Customer Reviews

Death and Nightingales

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is one of the great, underrated novels of the century. The opening three pages are among the best things I have ever read - a young woman hears an injured calf lowing in the early dawn and contrives to help her: the mixture of Gothic mystery, personal trauma, the dark violence of nature, the evocation of space is relayed with such elliptical intensity that you are left reeling.

The rest of the novel can't hope to follow this, and there's a little too much explanation in it when continued suggestion would have been much more powerful, but these are minor complaints. It has been called a Victorian novel, and the plot and range of characters have a similar richness, but there is none of the authorial dogmatism, excessive verbiage or fear of loose ends that mars the works of, say, Dickens. Almost every character, no matter how reprehensible, is portrayed with stunning fairness, my favourite being the landowner Willie, whose repeated, drunken brutality can't hide his essential, helpless decency.

There are some remarkable set-pieces, especially the Percy French concert, but what is eventually most memorable is the evocation of nature, Ted Hughes like in its ominous power and violent beauty, it looks on immemorially at the comparatively petty human dramas that would eventually lead to an appalling Irish century.

This is a story about two women ; a mother now dead and her surviving daughter now grown up and at a crossroads in her life. It is also a story about a key time in Irish history ; late 19th century Nothern Ireland. This is a beautifully written book. The book resembles strongly that part of Northern Ireland, it is set in. Beautiful, stark and forbidding. Beth is the daughter of a local wealthy Protestant, whose wife, a Catholic, is dead. Beth will face choices between her life with her father and a life with the man she loves. There are twists and turns handled superbly against the backdrop of the hauntingly beautiful Fermanagh countryside. This book is worthy of a single sitting read.

I am continuing to find Irish writers who amaze me with their superb abilities with language and storytelling. After reading this author for the first time,I must say I am as impressed with his work as I am with Roddy Doyle,Frank and Malachy McCourt,Sean O'Callghan,Brendan O'Carroll,Tim Pat Coogan,Don Mullan,Liam O' Flaherty,Morgan Llywelyn,Brendan Behan and many more of my favorites.
In this novel we get a story that keeps us totally engrossed from beginning to end. Not only a good story,it is set in 1883,just a quarter century after the Great Famine in the northern County of Fermanagh. We are given a great insight into the social issues of Irish/Anglo,Catholic/Protestant,Wealthy Landowner/Poor Tennants,Parnell and the struggle of Freedom from the British and other elements that influenced every apect of the society in late 18th Century Ireland.
McCabe uses language like a great painter strokes a brush,a great guitarist fingers the strings or a balladier like Paddy Reilly sings a ballad. Let me give you just a taste of what you'll be in for in this novel;
"Up here,this place is half-way to heaven!"
"Billy Winters watched them watching the Bishop of Clogher.Cheeky,smooth little bugger ticking me off like that. Doesn't need wiskey;intoxicated with himself. This room packed with Tammany Taigs,vindictive unforgiving pack,outbreed us yet,that's what they're up to,get the land back,get us off it or bury us in it,convert us or kill us,burning zeal...Still got a half notion he'll make a convert of me...no bloody fear, Sir,not my soul...not my land,not my gold,defend it to the death."
And how about this for Irish banter?
"Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse,that's what the Duke of Wellington said about being born here."
From the half-light of the hollow Donnelly's voice came back:
"It could also make you a God. He rules the universe!"
"A bloody bad job he made of this wee corner." Billy muttered.
"I've only the two sons left out of the dozen I've reared. The poet fellow inside never laves the bed and this fella here's hardly ever in it!"
And then ,how's this for blunt talk?
"I'll give you death and nightingales...you'll fly from here,forever,with rooks,daws,and magpies,you'll croak like scald crows from now on with fellow thieves and vermin."
And finally;
"Nature's a terrible tinker,full of tricks and contrariness."

This could only be an Irish novel and will be a great read now as well as many decades ahead.

This is a superb book. McCabe combines fresh clear description with a subtle psychological grasp of the complexity of character. There are ambiguities and reversals which are believable and earned. The story illuminates the political situation of late 19th century Ireland through the situation and and relationships of the characters. Sounds simple but it's hard to do well. Mcabe is masterful.

Ode to a Nightingale, which reflects John Keats's mournful state of mind in the face of the beauty and liveliness of nature, inspires the title of this sad but suspenseful book and parallels its melancholy tone. McCabe, like Keats, is in the thrall of nature in this novel, but McCabe's nature is not sentimentalized. Whatever beauty exists is wild, sometimes harsh and even savage, like the reality of life for the farm folk who populate the novel. Nature's everyday challenges are intensified here by the social and political challenges of Ireland in the 1880's: Catholic vs. Protestant rivalries, the upheavals of Charles Stewart Parnell and the Fenians, the assassinations of British aristocrats, the legacy of the famine, and the tenuousness of life itself.

