Image credit: Bekka Bjorke (https://www.thebekkaffect.com/about-1)
‘Pray you, no more of this, ’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon'.
Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’, V.II.
*A shorter version of this essay appeared in the September 2021 edition of Zin Dail Literary Magazine.
My historical fiction novel A Land Without Wolves will be published by Irish genre publisher Temple Dark Books in October of this year. Here are a few of my thoughts in the run-up to its release:
I find that one of the more enjoyable aspects of the writing life is seeing an idea steadily grow and ripen into something more than what it was originally. Having spent much of 2020 and 2021 researching and working on my novel A Land Without Wolves - lockdown and strenuous quarantine measures afforded me a rare opportunity to write with greater abandon than ever before - it would be remiss of me to claim that it emerged fully formed onto the page.
It began on the Hook Peninsula, in the southern tip of Wexford. As a child, during the height of the Celtic Tiger, I spent my summers on that remote, windswept headland that tapered off into the sea, exploring its many shingled beaches and limestone cliffs, my imagination running wild as the waves. It’s a hypnotic place, with sun-drenched fields and bocage dotted by the ruins of medieval abbeys and derelict drystone hovels. Salty sea breezes and the shriek of cormorants kept me alert, as the sun slowly sunk into the horizon, lengthening the shadows.
Perhaps it was my imagination running amok, but I sensed a change taking place after dark. There was a tranquility, undeniably; but an eeriness also. The mighty Hook Lighthouse, allegedly the oldest of its kind in Europe, with its flash stabbing through the dark, swift as a bird of prey, was an unnerving sight. Not too far away was Loftus Hall, the forbidding Georgian mansion reputedly haunted by the devil himself; further up the coast was Baginbun, the landing site of Norman invaders in the 1200s.
Above all, the most compelling place to venture into was Tintern Forest, near the village of Saltmills, a great tangled stretch of woodland which straddles the Bannow river, and which also makes several appearances in A Land Without Wolves. Wandering down its many winding, deciduous trails, I was intrigued and awed by how beautifully untamed it was. On a summer’s day, sunrays pierced luminously through the ivy, lending the place an enchantingly lush atmosphere. Forests are a spur to the imagination - to enter one still relatively free of human influence is to find a sanctuary from the banality and frenzied hurdle of everyday life, and consolation can be found in the ferny stillness and echoes of birdsong. I grew accustomed to those trees forming a solid green roof above my head, all but obscuring the sky.
But at night, especially on moonless evenings, regardless of the season, it became a haunted, primeval boscage straight from Poe or Hawthorne, aswarm with phantasmagoria. A cold, forbidding darkness seemed to emanate from its eldritch bed of soil and mulch and moss; leaves ceased to rustle, no birds could be heard chirping any longer, and even the scurry and scamper of animals seemed to fall quiet. Its tranquility melted away to be replaced with dread. A sleepless menace took possession of oak and chestnut, luring unsuspecting hikers away from the path. There was an abandoned gardener’s lodge that I imagined to be a witch’s hut; hidden on the far bank, easily missed unless one stared directly at it, was the grim ruin of what had once been a limestone mill. The weathered turrets and tower of the nearby stone Gothic Tintern Abbey only added to the place’s eeriness. At the river mouth, a battlemented stone bridge reminded me that Tintern once served a military purpose as much as a religious one.
My young mind was ignited. A storm of images rioted in my head, all vying to be put into words. One burned more insistently, whilst others eventually smoked themselves out: a highwayman, under cover of darkness, lying in wait for his prey under the bridge, his flintlock primed and hatred flaring his eyes. I had no idea who he was and why he felt the need to do what he was about to do - only that he refused to be evicted from my mind. And, unusually, he did not wear a mask - instead, his features were smeared in ash, crudely imitating a skull.
A Land Without Wolves began, innocuously enough, as a college assignment. In 2013, when I was an English Lit. student in IADT, during a creative writing elective overseen by the poet Katie O’ Donovan, we were assigned a short story set in an historical era. The idea of a lone highwayman stalking Tintern Forest re-surfaced in my mind like a phantom, and so I began crafting a tale around this figure, lying in wait for his intended target whilst musing on his past. The suggestion that we needed to know more about this man, what drove him to live the life he did, and perhaps even offer him a chance at salvation, did not occur to me at first. Rather than forget about it, I kept tinkering around with the story, adding more and more detail that better reflected the era in which this man lived. Despite all this, he had no name. He was simply ‘the highwayman’.
