Out of the Celtic Twilight

A teenage boy is talking to his father in the library of their rambling Irish house. His father tells him to look at a particular picture; the moment he obeys, four armed men enter the room. But when he turns round, his father has vanished – apparently into thin air.

So, in brilliantly dramatic fashion, begins Lord Dunsany’s The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). As a novel it defies categorization, but if you imagine a John Buchan thriller with an overlay of the Celtic Twilight and Rachel Carson-style eco-prophecy you will be almost there. It is also a rhapsodic guide to the art of shooting wildfowl, which argues plausibly that those who wade through icy marshes with shotguns are lured by something more than bloodlust. The main strand of the story takes place in 1885 with the narrator, Charles Peridore, on holiday from Eton. Since his mother is dead and he is an only child, his father’s disappearance leaves him with just the small staff of their down-at-heel estate for company; and, anxious though he is about his father’s safety, he is thrilled that he is now free to visit the nearby bog of Lisronagh in pursuit of the visiting greylag geese – ‘a greater prize to me than any that the world could offer’. The word ‘bog’ deserves consideration. To some people it epitomizes the supposedly primitive nature of the Irish; but anyone who has actually seen a bog will know it to be an eco-system of extraordinary complexity and – on the right day – beauty. The one at Lisronagh is to Charles ‘what the desert is to an Arab’, and it plays a central part in the plot. I can’t think of a landscape more difficult to describe, but Dunsany manages to capture both the wonder and the danger of it:

I walked on, under the bog’s edge, with peaty soil underfoot, in which sometimes rushes grew, now all in flower, and sometimes, almost timidly, the grass . . . And all the way as I went over that quiet land there went beside me a chronicle of the ancient shudders of the Earth, old angers that had stirred and troubled the bog; for the long layers, tawny and sable, ochre, umber and orange, that were the ruins of long-decayed heather and bygone moss, went in waves all the way, sometimes heaving up into hills, the mark of some age-old uprising, sometimes cracked by clefts that sundered them twenty feet down, as though they still threatened the levels so lately stolen by man.

Charles’s companion is Marlin, the gamekeeper, who knows all there is to know about birds – and about the bog, on whose edge he and his mother live. Old Mrs Marlin is an elemental figure, extraordinarily attuned to the workings of nature, and apparently able to tell the future: for, as her son eventually admits, she is a ‘wise woman’ – in other words, a witch. Mrs Marlin is the self-appointed guardian of the bog, and when a peat company brings in heavy machinery to dig out the turf, Charles hopes that she may indeed have some strange power to prevent it. In the meantime, he waits for news of his father, and discovers that – as the only person who can identify the four armed men – he himself is in danger. He also falls in love with Laura, an Anglo-Irish girl who shares his fascination with the folk tales told by the Marlins about Tir-nan-Og, the land of eternal youth. All this might make The Curse of the Wise Woman sound like a children’s book, but it evades that category too. Charles tells the story as an old man living abroad and harking back to a vanished Ireland. The novel thus becomes a meditation on memory and the passing of time, and the skill with which Dunsany interweaves this and the other strands of the book is exemplary. His treatment of politics is also masterful. Charles’s Ireland is one in which allegiances are complex, and straight questions best avoided. The Peridores are held in high regard as gentry, sportsmen and Catholics who possess a fragment of the True Cross; but to republicans they are part of an oppressive Ascendancy, and by saving a policeman’s life Charles’s father is deemed to have crossed an invisible line. The leader of the gunmen sums up this ambiguity perfectly:

There is no one we have a greater respect for than your father, but it is a pity he mixed himself up with politics the way he did; and it’s the way it is we want to speak to him, and no one could be sorrier than myself that I have to say it.

Particularly fascinating is the relationship which develops between Charles and another of the gunmen, whom he comes to think of as his ‘guardian demon’: a figure part threatening and part protective, who has a way of materializing at unexpected moments – and who even, extraordinarily, turns to Charles for help when the police close in on him. Dunsany, who died in 1957, is largely forgotten now, though two of his other books have cult followings – The King of Elfland’s Daughter (which has been compared to The Lord of the Rings) and My Talks with Dean Spanley (the comic tale of a clergyman who may be the reincarnation of a dog). In his day, however, he was a considerable figure, much admired as a novelist, playwright and short-story writer. W. B. Yeats went so far as to compare his style to Baudelaire’s. For the modern reader, it is the Celtic Twilight element of The Curse of the Wise Woman which is hardest to accept. Marlin the gamekeeper is torn between the strictures of Christianity and the seductions of Tir-nan-Og, ‘With the young men walking with the gold low light on their limbs, and the young girls with radiance on their faces, and the young blossom bursting among the apple-boughs, and all that is young there glorying in the morning’. Charles and Laura come to share his obsession; but even in the 1880s, would two educated teenagers really have given credence to such a thing? The answer is that Yeats for one did. In his autobiographical Reveries he describes how, at a similar age, he wandered the Sligo countryside in search of otherworldly beings: ‘I did not believe with my intellect that you could be carried away body and soul, but I believed with my emotions, and the belief of country people made that easy.’ My mother gave me The Curse of the Wise Woman for my fourteenth birthday, and I sometimes wonder why she chose this of all books. Did she just think it was a good read? Did she hope to spark an interest in field sports? (She herself was a keen foxhunter, and the novel contains a wonderful description of an eighteen-mile chase.) Or did she think I might identify with Charles Peridore? Like him, I divided my time between rural Ireland and an English boarding-school; I had recently lost my father; and though I didn’t believe in Tir-nan-Og, I was in thrall to the Celtic Twilight and its vision of beautiful young women with pale skin and flowing hair. We were living, too, in troubled times – the 1970s – and it didn’t seem impos-sible that we might receive a visit from armed men. One thing we didn’t have was a neighbouring bog; but that changed when my mother moved to the Knockmealdown Mountains which divide Tipperary from Waterford. The bog was small and tame compared to Dunsany’s, but it was nevertheless an enchanting place – above all in summer after the rain, when sunshine turned the rivulets running through the dark peat into gleaming veins of gold.And when, in my first novel, I set about describing heaven, it was with that bog and those mountains that I began.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Anthony Gardner 2018