Tuesday 6 August 2019

Dead can Dance: "Nobber" by Oisín Fagan



Dead can Dance

"Nobber" by Oisín Fagan

A review


“What the heck have I just read?” This is hardly my usual reaction to a book, but it doesn’t seem out of place for Oisín Fagan’s debut novel.  Nominally, “Nobber” is a historical novel set in Ireland during the Great Plague of 1348.  That said, the landscape, ravaged by the Black Death and marauding Gaels, gives the book that timeless, apocalyptic feel typical of dystopian fiction.  At the start of the novel, we meet one Osprey de Flunkl who, taking advantage of the panic induced by the advancing sickness, sets out to appropriate swathes of land through fraudulent contractual transactions.  He is accompanied in his dubious quest by the strong but surprisingly sensitive Harold, the intellectual William of Roscrea, interpreter of the Gaelic tongue, and Saint John of Barrow, a sort of Holy Fool, although, admittedly, less holy than fool.   

On a hot Irish summer’s morning this ragtag band makes its way to the small town of Nobber.  Flunkl et al however are hardly the only people who have set their sights on the settlement.  Following the murder of the mayor and his family, another “outsider” – a certain Ambrosio known affectionately as “Big Cat” by his common law wife - has already usurped leadership of the town with the help of Colca, a local farrier with a propensity for unnatural congress with goats, geese and horses.  Bands of Gaels are also threatening to attack the town.  These characters converge on Nobber and it is no spoiler to reveal that this will not end well.

How best to describe this novel?  Imagine watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail whilst under the effects of some devilish drug.  The funny passages seem funnier, the raunchy passages seem raunchier, and the darker parts of the novel seem as black as hell.  The high-faluting mock-archaic dialogue, particularly the exchanges between De Flunkl and his men, can be side-splitting.  Other scenes are nothing short of revolting.  Then suddenly one comes across poetical passages which read like a ray of sunshine through a rain-cloud.  As the novel progresses, it becomes more nightmarish.  Someone nails several crows to a cruciform structure – some sort of dire warning perhaps?  A desperate young mother loses her wits watching her baby die of hunger and her husband die of drink.  An old man who has lost his family to the plague digs his own grave and buries himself alive with the help of travelling salesman Monsieur Hacquelebacq. And every so often gangs of Gaels appear and unleash mayhem and peltings of live rats.


Fagan has allegedly stated that he has not included an acknowledgments section, because he does not want to associate people he loves with an “evil book” such as Nobber.    Such statements make me suspect a marketing ploy, an attempt to attract attention to the book by naming it as the next “cursed” read.  At the same time, Fagan does have a point.  With the dead literally piling up, the novel becomes ever more nihilistic.  One starts to wonder whether there is any “message” behind all the deaths and violence portrayed, whether there is any “meaning” to the increasingly surreal vignettes.  The real punch to the guts comes when the reader realizes that the whole point of the novel is that there’s no point at all.  

At the end, the townspeople try to find a scapegoat to assume responsibility for all their suffering.  They know that they’re wrong, but blaming somebody for the evil which has assailed Nobber helps to impose logic and meaning onto a tragedy which seems senseless.  Ultimately, the questions which the novel raises relate to the perennial mysteries of suffering and evil.  Why has the disease claimed so many lives, including so many innocent ones?  Why have some of the more evil characters been spared?  Nobber refuses to venture a reply to these troubling queries and ultimately offers no respite to the doom and gloom. 

Kindle Edition304 pages
Published July 25th 2019 by JM Originals

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I love medieval music but I struggled to build a playlist which complements Nobber.  Surely the ethereal sounds of Gregorian chant or early polyphony would sound out of place as a soundtrack to this dark a novel?  So would the strains of some troubadour love song.  Ultimately I chose to start my musical selection with some “medieval metal”.  Whilst this is not exactly my scene, I’ve often listened to the music of the German band Corvus Corax.   “O Varium Fortune”, with its mixture of ancient and modern sounds and doom-laden choruses seems to fit the mood of Nobber.


One of the band’s projects was built around the Carmina Burana, medieval songs found in a manuscript dating from the 13th Century.  These songs were made famous by Carl Orff who wove a selection into his large-scale oratorio Carmina Burana.  Much as I like it, I tend to prefer the original songs played on authentic instruments, such as in the recording by the brilliant Oni Wytars Ensemble.  Here’s a toe-tapping performance of the drinking song Bache, bene venies.   



Nobber has an apocalyptic feel to it, a sense that the mass decimation effected by the Black Death would change the world forever.  In the medieval worldview, death and the “end of days” had an almost tangible presence.  Here is an extract from the so-called “Song of the Sibyl”, a liturgical drama based on the Sybilline prophecies of the Apocalypse, which has been performed in churches in Majorca and Alghero and some Catalan churches since medieval times. 



Death, “the great leveller” is a big theme in Nobber.  2013 saw the premiere of Totentanz, a work for baritone, mezzo-soprano and large orchestra by Thomas Adès, one of the leading contemporary composers of “classical” music.  Totentanz is set to an anonymous text which hung below a 15th Century frieze in St Mary’s Church, Lübeck.  Adès notes that the frieze depicted members of every category of human society in strictly descending order of status, from the Pope to a baby. In-between each human figure is an image of Death, dancing and inviting the humans to join him.   This recording of the premiere of Totentanz includes an interview with the composer and details on the frieze, which was lost during an Allied bombing in WWII



Nobber has a medieval setting, but it’s hard not to feel that some of its barbs are aimed at contemporary society.  I therefore thought it fit to end this selection a song by Irish folk metal band Cruachan which also uses medieval imagery of warring knights to put across a topical political statement:  A thousand years have passed And mankind has stayed the same, They fight against each other for political gain  




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