Primarily a domestic drama, the novel describes one day in the life of Beth Winters, a Catholic in a community which is equally divided between Catholics and Protestants. Depicting her cleverness and resilience in the face of her difficult farm life, McCabe focuses on her 25th birthday and the events which have led to the crisis which is the novel's focus--the circumstances of her birth, her abuse by her putative father, and her attraction to Liam Ward, a Protestant firebrand. Full of local color, lively dialogue, sometimes mystifying dialect, and powerful nature imagery, Beth's personal drama achieves wider significance as the characters, confronting issues of life and death, separately reveal the inherent (natural) violence lurking in everyone just below the surface. Political and religious rivalries complicate the personal conflicts between Beth, her father, and her lover, and the suspense builds to a crescendo.

In terse prose which is so restrained that the reader must bring his/her own intelligence to the interpretation of the action, McCabe creates a final scene of devastating power, addressing the violence within us all and making it understandable, plausible, and ultimately shocking. The traumas here are the traumas of real life, the characters are practical and tied to the earth, the prose is unburdened by excessive verbiage, and McCabe's message rings true. Mary Whipple

Eugene McCabe's DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES absolutely picked me up and dropped me - the book was that powerful and moving. For a novel set in 1883 in rural Ireland to transport me as a reader so quickly and thoroughly shows me the hand of a master at work. This is an author that I am pleased to have discovered - and one whose work I will actively seek.

McCabe's writing style is as rough-hewn as the characters he portrays - but this is deceptive, because there are many subtleties at work here. His descriptive abilities are staggering - but most of the story is carried along either as conversation or as revelations to the reader of the characters' thoughts. Another reviewer commented that the author's style almost compelled the reader to create the story while reading it - and that's a pretty apt description of the `work' required of the reader to grasp the monumental achievement of this novel. This `work' is not toil-in-vain, however - there is a great reward to putting forth a little effort here.

The characters are vivid and real - and the story is one that involves love, family, politics, class struggle and murder. There is a palpable air of mystery and suspense that permeates the story, one that keeps the reader guessing, rapt until the end. There are likable characters whose treachery lurks just beneath the surface, as well as persons who seem to be less than respectable at first glance who turn out to be made of stout moral fibre - and there are those as well who are just as they seem, so I'm not really giving anything away with these statements. There's also one of the most unlikely heroes you're liable to run across anywhere.

I'd be tempted to say that this book is one of the best reading experiences I've come across in the past couple of years - I read this from the local library, but it's definitely one I'm going to want to acquire for my own collection. This is a `keeper'.

I picked this book up in a used bookstore based on two things: 1) on the cover is a quote by Michael Ondaatje saying "A deeply moving, powerful, and unforgettable book." and 2) I flipped through several pages and enjoyed McCabe's writing style. I should also say that I'm a bit of a fan of Ondaatje's writing style, but I don't fall all over the man's writing. (I read "In the Skin of a Lion" and found that book to be somewhat plotless and pointless, but still he is a very good wordsmith.) The story in Death and Nightingales is a little bit difficult to get into if you don't know any background to the Irish conflict between Protestants and Catholics. That's the undercurrent in this novel. It's also a "forced" read because, as one reviewer relates, there's not much of a plot to go on here. As you read you have to keep telling yourself to read. But I can accept that, because many late 20th century novelists tend to write this way. With the type of writer that McCabe is, you're reading his novel for his wordsmiting as much as for his storytelling abilities. What I found disappointing was that as I read I was becoming less and less enamored with his wordsmithing. There would be sentences and images I could really hang on to, but then his language would slip and drop completely flat, almost as if he'd left things unpolished, or untouched. It seemed as if, in spots, he became tired of his own work. That's how I read it, at least. And that's a very dangerous space for a novelist to be in. Also, I found McCabe's point of view switches to first person very forced and very clumsy. The pace did pick up in the last quarter of the book, though, and I found myself reading more for the story than for his turns of phrase or writing style. (Whereas, in the work of Styron or Faulkner, you *really* are reading and *enjoying* the language on the page.) All in all, 3 stars: not great (*certainly* not one of the best novels of the 20th century--good grief--as one reviewer suggests), not horrible, either.

I got this book because I had never read a novel written from a native Irishman's point of view. I was looking forward to learning new slang and getting a feel of rural Irish culture in the 19th century. The story was okay, but it wasn't very memorable. I read it a couple of months ago and I don't even remember how it ends, which is pretty rare for me.

i bought this book after reading several reviews praising it to the heavens and was extremely dissapointed after i read it. i found this a tedious book to read, the plot didn't seem to really go anywhere and the characters were never developed properly. the only reason to read this book would be for the descriptive language it uses, but the "plot" of the book detracts from even this. don't waste your money.