the author, but it is not easy to read for long periods, or to keep in memory – it twists and slips in one’s consciousness, with details and threads being lost or half-remembered. I had to backtrack a number of times, and even now, having finished the book and allowed myself a few days to process it, I don’t feel I have entirely come to grips with it.
As a debut novel it’s an impressive project, taking on themes of oppression, occupation, insanity and decay in a hyper-real narrative that challenges and ultimately shocks. I can’t honestly say it’s an easy read, but it certainly repays perseverance.
UPDATE - I wanted to bring to everybody's attention there is now a fine audiobook of Nobber. The narrator is Niall Buggy who captures the voice and mood of the novel splendidly.
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 realized 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 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
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This one was pretty wild. The novel is set during the bubonic plague of mid 14th Century, in a town called Nobber. People are holed up in their homes (sound familiar?), and as their relatives start to die, it seems their mental health comes into question as well (sound familiar?). Then we've got a handful of people trying to take advantage of the situation for their personal gain. That's about all I know.
This is a dark humor type of story, with some grotesque scenes, a little hint of magical realism, and people who like to talk dirty to one another. I have no idea what this one is really about. All I know is that the prose is excellent, there are a handful of scenes that left a strong impression on me (the forest burial with the fox, anyone?), and that Fagan is an author of which to take note.
A novel that, once you finish, will make you ask, "what the hell was that all about?" but will sear itself in your memory for a while longer. I'm not sure if I even liked it that much, but I was certainly impressed by it. Strong three stars.
"The corpses are hidden, but they seep into the living, the false shades amongst them. There are not enough hands to bury them any more. There is no more society, no more family. Society is slack, full of hypocrisy. It is gone. There is only this mob, burgeoning, becoming one."
This is a dark humor type of story, with some grotesque scenes, a little hint of magical realism, and people who like to talk dirty to one another. I have no idea what this one is really about. All I know is that the prose is excellent, there are a handful of scenes that left a strong impression on me (the forest burial with the fox, anyone?), and that Fagan is an author of which to take note.
A novel that, once you finish, will make you ask, "what the hell was that all about?" but will sear itself in your memory for a while longer. I'm not sure if I even liked it that much, but I was certainly impressed by it. Strong three stars.
"The corpses are hidden, but they seep into the living, the false shades amongst them. There are not enough hands to bury them any more. There is no more society, no more family. Society is slack, full of hypocrisy. It is gone. There is only this mob, burgeoning, becoming one."
Teetering on the brink of only 1 star. The concept and the plot indicated that this novel might be spectacular. Not even close. The story ended up being marginal at best; the characters had no redeeming qualities, and the plot crawled along nonsensically toward its ultimate end. Not very interesting and it was inundated with gratuitous weirdness and violence which seemed to merely be trying to culminate in the gross out. I thought I’d be blown away but found myself struggling just to finish.
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced