"A fabulous book - makes history real enough to smell and so powerful in its emotional impact that I had to remind myself to breathe. This is the past, but made almost frighteningly present."
- Kate Grenville
"Behrens writes about the famine and its consequences as if he were an eyewitness. 'The Law of Dreams' is absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written. . . . His writing is seamless, and often gorgeous. He is adroit at creating indelible characters in a few deft strokes. . . . What Behrens knows, what he teaches us again in this masterly novel, is that the past was indeed wondrous, and terrible and strange, but that it was a very real place." — The New York Times Book Review
Winner of The Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (Canada's Top Literary Prize)
"Any novelist must write with a sense of urgency, an ability to convince us that he understands his characters and knows what they are going through. This is especially true, I think, when dealing with a historical incident that has been largely forgotten or even become something of a punch line, as the famine has.
The Law of Dreams is a superb novel, and Behrens does a great job of putting one right in the midst of the horror that the famine actually was."
— Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley & Dreamland
"The Law of Dreams rings with a strange, hard poetry, a mingling of Behrens's rich narrative voice and scraps of startling wisdom that seem to emanate directly from Fergus's mind. Here he is in Liverpool, outside a pub, starving and barefoot, as always: 'Trying to make up his mind, he hopped restlessly from one foot to another, one coin in each fist. The door opened and [a] pack of thick-shouldered men came out, and he caught a tantalizing whiff of the smoky, meaty atmosphere within. You could stand outside, bootless and chewing fear like a baby; or take the bold plunge. Offer a coin...
Peter Behrens, a screenwriter and author of the story collection
Night Driving, characterizes a boy surviving the Great Famine as a modern-day Odysseus (or Ishmael), driven by fate and history. Critics praised Behrens's meticulous research; poetic, visceral prose; and period dialogue, and many commented that Fergus's Atlantic crossing was one of the most exciting journeys they had experienced secondhand. Others, however, felt that the novel was too cinematic and melodramatic, and opinions differed on the strength of the protagonist. Either his philosophizing possessed great depth or it "read like metaphysical stage directions" (
San Francisco Chronicle). Yet in its ruminations on life, death, and the lasting human spirit,
The Law of Dreams successfully "illuminates one of the 19th century's greatest tragedies and the massive migration it launched" (
Washington Post).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Behrens's impressive, swiftly paced saga tracks the life of an Irish boy after his family dies during the Great Potato Famine. Fifteen-year-old Fergus O'Brien takes up with a group of child bandits in Limerick, then makes his way to North Wales, where he works as a "tip boy" (a dangerous job that involves emptying carts of earth being cleared for the railroads). By the time he sets sail for Canada, hoping to make a living as a horse dealer, it is hard to believe that only a year has passed, such is the variety of his experience. In scope and subject, Behrens's work recalls Liam O'Flaherty's epic novel "Famine"; both writers have a stark style admirably suited to conveying the horrors of starvation and despair. But Behrens's language also has a visceral rhythm, and his similes meld the humble with the lyrical: whales rise "hissing" in a river, light "stutters" off an iron roof.
Copyright © 2006
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From The Washington Post
The Law of Dreams is a fearsome story of such prolonged agony and unquenchable spirit that you can't escape till the final page abandons you to astonished silence. Peter Behrens, a screenwriter who lives in Maine, based this debut novel on his family's history in Ireland, but the private tragedy he describes was common to hundreds of thousands of people during the Great Famine of 1847, and the language he uses constantly soars above that calamity toward the mystery of human struggle.
His young hero, Fergus O'Brien, endures abuses and deprivations that would make a lesser man feral, but there's a native decency in him, a natural grace that renders his decision to survive all the more agonizing. He belongs to a tenant family that subsists for 10 months of every year on the potatoes they grow on a quarter-acre of mountainous land. It's a tough existence, but Fergus prides himself on caring for his mother and sisters, and there's pleasure in the success of his labor: "Potatoes were not made or cut, like the farmer's hay or corn," Behrens writes. "They were lifted, joyfully, the surprise of the world."
