11 May 2017
Misty Distant Borders
The books of Lord Dunsany.
by J.R.Thomas
Might the convulsions of Brexit lead to an unexpected side effect, the reunification of Ireland? Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, has suggested that the Brexit of the United Kingdom is an opportunity to test the will of the Six Counties to unite with the south; feeling perhaps the ancient animosity between the two religions in the North will be overcome by common cause in an European future. Something suggests that might be a bit premature, but it does cast the mind back to when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom, albeit an increasingly reluctant part. The struggle for liberation and self-government, and that clash between the largely (but far from entirely) Protestant Anglo-Irish governing landowning class and the Celtic Irish rural poor was for much of the nineteenth century a backdrop to Irish life, often an uncomfortable one, but one where the parties got on with their existences as best they could.
Out of that came some wonderful writing and the flowering of a literature which still blooms strong. W B Yeats will be known to our readers, as will Oscar Wilde, and possibly even Bram Stoker; but there was one more or less contemporary who outwrote and outsold them all, and yet is almost completely forgotten. Edward Plunkett, 18th Lord Dunsany. Dunsany was very much the Anglo-Irishman, his family being one of the ancient Norman settler families, but the Plunketts had a streak of radical rebelliousness that led to sympathy and indeed to open support by some of his relatives for Irish independence. Dunsany himself was little interested in politics but deeply romantic and intensely interested in the Irish and Ireland, and its folklore and legends. He made his name as a writer after the First War, writing a series of fantasy novels set in a fairy kingdom, Pegana, then widening his scope to poetry (he was a most gifted poet) and plays – being a key supporter of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the crucible for much of the revival of Irish literature. In 1924 he wrote his perhaps best known book, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, but also began the series of Jorkens novel’s, Jorkens being a clubman who tells tall stories, a sort of compatriot of Wodehouse’s Mulliner. But the book which Dunsany had most deeply inside himself, and which he wrote and revised over a long period, finally publishing it in 1933, was The Curse of The Wise Woman. It was an immediate best seller (and prize winner), remaining in print until Dunsany’s death in 1957, and then being republished in 1972 and again in 2014.
The Curse of the Wise Woman combines many of Dunsany’s themes and interests: Ireland, the threat to the old ways of the new, rural against urban, fantasy, mystery, and additionally brings in some personal experiences. Dunsany was a Unionist and served as a soldier in Dublin in the 1916 uprising there, but the motives of the various players in the Curse of the Wise Woman are scratched away at to reveal the complex, the humane, and the unexpected in men caught up in difficult times and stretched loyalties; one might well suspect that Dunsany himself had the same complications of belief and loyalty for all his outward conventionality. Blending in is after all just an effective way of hiding. Also worth remarking is Dunsany’s wonderful ability to evoke place with few words; his sketch of a man struggling to recall long past events, in a Spanish town during the time of siesta with the heat resting heavy on the town, a dog that will not settle, dust and glare, is a hot and sweaty minor masterpiece.
This book must have taken aback Dunsany’s regular readers; it opens in an ancient tired house where, the narrator explains, everything is old. Not just that which is fashionable to be old, such as pictures and furniture, but everything, down to carpets and curtains. The narrator is a schoolboy, scion of an ancient family, living there with only his father and a few servants. He is about to go back to Eton for the autumn half, but would much prefer to stay at home in Ireland, to shoot snipe and geese on the bogs around the decaying house. Any reader who has visited Dunsany’s home, Dunsany Castle in Meath (still the home of his descendants) will recognise elements of the setting.
Events get underway with a simple but evocative description of a quiet night disrupted, a sequence of happenings that will gradually chill the spine of any reader of even moderate sensitivity. There is no violence or gore; but the slow dawning on the narrator of what actually goes on under his very feet is beautifully portrayed; distant galloping hooves and the smell of tobacco bring home to him that life is much more dangerous and ancient allegiances much less settled than the seeming certainties of the morning of that day.
But at least he does not have go back to Eton. His wish to spend the autumn among the bogs and fields around the house is unexpectedly granted; and he begins to discover layers of Irish life, life in the bog, that open his eyes to the unexpected and previously unknown. Until a new threat arises. That becomes the core of the tale.
The Curse of the Wise Woman is not for everybody. A country sports fanatic friend did not see the point of it at all; indeed it is not a book about chasing snipe or waiting for geese. Although this is to some extent an autobiographical book Dunsany was primarily a fantasy writer with a complex inner existence, and here those complexities and layers come prodding the surface of life. It is not always obvious if what is happening is reality, or is unfolding in the narrator’s mind or dreams; you might ask if we have a narrator who is entirely telling the truth. He is an Eton boy after all.
Put that aside for consideration on the third and fourth reading; treat the tale as … a tale; or maybe as the memoirs of an old man. It is the record of an existence that Dunsany knew to be receding into the past, of happenings that hopefully his children would not have to endure. But also of simple times that they could never savour, of a magical era spoilt by distant events and nearby machinery, of lives that had seemed to be based on ancient certainties but which now had to be played out on cracking ice. It is about how the world slowly comes up to our necks, and how we may continue to breathe.
Some exceptionally good books were written between the two world wars. The experiences of death on an appalling scale, and the politics of evil which arose so unexpectedly out of idealistic intentions to build a new world, seemed to produce writings of great power and insight, often with an economy and style which holds the reader late into the night until the last page. This is one of the best; and it deserves to be much better known.
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