Irish writer Oisín Fagan’s debut story collection, Hostages, narrated in part by a talking bomb, announced a writer out to do whatever the hell he wants – an approach confirmed by his wild first novel, set in the middle ages and named after the plague-hit Irish town where it unfolds.
It starts by following a young aristocrat, Osprey de Flunkl, touring Ireland to profit from what’s known as “the sickness” by hoovering up property deeds of the largely illiterate dead. He’s joined by a bickering retinue including a hard-pressed translator, William of Roscrea, relied on for diplomacy with marauding Gaels equally keen to use the plague to recapture land the Normans forced them from.
Clashing registers drive a violent narrative. “I would do well to unhand you of your own sword, wrap these guts around your neck, string you up off a tree and lynch you, and then I would fill your dead mouth with many blooming flowers so something that was beautiful would issue once from your throat,” a local tells de Flunkl’s band. “Madame, good morning,” comes the reply. “I believe we have made a false beginning. May we inquire of you whereat the mayor dwells?”
But the mayor is long dead, murdered by restless townspeople whose travails Fagan intercuts with de Flunkl’s predatory errand. Dervorgilla, struggling to feed her baby, imagines how her nails could “slide so easily through the spongy skin” of his fontanelle, “stirring out the brains”. Glynis and Aethelburga argue over the tree sprouting in the middle of their one-room dwelling: “She probably expects him to take care of it; I know by where she leaves her silences, he thinks, sipping his jug of ale, looking out of the window.”
These people could be anybody, anywhere, save for the town’s growing ranks of flyblown corpses, the unexplained emergence in the neighbourhood of a giant, crow-coated crucifix, and Colca, a clothes-shy blacksmith whose outlandish proclivities are indulged by local toughs until he helps another greedy incomer, referred to as “the man”, enforce a curfew. “He fucks horses,” someone says during a revolt. “He fucks them and is always naked. Angela Fitzsimmons said she saw him officiating a mass over two goats in the woods. He had put little hats on them, and then married them, one to the other.”
While Fagan hardly ignores the comedy and shock value inherent in this material, he takes his cast seriously, too. Colca’s bestiality informs the book’s most uproarious moments as well as its saddest. A subplot involves a woman avenging her enslavement at his hands by disembowelling his beloved mare, Emota, whose intestines end up a plaything for a mushroom-addled child attached to de Flunkl’s band, but there’s also a powerful exchange between Colca and his long-suffering mother, Raghnailt, urging him to change as he reveals the suicidal despair his cravings have caused him.
You could see Nobber as an anarchic snapshot of a society in flux, a warning about the seductions of demagoguery, or even a send-up of disaster capitalism; in an Irish context, the scene of Colca’s mother’s anguish at her son’s eventual fate can’t help echoing the kangaroo-court justice dealt out by paramilitaries. Yet the novel never feels like a vessel for anything so simple as a message; a grisly, gross-out slice of medieval life and death, it’s vigorously, writhingly itself, spilling out of any box you put it in.
• Nobber by Oisín Fagan is published by JM Originals (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
