Peter Behrens
reading from The Law of Dreams
Friday, 23 March, 7 pm
The Grand Hall, Scotiabank Building, 40 Charlotte St.
The recipient of a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Peter Behrens was born in Montreal and lives in Maine. A fiction writer, essayist, and screen writer, Behrens has published a collection of short stories, Night Driving, and written four feature screenplays. His short stories and essays appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Night, and The National Post; his fiction is anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, his non-fiction in Best Canadian Essays. The Law of Dreams is his first novel.
Fergus O’Brien, his parents and sisters – subtenants of Farmer Carmichael – have lived their entire lives on the “shoulder bog” of Cappaghabaun Mountain on Carmichael’s farm. A prosperous farmer on the estate of an absentee landlord, Carmichael considers that part of his farm “Good for nothing but mountain men and their potatoes.” The Irish-speaking mountain people are allotted a small patch for potatoes, which, along with what they can hunt, is their principal sustenance. It is, however, 1846, and the foul-smelling potato blight is ravaging the fields. Carmichael is told to eject the mountain people, tumble their cabins, and use the land for grazing livestock. In the harrowing opening scenes of Behrens’ novel, Fergus’ family, already suffering from the Black Plague, resist evacuation, refuse the going-away shee of two guineas. Only Fergus survives, and survival means the workhouse – “Paupers lay about the yard, soft as gutted trout.” Ill and starving, he quickly escapes the workhouse, joining the ribbonmen, a gang of thieves, mostly children, who live in the warren of trenches cut in the bog by generations of peat collectors. Fergus’ strategy – and therefore the structure of the novel – follows the law of dreams, keep moving. Impelled by that law, and forcing himself to forget all that he’s lost, Fergus often experiences “a gauze-over-all feeling” as he does the hard, sometimes cruel, things necessary for survival. “Stay in your life as long as you can,” he says to himself taking a fistful of coppers from the pocket of his dying mate. In Behrens’ episodic and beautifully rendered novel, Fergus travels far from home. Danger is constant. If Fergus is, of necessity, sharp-witted and wily, he is also tender and sensual: “her whole shape – sleeping, disordered, sexual – was plangent in his mind.” That’s Molly, who accompanies him a way, but Fergus comes to recognize, “Inside your head you’re alone. Nothing’s real but your own brain talk.”
“It’s hard to believe that this book is Peter Behrens’s first novel. With the sparest of language, the author depicts the internal struggles of a good-hearted young man in the midst of the unthinkable; a man who learns he must suppress terrible memories in order to move forward; a man who, despite all his troubles, still believes in the possibility of a full and passionate life. A moving achievement.”
---Historical Novels Review