Despite a measure of artitistic self-indulgence, I’ve actually come to enjoy Hugo Pratt’s books (some of them at least) but his representation of Ireland during the war of independence is amusingly uninformed.
When his laconic anti-hero (the nautical Corto Maltese) ends up in Ireland, he meets the hilariously named ‘Banshee O’Danann’.
I sometimes wonder whether Pratt was actually very sly, and this was all just part of some obscure joke.
I wouldn’t put it past him.
Now that I’m back in the office, I’ve started work on ‘FIONN: The Betrayal‘ – the fifth book in the Fionn mac Cumhaill Series. At this stage, this is intended to be the second last book in the series.
The current chapter one (these things tend to change) involves a conversation around a game of fidchell between Demne (Fionn) and his aunt, Bodhmhall. This approach allows some development of the Fionn character but it also provides a helpful recap of the story so far and sets the scene for the rest of the book.
More importantly, it’s also quite fun writing the conversation dialogue between the young/eager Fionn and the much more worldly Bodhmhall.
I’ll make this first chapter available in the ‘paid’ section of my newsletter once I’ve advanced the story a little further.
My first encounter with Reefer and the Model (Joe Comerford’s independent thriller and Ireland first arthouse ‘western’) was in 1989 when I moved to France. Moving around the city, I was surprised to discover several posters advertising an Irish comedy-thriller that consisted of an odd ‘line -up’ style photo displaying a priest, a bearded woman, and a labourer.
Reefer and the Model tells the story of an odd foursome. Reefer (Ian McElhinney) and his two comrades (Spider and Badger) are men with a violent past now eking a living on a battered trawler that operates as a ferry along the Galway coast. When Reefer picks up a hitchhiking pregnant woman (Carol Scanlan) who’s struggling with drug addiction, an odd sort of romance develops, and she comes to live on the trawler. The newly bound, but financially desperate, foursome must now resort to a heist to survive.
When it was released, although relatively little known in Ireland, the movie was being lapped up by European audiences (it won the Europa Prize at the Barcelona Festival, Best Feature at the Celtic Film Festival in Wales and was nominated for Best Young Film at the 1988 European Film Awards), who were entertained by, but didn’t entirely know what to make of, this west of Ireland style adventure. The American market also struggled with how to approach this indigenous production and it had a relatively low profile there.
The 1988 movie languished in the archives for decades but was recently restored through the IFI and Screen Ireland Digitisation Project and a new Director’s Cut was released with a premiere screening at the Galway Film Fleadh this month.
The movie is 80 mins long but if you get a chance to see it. I was very influenced by it when I first saw it and fell in love with its clever dialogue (which now sounds slightly stilted to my ears) and the theme song from Delores Keane.
There’s very little video of the movie available online apart from a report on its making from the RTE archives whihc you can find here: https://www.rte.ie/…/21282626-reefer-and-the-model…/
An ‘early medieval batte scene’ from Polish artist Aleksander Karcz.
As a general rule, I tend to avoid large scale battle scenes in my books, except where they’re the culmination of some important plot point or otherwise a necessary contribution to the story I’m writing.
Fantasy entertainment has probably set a few unrealistic expectations when it comes to Irish battles – cartainly in pre-history times (i.e. pre 5th century). During that period, there was no real warrior class in the Irish society of the time and the low population density meant tribal warfare would have been more ‘skirmish’ than ‘pitched battle.’
There was one morning when the world dissolved, obliterated in a downpour that melted the distant islands, then the immediate surroundings as well. Preceded by a cluster of unusually threatening, blue-bruised clouds, the incoming deluge had given plenty of warning. As a result, the girl was comfortably settled under a solitary oak at the tip of the inlet outcrop, cloak tugged tight around her shoulders as she waited to watch the clouds unload their burden.
The downpour rattled the lake’s surface with a startling intensity that she’d not seen before, a ferocious hail that scattered white-foamed eruptions across the water around her. Mirrored by countless ripples on that shuddering surface, the resulting kaleidoscope of movement was giddyingly, but terrifyingly, beautiful.
Tethered to the island by nothing but a thin strip of rock, the girl felt a swell of panic when even that link disappeared, and her existence reduced to the tree above and three paces of the rocky outcrop. Conscious that there was nothing beyond the fusillade of rain, she was struck by a sudden, shocking sense of absence. Terrified at the prospect of being cut adrift, she peered desperately through the deluge for any hint of physical substance, for any trace of natural solidness, for … anything.
To her trembling relief, the downpour eased soon after, and although it seemed to take far too long a time, the outline of the island took substance through the rain. Whole and expansive, the Great Mother’s bulk emerged from the surrounding murk. Slowly, ponderously, it reached across the thin strip of stone, embraced the girl in her fulsome whole and, soothingly, reassuringly, brought her home.
Liath Luachra: The Great Wild was released on 2 June 2023. You can find the details here: The Great Wild
What is the Sweetest Sound?
The music of what happens next.
In terms of what happens next, I’ve got my head down on a number of separate IRISH IMBAS projects, most of which won’t see the light of day until later this year (and some later still).