I submitted the short story to various publications and the rejection was unanimous. Finally I received an email back from a newly-formed genre press named Temple Dark Books suggesting I expand the story into a fully-fledged novel. Only after accepting this did I fully give the highwayman his due. I named him MacTíre, which derives from the Irish for wolf (literally ‘son of the country’), due to his zealously friendless nature.
The wolf in many respects is a most potent emblem of Irish history and colonial displacement, as well as featuring prominently in Irish myth and folklore. More realistically, they were deemed a major health and safety risk as early as Elizabethan times. Legislation and bounties on wolf attacks had been in effect ever since. MacTíre’s story begins in the winter of 1786 - supposedly the year that the last wild Irish wolf was killed, after several centuries of systematic extermination.1
Beginning his story in the late 1780s, a full decade before the rebellion of ’98 erupted, and when the Penal Laws maintained a stranglehold on Irish society also licensed me to write of a time when extreme and often unprecedented political and social change was starting to take root.
Writing historical fiction is a formidable task (at least, it is for me). Despite a lifelong casual interest in history, the genre never featured very prominently on my cultural radar. Producing a full-length novel set in pre-Famine Ireland, therefore, presented a unique challenge. Before I could begin the story aproper, I engorged myself on as much historical detail as possible. At the same time, the challenge of crafting a compelling novel, as opposed to a textbook or a dissertation, was compounded by such attempts. An accurate re-imagining of the past is possible, but never, I believe, fully achievable. Nonetheless, one gained a sense of duty in retaining fidelity to the facts, of setting a story within a long-vanished time and place, and of rendering the same with as much accuracy as can be mustered.
I began working on it in earnest in a rented rain-lashed cottage on the island of Inishbofin in late August of 2020, and almost immediately found myself confounded by yet another issue: that of getting the novel’s narrative voice just right. As a 21st-century man writing about the lives of ordinary people from several centuries ago, it felt unseemly to write in a style that was too contemporaneous. The novel as a literary format in the 1800s, I kept reminding myself, was then only in its infancy. Nonetheless, I read 18th-century classics such as Fielding’s Tom Jones, Richardson’s Pamela, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Burke’s Reflections of the Revolution in France, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Paine’s Right of Man, Schiller’s Philosophical Letters, the poetry of Pope and Gray, as well as the memoirs of Dublin sex worker Margaret Leeson and the boxing champion Daniel Mendoza, in order to give the background as true an atmosphere as possible. Each of these texts made it clear that a major sea change was sweeping through 1790s Europe, with no telling where it would end or how.
To an extent, this also validated the novel's occasional lapses into verbosity - I felt at a license to lose all restraint and really run out the guns when it came to prose styling. It also extended over into the music of the era too - Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor and Hayden’s Farewell Symphony were exactly the portentously grandiose soundtracks I needed. Of course, everything else I could get my hands on regarding late 18th-century Irish history - from survivor’s accounts to after-the-fact analysis of expert historians - were also devoured.
The sheer wealth of information was staggering: various Redcoat regiments, the names of various towns and battles that took place before, during and after the insurrection, the names of its primary players. The bodycount alone was staggering. This was long before the smaller details were taken into account: the smell of gunsmoke, the manner in which people spoke to one another, the reality of the Irish landscape. An accurate re-imagining of the past is possible, but never, I believe, fully achievable. Moreover, the eighteenth century is often stereotyped as an era of powdered wigs, Grand Manner portraiture, ornate Neoclassical architecture, symphonic orchestral music, the Ancien Régime, and restrictive, aristocratic standards of etiquette.
