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 Edition, 304 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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