Bad Potatoes - "Law of Dreams"

I express or have enacted my Irish heritage in the following ways: 1) I read Angela’s Ashes in high school, 2) my favorite meal consists of Harp, medium-rare steak, mashed potatoes, bread, following by an Irish coffee and dessert, 3) I perpetually keep a bottle of Jameson on my desk - a balm on those late nights writing papers. So when my friend gave me a pre-publication (“Advanced Reader’s Edition”) version of a novel his friend obtained at a book publisher fair, I obliged.

I felt like a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, sifting through the pages with a curious, scrupulous eye. I kept several deft comparisons to similar novels in my pocket along with witty cultural references or jokes about the Irish that The Law of Dreams would confirm or disavow. Maybe I would boost the novel’s sales with my grand review.

Peter Behrens résumé piqued my interest. After producing a collection of short stories entitled Night Driving in 1987, he has since worked primarily as a screenwriter for Hollywood. This knowledge helped me detect the stench of “novel-written-to-have-movie-made-starring-Scarlett-Johansson.” Because, you know, she’s Irish and needs to reboot her career.

The novel sets out ambitiously and at first delivers but then dissolves into a cyclical mess the last 250 pages (out of nearly 400). The prologue takes a promising look at a pressured farmer/landlord in mid 19th-century Ireland. With the beginning of the famine and typhus fever spreading, he is forced to evict his poor tenants.

“That evening, inspecting his field of ripening wheat, plucking a stalk and pressing the grains out onto his palm, he tastes one on his tongue. Cracks it between his teeth.
Then opens his hand.
Light and dry the pale grains are, wholly ripe, practically weightless.
In a second, the casual wind has swept them away.”

A beautiful image, capturing the blight perfectly. This book promises a country’s beauty and agony, trust and betrayal, redemption, resourcefulness, and a plaintive gaze at evanescence. Our protagonist Fergus O’Brien will fall in love, work through his struggles, and eventually live in happiness or die a hero. He is my ancestor as well as Behrens’.

Wrong. While his struggles are laid out powerfully in the first section of the novel, his journey becomes a repetitive pornographic and disinterested wandering. Yet several Amazon reviewers draw comparisons to Joyce’s Daedalus! His first, unrequited love (Phoebe, the farmer’s daughter) and his second, passionate lover (Luke) are the only two women we care about. Their relationships are poignant and tragic. But then the tone of the story comes through: misogynistic and bitter, Fergus runs into some lamentful women, and eventually arrives at the heels of another intemperate female: America. The language is chauvinistic, especially during the sex scenes (more than the reader could wish for!) and the female characters are portrayed poorly. Fergus’ continuous wet dream leaves the reader unsatisfied.

But how does Fergus’ primary pursuit (perhaps secondary) of the American dream pan out? Can Behrens pull off an overdone conflict? For the most part, it works. The metaphor of salmon in the river – sometimes literally or figuratively caught by Fergus and sometimes himself being caught – is intriguing. The novel loses a beautiful lyrical quality partway through. We go from wheat in the fields and Irish landscape to horses. A blue Mr. Ed becomes man’s best friend.

In the end: a well-intentioned but unsatisfying affair. The idea of researching his family history and creating a story about his great-great-grandfather’s journey to Canada is fantastic. The song of himself – the struggle, hunger, love, violence, racism – all great, but it just doesn’t play a melody we haven’t heard.