It was ‘the philosophic century par excellence’,2 the era of the landscaped garden, wherein nature itself was clipped and trimmed into elegantly geometric groves and topiary. The human mind was to be unshackled from superstition; civilization and its dreams of Enlightenment would prevail. Individualism and liberty would be articles of rational faith. Due to the philosophes’ emphasis on reason and intellect, it was widely believed that man would eventually bend nature's savagery to his will, and thereby ultimately collar his own savage impulses as well. As the poet Brendan Kennelly observes: ‘... it was a century of opposites: wealth and poverty, elegance and ugliness, tyranny and slavery, violence and the search for peace, sophisticated style and congested filth, beautiful architecture and squalid, reeking hut-homes, order and lawlessness - these are some of the features of life in Ireland, and perhaps especially in Dublin, in the eighteenth century.’3 But it was also something of a golden age for highway robbery.4
The late eighteen-century was indeed a time of revolutions, big and small. The American Revolutionary War was met with great adulation from its supporters, panicked dismay from its detractors; the French Revolution was still an ominously simmering rumour, and changes on both a societal and epochal scale marked the century’s end. In the so-called Kingdom of Ireland, great progress and grinding poverty went hand in hand. The principles of the aforementioned French uprising would spur the then-nascent United Irishmen to bolster galvanized insurrection. Tensions between a Protestant and Presbyterian gentry and a predominantly Catholic underclass would be briefly assuaged by the formation of the United Irishmen in Belfast. This structure was reinforced by repressive Penal Laws imposed by the British parliament, which stripped Catholic citizens of their fundamental rights to work and to be educated alongside their Protestant counterparts. Interestingly, those same laws were also decried in their time by Dublin philosopher Edmund Burke, that reputed patron saint of political conservatism, who described such a system as:
“a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”
Whilst greater parliamentary independence had been gained via the efforts of Henry Grattan from 1782 onwards, Dublin, the second city of the British Empire after London, remained riven by disease, gang warfare, exploitation of the lower orders and a colonial administrative chokehold as represented by British rule and military presence. Still to come was the Reign of Terror, and the months of insurgency that would eventually be known as the 1798 Rebellion. As noted by Louis Cullen:
‘The absence of opportunity was only in part due to the operation of the Penal Laws which deprived Catholics of employment under municipal or State auspices, including even menial posts in the Revenue establishment. The fundamental cause was economic: outlets in clerical employment were extremely limited in a predominantly rural society and for the educated Catholic without the resources to aspire to an army commission or a career abroad, prospects were narrow in the extreme.”5
Such tensions, however, were not mere disagreements on matters of faith; the warring gangs the Liberty Boys (Protestant weavers from the Liberties) and the Ormond Boys (Catholic butchers from Smithfield) frequently fought pitched battles on the city’s relatively few bridges over their religious affiliations. Giants of Irish letters such as Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Sterne, Hutcheson and Burke, were at the forefront of the marketplace of ideas. Dublin at the turn of the century - some of its Georgian splendour survives, though, thanks to various property developments sweeping the capital, it also remains endangered - demanded to be realized. The evocative engravings of James Malton proved invaluable as rare visual records of that long-vanished city in that long-vanished time.
1798 was a brutal and bloody conflict that seems to have been, like many Irish wars, sanitized and glorified to the extent of its darker ramifications being ignored. This means good people on both sides of the conflict are sacrificed to its fury. No one is ever fully a hero or a villain, no matter how laudatory or corrosive their ideals. Which brought me back to Joseph MacTíre, A Land Without Wolves’ criminal protagonist.
The deeper I delved into his story, the more he warped and changed by the paragraph. He was more than just a mere black-hearted outlaw; he was cunning, embittered, sarcastic, haunted by execrable traumas that not even I, as his creator, was fully privy to. Nor was he above sharing a joke and he harboured a love of books that, in the predominantly illiterate society of 18th-century Ireland, would have marked him out as eccentric at best, and suspicious at worst. He was Clint Eastwood with a Wexford accent, a brute-force highwayman who would also quote a line or two from Shakespeare over his victim’s corpse; he was a willing outsider, raging at society for the traumas it inflicted on him as a means of coping. Nor is he even a complete recluse: his unspoken feelings for Grainne, a local brothel madame with whom he shares a cut of the spoils in exchange for intelligence on potential future prizes, indicates his need for some semblance of intimacy, and perhaps even love. His tacit solidarity with Grainne and her sex workers, as fellow outsiders shunned by a society too preoccupied with its own good standing, showed he was not entirely void of compassion. Before he can remedy this, he finds himself witnessing to a nation on the brink of irreparable change.
The adolescent appeal of being a lone wolf has its limits. I've come to view Joseph as a deconstruction of the archetypal highwayman figure as represented by Dick Turpin and Joseph Wild, and Alfred Noyes' classic poem 'The Highwayman' as well as of the classic Irish figure of the rapparee, who had a distinctly political hue to their crimes. In British-ruled Kingdom of Ireland, this manifested as many native Irish harbouring tacit support for their doings. According to Alice Curtayne, ‘The sympathies of the masses of the native Irish were always with the Rapparees… their activity is like a thread of light in a long, dark tunnel.’6
I soon learned that MacTire also had a deep affinity for the writings of John Milton. The English laureate’s sympathetic portrayal of Lucifer, the established corrupter of mankind, showcases how darkness and light, whilst always concurrent with one another, can take many guises and meaning. Like Lucifer, MacTíre inhabits a paradise, albeit one that is perpetually threatened by violence and murderous vendettas which he is ultimately powerless to transcend. The fallen angel defiantly declaring he would rather rule the fiery hellscape to which he has been banished than serve in the tyrannical paradise from which he and minions have fallen is not lost on him.
