Under Enchanted Irish Tea’s Spell

Shamrock Tea

A Novel

By Ciaran Carson

Granta Books

$19.95, 308 Pages

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Go back in history to the time of St. Patrick, who’s said to have brought Christianity to the Celts, and you’ll find why the Irish imagination is so supernatural, filled at once with saints and faeries, herbal cures and holy water.

On the one side is the ancient world of pagan ritual--bonfires and wee people, giants and banshees, a realm of magic and mystical understanding that are part and parcel of everyday life. In this sphere, myriad worlds exist contemporaneously separated by the thinnest veil from what we perceive as the “real” world. The Christian culture, which Patrick brought, steeped like tea in that enchanted world for centuries to create the other constituent: An Irish brand of Catholicism that is influenced by the “Lives of the Saints,” holy relics and acts of saintly intervention--an environment in which pagan-type magic occurs regularly but is accounted for via hagiography.

Enter Ciaran Carson, a Belfast writer with a penchant for philosophy, a love of color variations and Van Eyck paintings, who takes seriously the concept of Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes): You can read the world in a drop of water. Mix these ingredients and you get “Shamrock Tea,” a novel that offers a uniquely Irish approach to magical realism and contemporary storytelling, filled with animal symbolism, moving statues, telekinesis, miracles and levitations, a story bursting with seeming coincidences that, on second glance, are anything but coincidental.

At center of this dreamscape is the young Belfast boy Carson who serves as narrator detailing his own encounter with shamrock tea, a drink that allows people to experience the world with the eyes of a visionary. Upon imbibing, drinkers are able to glimpse the underlying web linking everything together and see the true, brightly colored nature of the world. This enchanted tea can be found only by passing through Van Eyck’s painting “The Arnolfini Marriage.” Many historical figures are also influenced by this tea and make up parts of Carson’s conspiracy tale: Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle.

In this imaginative novel, consisting of short snippet-like chapters, each titled with the name of a color (Flander’s Blue, Parrot Green, Carnelian), characters of the imagination meld together with historical figures; lessons from “Lives of the Saints” weave in and out of chronicled facts and fictitious inventions, creating a world where nothing seems quite solid, but everything is related to everything else.

The author populates his book with an astounding number of references to genuine patron saints, using the saints’ stories to give context to the tale at hand. There is the patron saint of books (St. Catherine); of bronchial complaints (St. Therese of Lisieux); of safe childbirth (St. Margaret); of sleepwalkers and the insane (St. Dympna); of gardeners and cab drivers (St. Fiacre); of birds, cuckoo clocks and Switzerland (St. Gall), to name a just a few. The calendar of saints, which assigns a feast day for each of the respective saints, becomes a kind of “universal time scale, by which the future is always indicated by the past.”

The erudition necessary to write a book with such great detail--the mythology of scores of saints, the history of paintings and philosophy, poetry and literature--is astonishing, as well as Carson’s ability to forge this material into a mesmerizing narrative.

The stories themselves delight while meandering here and there, finally building to a central theme--that we can infer the existence of God from the beautiful appearance of, among many things, a bluebell because “ ... the whole universe is littered with His clues.”

Carson builds this theme beautifully but never comes to much of a conclusion, a flaw that is wholly forgivable as he does such a remarkable job enchanting, enlivening and mystifying his readers.

In the true tradition of Irish storytelling, we find ourselves under his spell until the very last word, unable to leave the world he creates or to argue against it.