Famine Dreams and Nightmares

By Tom Deignan

The Law of Dreams: A Novel
By Peter Behrens Steerforth

ONE of the few ways people can come to terms with historical calamities is by listening to the words of the victims who were there, who suffered because of events and forces beyond their control.

Think of the great writings that came out of, say, the Holocaust or the struggle to end slavery in the U.S.

It’s been noted that the Irish Famine did not produce many such eyewitness accounts to help us understand more deeply the suffering the millions of victims endured. So, it’s been left to historical novelists to fill in these gaps.

In recent years historical novelists have been very busy with the Famine. There was Peter Quinn’s 1995 epic The Banished Children of Eve. More recently, Kevin Baker gave us the brilliant, gritty Paradise Alley, which chronicled the era from the coffin ships to the New York City Draft Riots. Joseph O’Connor (Sinead’s brother) also gave us a disturbingly realistic look at the Great Hunger with his novel The Star of the Sea.

Add Peter Behrens to the list of writers who have tackled the Famine, seeking to locate humanity amidst all of that misery. Behrens’ new novel The Law of Dreams is an ambitious look at one Famine immigrant’s trek across the United King- dom, before finally making his way to Canada.

It is far from a perfect book, but it has plenty of gruesome, vibrant details to merit a place next to many of the recent Famine novels which have come out.

At first, Behrens seems an unlikely chronicler of the Great Hunger.

He’s perhaps best known for his collection of stories entitled Night Driving. The Montreal-born Behrens (who lives in Maine) has also written essays for The Atlantic Monthly.

It turns out, however, that Behrens’ own ancestors fled the Famine. They landed at Gross Isle in Canada, a quarantine site where a monument to those who did not survive the coffin ships stands today.

But The Law of Dreams does not read like thinly–veiled autobiographical fiction. At the book’s center is a teenager named Fergus O’Brien, whose tenant farming family is jolted by the blight of 1847.

Soon enough, the O’Brien’s landlord is burning down their farm and many like it, in one of this novel’s many heart-breaking scenes.

Young Fergus eventually ends up in a workhouse, seeks revenge on his landlord, and makes his way to Liverpool where he becomes a street urchin/male prostitute.

Fergus’ constant movement may jar some readers, but Behrens is to be credited for holding the narrative together and for making each new setting seem striking and memorable.

Along the way, Behrens allows us to grasp the profound uncertainties that hang over Fergus, living in a world described as “a gun loaded with chance and mistakes.”

It is in Wales that Fergus meets a married woman, Molly, with whom he will travel to North America.

“Their first death was off the town of Three Rivers,” Behrens writes as Fergus, Molly and their fellow travelers sail into Gross Isle. “The victim had no friends aboard, his wife and children having died on the Atlantic crossing.”

Shortly afterwards Behrens adds, “Three more of the fever cases died the afternoon between Three Rivers and the St. Mary’s current. (Fergus) heard the captain tell the hands to put them over quickly, but this time their relatives refused to let crewman near the bodies, insisting the dead be left in peace until they could be carried ashore at Montreal and buried in the ground like Christians.”

As Joseph O’Connor’s book did, The Law of Dreams brilliantly recreates a mid-19th Century sea voyage. On the other hand, it should be added that sometimes Fergus comes into contact with such dastardly villains, faces such adversity, that The Law of Dreams veers close to an overblown period movie. (Incidentally, Behrens is also a screenwriter.)

Still, this novel can’t be accused of focusing solely on the misery of the Famine era. Fergus, at times, seems like a character out of Dickens -– on the run and in trouble, and as a result falling into rollicking adventures with very colorful characters.

Not for nothing was Behrens able to get the likes of Peter Quinn and Malachy McCourt to praise his book, but also hip non-Irish writers such as Heidi Julavits and Jonathan Lethem.

We know much more about the Famine now than we used to. For many schoolchildren across the country it is a mandatory topic for study.

Still, the voices of those who actually endured it remain disturbingly silent.

Liam O’Flaherty’s 1930s book Famine remains a landmark. But in recent years, thanks to inventive novelists such as Behrens, we are beginning to hear many of the cursed voices who had to endure this horror.