The very name Lucifer originally meant ‘bringer of light’; but the supposed Age of Enlightenment, however, has chosen not to shine upon MacTíre. So, in rejecting Heaven and defiantly declaring himself the ruler of hell, Lucifer embraces a new life for himself. Likewise, MacTíre, embodies the logical conclusion of the dark side of freedom Milton gives such portentous expression to in the anti-heroic Satan, in that he deems a life of self-sufficiency and living off the grid far superior to the stifling creature comforts offered by mainstream society:
"Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
to reign is worth the ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."...
Underscoring this, however, is the knowledge that in doing so, he will never again see Paradise. In like fashion, MacTíre, for all his avowed contempt of established society, its myriad constraints and social ills, on some level knows he is denying himself the boons that a regular citizenship can offer. Before he can remedy this, he finds himself witnessing to a nation on the brink of irreparable change. By necessity, he is a man who must live in the dark. In his essay on resentment, Fredrich Nietzche writes:
“While the noble man is confident and frank with himself… the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors, everything secretive appeals to him as being his world, his security, his comfort; he knows all about keeping quiet, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily humbling and abasing himself.”7
Therefore, it is my hope as MacTíre’s creator that his story will shed some light on the daily life of one who chooses to live a life of despair, and in doing so, identifies more an angel cast forever out of paradise and comes to believe himself to be damnation personified. A life of free-floating violence, generalised existential vengeance on a society he believes has deeply wronged him and a friendless existence governed by the fact that he is ultimately a hunted man awaiting the noose holds little appeal to me. “But is not revenge forbidden by heaven?” ponders the title character of Fielding’s Tom Jones. “Yes, but it is enjoined by the world.” MacTíre has cut himself off from any possibility of healing or redemption, and his attempts at establishing human contact are doomed to failure. Moreover, his literacy (a rare quality in 18th century Ireland) ensures he is increasingly aware of the changes in the societal wind, and of his own insignificance therein.
If MacTíre represents anything it is the dark side of freedom, one that ensures you have no allies due to being so solitary in your mission for independence. His young apprentice Mogue Trench, whom he trains to fight and rob and ultimately inherit his legacy as a feared criminal, comes to realize that waging war on the entire world out of a misguided (if understandable) sense of revenge isn't the best way live ones life. Eschewing any romantic notions of the criminal figure, I tried to get to the heart of such a man, one who operated cloaked in the shroud of his own self-made myth: a myth that ultimately saw him cut off from rejoining society. For indeed, what can a man’s individual freedom measure against those of his fellow citizens? It is this realisation that ultimately ensures his survival.
Writing this book was a seemingly endless exercise in grappling with the boundaries of one’s knowledge and understanding; it is my hope that most of those boundaries were successfully crossed. Now that it is finally finished, and the relief of seeing it finished has passed, the grappling I must now do is with where it will go.
I hope whoever picks it up receives some measure of enjoyment or insight from it. With a sense of inevitability and no shortage of heavy-heartedness, I must say goodbye to my old friend, the wolfish, ash-smeared highwayman who kept a solitary vigil in the forest of my head throughout the years, see him swagger off into the wider world and hopefully make his impact on whomever he encounters. Such is the way of these pursuits; I hope there’s something in these pages that will stay with you.
But that’s what novels are for: to offer itself to the reader. I hope you find something in it that speaks to you.
Works Cited:
Charles B. Moffat, The Mammals of Ireland, The Irish Naturalists' Journal, Vol. VII, No. 2, p. 56, (June, 1938).
Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, quoted in Henry Steele Commager's The Empire of Reason (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
Brendan Kennelly, Foreword to Irish Literature: The Eighteenth Century (ed. A Norman Jeffairs, Peter Van der Kamp, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006).
Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
Louis M. Cullen, Life in Ireland, (London:B.T. Bansford Ltd, 1968).
Alice Curtayne, Irish Story: A Survey of Irish History and Culture (Dublin, Clonmore and Reynolds Ltd: 1962).
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (Cambridge University Press: 1887, trans. Carol Diethe).