“What the heck have I just read?” This is hardly my usual reaction to a book, but it doesn’t seem out of place for Oisín Fagan’s debut novel. Nominally, “Nobber” is a historical novel set in Ireland during the Great Plague of 1348. That said, the landscape, ravaged by the Black Death and marauding Gaels, gives the book that timeless, apocalyptic feel typical of dystopian fiction. At the start of the novel, we meet one Osprey de Flunkl who, taking advantage of the panic induced by the advancing sickness, sets out to appropriate swathes of land through fraudulent contractual transactions. He is accompanied in his dubious quest by the strong but surprisingly sensitive Harold, the intellectual William of Roscrea, interpreter of the Gaelic tongue, and Saint John of Barrow, a sort of Holy Fool, although, admittedly, less holy than fool.

On a hot Irish summer’s morning this ragtag band makes its way to the small town of Nobber. Flunkl et al however are hardly the only people who have set their sights on the settlement. Following the murder of the mayor and his family, another “outsider” – a certain Ambrosio known affectionately as “Big Cat” by his common law wife - has already usurped leadership of the town with the help of Colca, a local farrier with a propensity for unnatural congress with goats, geese and horses. Bands of Gaels are also threatening to attack the town. These characters converge on Nobber and it is no spoiler to reveal that this will not end well.

How best to describe this novel? Imagine watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail whilst under the effects of some devilish drug. The funny passages seem funnier, the raunchy passages seem raunchier, and the darker parts of the novel seem as black as hell. The high-faluting mock-archaic dialogue, particularly the exchanges between De Flunkl and his men, can be side-splitting. Other scenes are nothing short of revolting. Then suddenly one comes across poetical passages which read like a ray of sunshine through a rain-cloud. As the novel progresses, it becomes more nightmarish. Someone nails several crows to a cruciform structure – some sort of dire warning perhaps? A desperate young mother loses her wits watching her baby die of hunger and her husband die of drink. An old man who has lost his family to the plague digs his own grave and buries himself alive with the help of travelling salesman Monsieur Hacquelebacq. And every so often gangs of Gaels appear and unleash mayhem and peltings of live rats.

Fagan has allegedly stated that he has not included an acknowledgments section, because he does not want to associate people he loves with an “evil book” such as Nobber. Such statements make me suspect a marketing ploy, an attempt to attract attention to the book by naming it as the next “cursed” read. At the same time, Fagan does have a point. With the dead literally piling up, the novel becomes ever more nihilistic. One starts to wonder whether there is any “message” behind all the deaths and violence portrayed, whether there is any “meaning” to the increasingly surreal vignettes. The real punch to the guts comes when the reader realizes that the whole point of the novel is that there’s no point at all.

At the end, the townspeople try to find a scapegoat to assume responsibility for all their suffering. They know that they’re wrong, but blaming somebody for the evil which has assailed Nobber helps to impose logic and meaning onto a tragedy which seems senseless. Ultimately, the questions which the novel raises relate to the perennial mysteries of suffering and evil. Why has the disease claimed so many lives, including so many innocent ones? Why have some of the more evil characters been spared? Nobber refuses to venture a reply to these troubling queries and ultimately offers no respite to the doom and gloom.

3.5*

Head to https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/08/nobber-by-oisin-fagan.html for an illustrated version of the review, together with a playlist which includes folk metal and a toe-tapping medieval drinking song. ( )

“What the heck have I just read?” This is hardly my usual reaction to a book, but it doesn’t seem out of place for Oisín Fagan’s debut novel. Nominally, “Nobber” is a historical novel set in Ireland during the Great Plague of 1348. That said, the landscape, ravaged by the Black Death and marauding Gaels, gives the book that timeless, apocalyptic feel typical of dystopian fiction. At the start of the novel, we meet one Osprey de Flunkl who, taking advantage of the panic induced by the advancing sickness, sets out to appropriate swathes of land through fraudulent contractual transactions. He is accompanied in his dubious quest by the strong but surprisingly sensitive Harold, the intellectual William of Roscrea, interpreter of the Gaelic tongue, and Saint John of Barrow, a sort of Holy Fool, although, admittedly, less holy than fool.

On a hot Irish summer’s morning this ragtag band makes its way to the small town of Nobber. Flunkl et al however are hardly the only people who have set their sights on the settlement. Following the murder of the mayor and his family, another “outsider” – a certain Ambrosio known affectionately as “Big Cat” by his common law wife - has already usurped leadership of the town with the help of Colca, a local farrier with a propensity for unnatural congress with goats, geese and horses. Bands of Gaels are also threatening to attack the town. These characters converge on Nobber and it is no spoiler to reveal that this will not end well.

How best to describe this novel? Imagine watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail whilst under the effects of some devilish drug. The funny passages seem funnier, the raunchy passages seem raunchier, and the darker parts of the novel seem as black as hell. The high-faluting mock-archaic dialogue, particularly the exchanges between De Flunkl and his men, can be side-splitting. Other scenes are nothing short of revolting. Then suddenly one comes across poetical passages which read like a ray of sunshine through a rain-cloud. As the novel progresses, it becomes more nightmarish. Someone nails several crows to a cruciform structure – some sort of dire warning perhaps? A desperate young mother loses her wits watching her baby die of hunger and her husband die of drink. An old man who has lost his family to the plague digs his own grave and buries himself alive with the help of travelling salesman Monsieur Hacquelebacq. And every so often gangs of Gaels appear and unleash mayhem and peltings of live rats.

Fagan has allegedly stated that he has not included an acknowledgments section, because he does not want to associate people he loves with an “evil book” such as Nobber. Such statements make me suspect a marketing ploy, an attempt to attract attention to the book by naming it as the next “cursed” read. At the same time, Fagan does have a point. With the dead literally piling up, the novel becomes ever more nihilistic. One starts to wonder whether there is any “message” behind all the deaths and violence portrayed, whether there is any “meaning” to the increasingly surreal vignettes. The real punch to the guts comes when the reader realizes that the whole point of the novel is that there’s no point at all.

At the end, the townspeople try to find a scapegoat to assume responsibility for all their suffering. They know that they’re wrong, but blaming somebody for the evil which has assailed Nobber helps to impose logic and meaning onto a tragedy which seems senseless. Ultimately, the questions which the novel raises relate to the perennial mysteries of suffering and evil. Why has the disease claimed so many lives, including so many innocent ones? Why have some of the more evil characters been spared? Nobber refuses to venture a reply to these troubling queries and ultimately offers no respite to the doom and gloom.

3.5*

Head to https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/08/nobber-by-oisin-fagan.html for an illustrated version of the review, together with a playlist which includes folk metal and a toe-tapping medieval drinking song. ( )