From ‘great hunger,’ hope sprouts

TODAY, most of us know it simply as “the potato famine.”

But because the majority of its victims suffered and died innocent of English, its name in Irish better conveys the catastrophe’s simple terror: An Gorta Mor -- “the great hunger.”

One of the many fine things about Peter Behrens’ stunningly lyric first novel, “The Law of Dreams,” is that it is emphatically a story of that “great hunger,” a work of richly empathetic imagination that reminds us once again of how powerful historical fiction can be in skilled hands. In fact, the story has a factual and emotional authenticity that calls to mind the similarly masterful debut Thomas Flanagan made with his now classic novel of Irish history, “The Year of the French.”

Oddly, for a calamity that occurred in what was then the territory of the world’s most developed nation (Britain) in the relatively recent past (the mid-19th century) and that afflicted that most verbal of people (the Irish), “the great hunger” has bequeathed us precious little first-rate fiction.

For generations a kind of shamed silence hung over the cataclysm, complicated by the assertion in some Irish nationalist circles that the famine following the general failure of the island’s potato crop in 1845 was a deliberate act of genocide by the English government.

In recent years, reliable scholarship by Cecil Woodham-Smith, F.S.L. Lyons and his pupil Roy Forster, among many others, has helped launch a scholarly reclamation of the famine as it really was. Today, informed opinion regards it as a tragedy compounded by bad biology, bad agronomy and bad economic theory that solidified into a tragic, life-consuming rigidity.

When it comes to full-length fiction, however, the most gripping work has remained “Famine,” the novel Liam O’Flaherty published in 1937. Though written in his rather idiosyncratic blend of the heroic and naturalistic, O’Flaherty’s book drew on his own impoverished childhood on the Irish-speaking island of Inishmore. No one has done a better job of capturing the isolation and terror the Irish peasantry must have experienced in that summer of 1846, when the potato blight rotted the crop that made up an estimated 80% of the average family’s diet.

If Behrens -- a Canadian-born screenwriter and award-winning author of short stories -- does not exceed O’Flaherty, he equals him in compelling new ways.

In part, it’s a matter of emotional perspective. O’Flaherty’s is the preeminent account of the more than 1 million Irish people who died of hunger and disease. Behrens’ is the definitive story of the nearly 2 million who went into exile, setting in motion the Irish diaspora that has continued until recent years. Ireland’s dazzling and hard-won new prosperity notwithstanding, its current population still is less than half what it was in the first year of the famine.

Behrens’ protagonist is young Fergus O’Brien, the son of landless peasants in County Clare, allowed to squat on the barren hillsides that are part of the lands rented by a large farmer from an absentee owner. The farmer already is under pressure to clear the squatters’ one-room cabins and meager potato patches so that land can be given over to more lucrative grazing. One of the novel’s strengths is the sharp and knowing way the author quickly but convincingly sketches in the inescapable predicaments of these characters.

In a series of brief, propulsive chapters, all the forces of tragedy come chillingly into play. Phytophthora infestans -- the potato blight -- strikes and, in a single evening, Fergus and his neighbors lose their entire crop. It is a devastating scene -- more a sketch than a chapter in Behrens’ telling, and it ends thus:

“Reaching his plot, Fergus immediately saw that his plants, healthy and green that morning, were withered and black. Falling on his knees, he pulled one up, then another and another. The potatoes clinging to the roots were shriveled and wet. He dug up every plant in the row and potatoes were nothing, purple balls of poison, and he heard neighbors’ screams floating in the dark.”

It’s a heartbreaking sequence, almost a small homage to a similarly powerful scene in O’Flaherty’s novel.

The farmer/leaseholder buys out the rest of the squatters, but Fergus’ father stubbornly stays on. As a migrant laborer, he has too clear an idea of what awaits a hungry, landless family on “the roads.” Starvation follows, then typhus.

As Fergus lies stricken with his dead sisters beside him in the cabin’s loft and his dying parents on their straw below, English dragoons arrive to evict them. Fergus is taken away, but the rest of the family have the hovel burned down around their ears.

One of the farmer’s sons, kindly and beset by guilt, buys Fergus admission to a nearby workhouse where a “fortunate” few of the starving are cared for in a corrupt and desultory sort of way:

“Paupers were fed in the yard, where the steam of soup was stunning, and he lingered over the kettle until the warden screamed at him to take his noggin right fast and move along, move along.

“A hundred men and boys slept on straw pallets in the male paupers’ sleeping hall. He fell asleep instantly but awoke in blackness in the middle of the night, with strangers lying flat as the dead, and the fire too far off to give any light or heat. He had wet himself, and the sour stink of piss on straw reminded him of Carmichael’s stable and the red mare in her stall....”

From the workhouse, Fergus begins a kind of odyssey that involves an unexpected and violent reckoning with the farmer who evicted him, a journey across ravaged Ireland to the fetid refuge of Wales and Liverpool. Finally, there is the long and treacherous voyage to exile in Canada.

Behrens is an unobtrusively elegant stylist; one of the great satisfactions of this book is the way in which Fergus’ inner consideration of his tormented journey distills itself aphoristically, as in this reflection: “Betrayal tastes cold on the tongue, but you don’t feel it so much, right at first; you’re trying to pull yourself inside.”

On the voyage to America, Fergus intervenes to stop a drunken immigrant father from beating his young daughter. There is a quick, sharp fight after which Fergus -- unthanked by the “whimpering creature” or her mother -- wonders to himself: “Are you a part of the world, like a bird, an apple tree, a fish, or the sea itself -- or are you here to judge it, everything in it, yourself included?”

Finally, the ship reaches Canada:

“Forty-one days after clearing Clarence Dock, Laramie dropped anchor below the quarantine station at Grosse Ile, an island in the St. Lawrence twenty miles downstream of Quebec. They had two fever cases aboard; the girl Fergus had tried to protect, and her sister.

“The line of ships at anchor stretched two miles in the river. A few had been inspected and flew the green flag of quarantine, but most were awaiting medical men to come out and remove their fever cases to the island so that their days in quarantine could begin.”

Those waiting vessels have come down to us in history as the infamous “coffin ships” on which more than 20,000 immigrants died within sight of their promised land. The resilient Fergus, however, finds hope and a healing sort of new beginning, as did so many immigrants in those dreadful years.

Irish is a language made for pithy, multifaceted sayings. One that became popular in time after the famine went, “Sadness is the easiest thing to get.”