Fifty-four pages into this epic novel, the protagonist, having jumped overboard a slave ship he mistakenly boarded, now under mutiny, appears to take his last breath. Then 20 pages or so later, suddenly he walks straight off the page. “You are a minor character in someone else’s story,” he is told.
It is perhaps this sentiment that is one of many core themes of Fagan’s second novel – a highly imaginative literary frenzy that is yet more ambitious than his debut, Nobber, a book that saw tensions rise between the Normans and Gaels in a plague-ridden 14th-century Ireland.
Irishman Angel Kelly crosses the Atlantic with the intention of establishing a utopian commune in Brazil towards the end of the 18th century. What results is a savage odyssey of avarice and senseless violence; in an unnamed colony in Latin America, a battle of empires and quest for colonisation.
“We are in an enraged and envious era that seeks to pass itself off as a just and benevolent one.” Neither utopia nor dystopia, in a novel that speaks as much to the horrors of past brutalities as current, Fagan captures the sense of rudderlessness in a world dictated by hubris.
With a shifting cast of characters, a diverse array of accents and idioms, frequent dialogue in Spanish and French, and rather baroque prose, Fagan demands a lot from his reader. I frequently found myself having to reread passages to remind myself who one character or another is. Though this may be missing the point. “It will either be a man like him, or it will be another man like him from across the ocean.” Safely accept, it is a vainglorious man causing pain in his pursuit of power.
[ Nobber review: 14th-century bawdiness and Irish noir whimsyOpens in new window ]
“Was it for this?” one characters asks towards the end, observing the destruction around him, recalling Yeats’ poem September 1913, and his reference to the “delirium of the brave”. It is a question that crosses my own lips, as the labyrinthine novel descends into chaos, with characters performing cartwheels and handstands as they speak. Ca en vaut la peine? Is the novel worth the effort?
Eden’s Shore is less grounded than Nobber. It is less entertaining and more beautiful in its honesty. While savagery abounds, moments of wonder act as reprieve in this ambitious text that brims with life, as much as it does death.