Most of these are in varying stages of completion and although, in some regards, I’m champing at the bit to get them out, I also know they won’t taste anywhere as sweet if I rush them.
Key amongst these projects are:
I’m back home in Beara and travelling around Ireland during June and July, catching up with family and friends and carrying out some additional research.
If you’re seeking an interview or have a mutually interesting project you’d be keen to work on together, feel free to email before I get back.
I’m currently behind on where I want to be with Liath Luachra: The Great Wild. At this stage, the draft is sitting at over 30,000 words and although I had planned to keep it around that length, the final product is looking more like 40-50,000 (in other words, it’s about 3-4/5 complete).
This means that the final version it won’t be released in April as intended. I’m now postponing release until the start of June (although Patrons and paid newsletter subscribers will get it earlier).
In that regard, I’ve now put it up as a pre-order for Amazon which you can find here: The Great Wild Preorder
The back cover blurb reads as follows:
Ireland : 1st Century
In the deep, green depths of the Great Wild, a naked girl awakes in a forest clearing. With no belongings – bar a cloak and a bloody knife – and no memory to guide her, she must adapt and survive in an unfamiliar world.
With every possible kind of danger.
When I first started writing the Fionn mac Cumhaill Series almost nine years ago, I was keen to create a realistic, culturally authentic version of the famous Fenian Cycle. In particular, I wanted to write stories that were genuinely Irish while also accessible to non-Irish readers.
As part of my overall goal with Irish Imbas however, I was also keen to use the books as a means of reintroducing lost Gaelic/Irish concepts (that is words, expressions and – more importantly – ways of thinking) that have been lost from common Irish parlance as a result of language decline, the impacts of colonization and so on, but which still have significance at a societal level.
This is why throughout my books (and other projects), I always add a smattering of words like ‘fian‘, ‘rí‘, draoi, ‘ráth‘, and so on – words that by themselves mean little, but which in the context of understanding Irish/Gaelic culture, have a hugely significant resonance.
The word ‘Fianna‘ is a classic example of how much has been lost. This word – the basis for the contemporary word ‘Fenian’ – is believed by most people (including many Irish people who were never told any better) to be the name of Fionn mac Cumhaill’s war band.
In fact, ‘Fianna’ was simply nothing more than the plural of the word ‘fian‘ (which meant ‘battle group’ – usually in a tribal context). This means that Fionn’s fian was just one of a number of such groups and a recognised dynamic in the society of the time.
It’s a little thing, but when you take the downstream consequences of that new knowledge into account you can see how it changes the interpretation of both story and culture. For creators who want to retain cultural integrity in their work, this absolutely has to be done.
Trying to balance those competing goals (the requirements of cultural integrity and the requirement to deliver an accessible and enjoyable story to an international audience) can actually be quite a challenge at times. The balance is never easy and any creative decision you make with one can have a huge consequence for the other.
One of my earliest decisions, for example, was to retain the original Gaelic spelling for the character names (Fionn, Liath Luachra, Bodhmhall, Fiacail etc.) and place names (Seiscenn Uarbhaoil etc.). This goal for cultural accuracy – naturally – clashed enormously with the accessibility goal. For non-Gaelic speakers, Irish names can be the equivalent of having a broken stick in your mouth – whatever comes out is going to come out mangled! Anyone used to thinking in English – understandably – struggles with the unfamiliar combination of vowels and consonants.
Naturally, the advice I received from everyone was to use an anglicization of the names to make the reader more comfortable. After all, that’s why in the early days Fionn mac Cumhaill’s name was anglicized to the meaningless ‘Finn Mac Cool’. Sure, the latter is easier to say for an English speaker but the English name doesn’t carry the strong cultural associations of the Irish one (Fionn means ‘fair-headed’ but also has related connotations of ‘insightfulness’ etc.). ‘Finn’ is a meaningless term that includes no such depth or resonance (and, here, I’ll have to apologise in advance for to those parents who’ve gone and named their kids, Finn!).
Most of the books and other products I produce are strongly influenced by my decision to always lead with the ‘heart’ (cultural authenticity) as opposed to the ‘head’ (commercial ease). That said, I usually try to improve the accessibility where and when I can. For example, with the names and placenames, I soften the challenge for readers by providing an audio pronunciation guide.
In most respects, that actually pays off in the longer term as readers can generally work out when something’s authentic or not. Most readers tend to respect what I’m trying to achieve and have demonstrated immense patience and willingness to overcome things like the initial pronunciation challenge.
At the end of the day, I guess what my experience has really demonstrated is that if you produce something that’s good enough/intriguing enough/interesting enough for people to enjoy, they’ll put up with your whims and, often, they’ll support you.
As an aside, here’s a question I once held up at Irish cultural/heritage class I was running:
How would you pronounce the following?
Everyone in that group of attendees (about 18) was able to pronounce at least two of those names. Even when they couldn’t, they still knew exactly who those individuals were and what they had achieved as part of their creative career.
Basically, culture is not a barrier to success unless you let it be.
Father Sun had neared his peak when the girl in the clearing stirred.