We meet Fergus just before a virulent mold spreads across Ireland, withering and blighting the country's crop. Throughout the novel, Behrens stays close to Fergus's experience and knowledge, but everything that Fergus witnesses resonates with the horrible facts of this period. About a third of the 8 million people in Ireland lived almost exclusively on potatoes before the blight struck. Farmers were completely helpless to stop it. Cruel economic policies in England quickly exacerbated the situation, and widespread poverty, starvation and disease followed. Those who survived (and many who were soon to die) took to the roads, desperate for food.
That's the general history most of us know, but in this extraordinary novel Behrens conveys a kind of visceral comprehension of the events that only one who survived them could surpass. Ten weeks into the famine, Fergus's stubborn father still refuses to take his family away, even as their landlord rides around the mountain knocking down shacks and sending families off with a little money. In the first of many unforgettable scenes, Fergus's siblings and parents are finally burned alive in their beds, too weak with hunger even to object. Only Fergus survives, and, in what's considered a great act of charity, he's deposited in a workhouse, where he's immediately stripped, shaved and sprayed with acid to kill the lice. "Paupers lay about the yard," Behrens writes, "soft as gutted trout."
Fergus soon realizes that the workhouse is a trap where he'll either be starved to death or carried off by fever. Over and over, he confronts the frightening powerlessness of his position, but it never loses its ability to shock him -- or us: "Awareness pierces the chest like a spike being driven in. The world doesn't belong to you. Perhaps you belong to the world, but that's another matter." Fergus reaches out everywhere for friendship and love; he's a kind, loyal young man, but he's doomed to outlive his companions, constantly forced to pull pennies from the pockets of freshly dead friends who won't need them anymore. "You had to stay alive," Behrens writes, "every instinct told you. Stay in your life as long as you can. If only to see what would happen. Every breath told you to keep breathing."
When he manages to break out of the workhouse, his ordeal continues: He joins a gang of young thieves, he lives in a whorehouse, and he works on the rails spreading across Ireland almost as fast as the potato blight. All this time, he dreams of a place called America, about which he knows absolutely nothing. Still, a vague sense of its possibility eventually draws him across the Atlantic in one of the novel's most arduous sections.
The Law of Dreams rings with a strange, hard poetry, a mingling of Behrens's rich narrative voice and scraps of startling wisdom that seem to emanate directly from Fergus's mind. Here he is in Liverpool, outside a pub, starving and barefoot, as always:
"Trying to make up his mind, he hopped restlessly from one foot to another, one coin in each fist. The door opened and [a] pack of thick-shouldered men came out, and he caught a tantalizing whiff of the smoky, meaty atmosphere within.
"You could stand outside, bootless and chewing fear like a baby; or take the bold plunge. Offer a coin for a feed and see if they would take it.
"The world, latent; a gun loaded with chance and mistakes."
In the life of this determined young man, Behrens illuminates one of the 19th century's greatest tragedies and the massive migration it launched. A novel that animates the past this vibrantly should make volumes of mere history blush. "Life burns hot," Fergus thinks, and so do these pages.
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Peter Behrens' short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Saturday Night, and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Night Driving (Macmillan). Behrens was a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and held a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inspired by his own family history, Behrens has fashioned a paean to the strength of the human spirit that illuminates a piece of history. Fergus O'Brien is still in his teens in 1846 when blight strikes his potatoes and typhus his family, whose cabin is set aflame with his younger sisters dead and his parents lying ill inside. Famine, fever, and deprivation are his constant companions, from the workhouse to which he is sent, through his time with an outlaw band, an attack on the farm on which his father was a tenant, respite in a Liverpool bordello, and work in Wales, where he takes a fancy to his shanty-owner's "railroad wife," red-haired Molly, with whom he sets sail for the New World. The law of dreams is to keep moving, and that's what Fergus does, taking advantage of opportunities even as he is haunted by dreams and hurt by betrayal. Behrens tells this story in spare prose that distills ideas to their essence, making this absorbing historical fiction. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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