Law of Dreams

Peter Behrens' coming-to-America novel Law of Dreams follows a poor Irish farmboy through potato-famine era tragedy and misery.  It's a satisfying country byway of a tale with a gripping storyline.  A veritable stew of characters enter and exit the narrative, constantly encouraging the reader to question their motives, sincerity and fate.  A reader is never quite sure whether it's worth "rooting" for any character.

Fergus O'Brien is the yo ung protagonist who flees the farm his family has worked when the potatoes come up black.  Sent to a "workhouse", he doesn't last there long either.  He is called by the road, by a life incompatible with staying anywhere, and days of chasing and pursuing follow.  He pursues opportunity.  He chases food.  He seeks women, companionship.  He follows dreams.  But, mostly he flees stillness.  Like the quiet wake of a slowed ocean liner in a riverway, Fergus leaves a trail of corpses, suffering and greed.

"The world is strangers," Behrens writes as he introduces us to plenty.  He opens with  Carmichael, the farmer, with his comely daughter Phoebe.  Murty Larry befriends Fergus in the workhouse.  Luke leads an Oliver Twist street urchin army called the Bog Boys.  Mary runs Shea's Dragon, a Irish outpost with a lyrical sound and a lurid story.  Muck Muldoon fights man and horse - he's a bare-knuckled villain of a boss.  Molly is with Muck.  William Ormsby is the sage traveler with tales of Indians encountered, vanquished or married.  Behrens keeps them coming.  They appear in the road like oncoming carriages.  And by and large they pass, some leaving an indelible mark on Fergus, some like a deep bruise fester under the skin.

Law of Dreams is a journey well worth the cost of passage.  Reviewers consider it a well-researched voyage of historical fiction.  For me, it's an emotional snapshot, carefully written, of a doomed generation of Irish souls.

Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?  That there is a path to be followed, literally to the death?  Awareness is harsh but better than being unaware, never sensing a path.  Better than a life of stunts, false starts, dead ends.  Better than the irredeemable ugliness of the halfhearted.  Better than feeling there is no shape to anything - there is.  The world knows itself.