The Black Snow by Paul Lynch
My rating: 5/5 cats
a book that would be best friends with Jude the Obscure.
from the synopsis:
In The Black Snow, Paul Lynch takes the pastoral novel and–with the calmest of hands—tears it apart.
i can’t really think of any way to better describe what i just read. whoever wrote that is a genius at distilling this book to its purest essence. it’s a pastoral novel the way thomas hardy wrote ’em – impassive nature serving as a backdrop to a human self-destructing. nature is permanent, people just passing through. and calmly, yes. a methodical dismemberment of comfort, stability and safety.
like a traditional pastoral, the beginning is very slow-moving. not that nothing happens – it opens with the byre-burning, cattle-and-farmhand-killing fire that sets the entire novel in motion, and it’s intense. but it has all the detail and description of a pastoral – all the sounds and scents and density of farm and bog and natural elements that places you directly in the action, immersed, ready to go. but you won’t go, not for a while. it’s a very slow build. not boring, necessarily, although some will find it so. like a fire, it licks and samples, but once it catches, it is unstoppable devastation.
barnabas kane (an ominously biblical name for sure) returns to donegal in 1945, after having emigrated to america and spent years working construction in new york, untethered on those narrow beams high above the city. he returns with a wife, eskra, and the money he made abroad to establish a farm with several fields, cattle, and an apiary for his wife. they have a teenaged son named billy, and despite the locals viewing them as outsiders with the taint of “foreignness” about them, they are doing well and making a life for themselves in perfect bucolic bliss. there is a war on, but they are so removed from it in their rural bliss, their only connection to it is in the rations and the occasionally-heard plane flying above.
If it wasn’t for hearin them planes and the rationing sometimes I often think what’s going on in Europe is made up. The Emergency some big yarn we’re being spun to explain why nothin gets done in this country. Bunch of useless bastards in Dublin. The newspaper says the entire world is being reshaped but here in this place you wouldn’t know nothing of it.
the eye of the rest of europe’s hurricane.
but then their byre burns down under mysterious circumstances, killing all the cattle, along with their farmhand and friend matthew peoples. barnabas also entered the burning byre after matthew, trying to save the cattle, but was pulled out, the only surviving thing in all the ash.
but survival isn’t a triumph. following the fire, suspicion is cast towards barnabas in his perceived role in matthew’s death, and he finds little assistance in rebuilding; a turning away that intensifies the isolation of already-isolated characters. he had canceled the insurance on the byre, needing the money for other things, and is turned away both by the bank and from neighbors when he goes looking for assistance. he’s not a kind man, and there’s a bitter irony in his situation, unnoticed by barnabas, who had shooed some tinkers off his land after the fire when they were picking through the remains for anything they could use. so – not a kind man, but a tough one, and he reasons that if no one will help him, he will help himself, and he begins rebuilding on his own. his methods of doing so further anger the community, as they disrespect local traditions and history, but he brushes off their cautions and accusations as superstitious nonsense.
and then things go very badly very quickly.
poor long-suffering eskra tries to give comfort, but is frustrated by barnabas’ stubborn refusal to sell off any of their land, and his continued bitterness towards his neighbors.
You thought everything could be good for ever. That you were made now, Mr Big Shoes. That all the work was done. In your mind nobody dies and nobody grows old and there is no sign of winter. What in your stupidity have you done to us?
as barnabas descends into drink and fits of rage and billy skulks around with his own secrets, their situation deteriorates as they are beset by one horrific trial after another.
it’s about hubris and pride and misunderstandings and guilt and all the tiny bits chipping away that will eventually causes the avalanche. and it’s full of killer imagery, like The shriek of her eyes.
it’s basically Jude the Obscure. an ambitious man finds himself battered by life because of a foolish mistake, and from that point on, he can find no comfort. not in family, nor work, nor drink, not in the kindness of strangers nor the bounty of nature. the man can’t even get a hot cup of tea.
nothing but escalating misery splashed over the page, in beautiful and brutal prose.
and the epilogue… it’s the goddamn smiley faced exclamation point that kicks you in the teeth
there are still unanswered questions at the end, but in this case, it’s appropriate. the why and the how and the who isn’t important to the story, just the what – the chain of events that turns the cogs.
so paul lynch is two-for-two with me now. he managed to satisfy two completely different literary sweet spots of mine: in Red Sky in Morning he brought off a bloody grit lit tale full of violent revenge and with this one, he gave me that ever-snowballing relentless misery that i love. paul lynch, be my valentine!
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it started out slow, then it got good, then it built to an ending that channeled thomas hardy at his most brutal. holy hell, this was good.