Stretched across the ankle-high grass, her initial shiftings were indiscernible beneath the black cloak that swathed her. As vigorous ripples of activity shifted through the garment however, it loosened and slowly unravelled. A bare pair of legs slid into the open and a solitary figure unfolded from it in a series of awkward angles.
Lying face down in the flattened grass, the dark-haired girl who’d emerged, raised her head to peer at the forest standing twenty paces away. A long moment passed as she stared blankly at the trees, engrossed by the shifting depths of its mottled browns and greens, the smooth sway of branches that throbbed with the sound of birdlife.
This is the opening scene to Liath Luachra: The Great Wild, a novella that I’m hoping to complete by the end of next month.
It’s probably been influenced (to a degree) by some of Alessio Albi’s beautifully moody works (attached)
Some readers might find this image a little familiar.
That’s because it’s remarkably similar to the layout of the ‘Crannóg‘ used in the book ‘LIATH LUACHRA: The Metal Men‘.
In fact, this is an early image of the ráth at the Irish National Heritage Park. It has a very similar layout to the fictional crannóg as, in general, there wasn’t major differences in terms of structural designs back in the day. People used the natural materials available and the fundamental designs of what worked were easily adapted to many structures.
Our ancestors were eminently practical as, a lot of the time, their lives depended on it.
A segment from the second Beara book, Beara: Cry of the Banshee
Although this sequel to Beara: Dark Legends is still very far from even a first draft, I was doing some work on it last weekend.
This is a quiet scene between two of Mos’ co-characters: ‘kind-of’ partner, Ailbhe/Olva (Hungarian magician and acrobat) and good friend Bróna (West Cork’s most industrious hacker). In the first book, both women took an instinctive dislike to each other which was fun to write and play out.
In the second book however, enough time has elapsed that their enmity has softened, to the point they can even have conversation on topics as arcane as ‘connection to place’.
In this scene, they’re standing together on Beara’s south coast, considering the view over Cuan Baoi.
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Ailbhe stared at her, at the grey rock, the cold sea and back to her again.
‘I don’t know if I could live here. The weather’s … sad. The landscape has a bleakness to it I …’ Unable to find the words she wanted, she stopped trying and settled for a shrug.
Bróna nodded. ‘That’s only because you read the landscape differently to people living here.’
‘What do you mean?’
Bróna mused on that for a moment.
‘Landscapes are like a book. If you don’t have the necessary vocabulary – the placenames, the local history, the contextual terms of reference … then it’s hard to make sense of it. There’s no relationship, no emotional connection with it.’
Ailbhe smiled at that. ‘You need an emotional connection to the land?’
‘You do. It helps when times are hard.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What do you see when you look around?’
Reluctantly, Ailbhe did another slow sweep of the surroundings.
‘Grey rocks. A grey sea. Gorse. A lighthouse in the distance.’
‘Sure. You see the physical topography of the land. Yet, when I look around, my personal history in this region means I’ll see layers that mean nothing to someone who’s never lived here. I see Cnoc Daod the hill that’s dominated our family’s view for several generations. I see Parc an Tobar – the field with a hidden well behind the fern bushes. I see An Tráthín where one of my brother’s fell and broke his leg. I see a buachalan bush that the sidhe were said to fly away on, fuchsia bushes that will heal a sore throat. I see the mass rock where people gathered in secret during penal times, I see an trá bán – the beach where I collected shells as a child and where, as you can see, my own son is now doing so.’
She paused and pointed to a nearby rock coated with moss. ‘Over there by that big tree, about fifteen years ago, I lost my virginity to one of the Harringtons.’
Ailbhe stared at her, then gave one a rare, deep, and very hoarse, laugh.
Bróna grinned.
‘I guess what I’m saying is that our roots run deep here. Our personal history is fundamentally linked to the place, physically through the bones of our ancestors and, metaphorically, through the stories and emotion we’ve shared here. It’s always there – a constant fixture and reference point. My father saw this view every day, so did his father and so do I. For that reason, it represents a continuity of landscape relationships, of memories connected to places that have been shaped by our ancestors. That emotional connection means we don’t see the land as existing uniquely in the present.’ She shrugged. ‘Which, of course, triggers a whole different interpretation of what we do see.’
There was a long silence when she finished. It went on to stretch far longer than either expected.
‘Did you really lose your virginity under that tree?’ Ailbhe asked at last.
‘Let’s just say that if you’re ever looking for a spot that’s private and dry and doesn’t have nettles, that’s one I’d highly recommend.’
An impressive stainless streel representation of Fionn (and doggies) in Kildare. I really like the style by Lynn Kirkmann (the creating artist) but I was surprised at the Kildare County Council website notice which provided the following text:
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The sculpture came about following a consultation with Kildare County Council who wished to commission a significant landmark sculpture to celebrate Kildare’s colourful history and folklore and the presence of the Military in the area since earliest times and up to the present day.
Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna are genuine historical figures whose deeds and life stories have been embellished through time, myth and legend. There are many tales of their acts of bravery and magic. They were hunters and warriors, the bravest, the swiftest, the strongest and made the wild places of Ireland their demesne.
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To find a County Council publishing that colonial-style fantasist perspective is genuinely a bit concerning. Fionn and the Fianna were not historical figures but native cultural representations.
