The Last Storyteller: A Novel of Ireland - Hardcover

Delaney, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400067855 ISBN 13: 9781400067855

Publisher: Random House, 2012

Synopsis

Frank Delaney, New York Times bestselling author of Ireland, Shannon, Tipperary, Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show, and The Matchmaker of Kenmare, is the unparalleled master of Irish historical fiction, bringing Ireland to life with exceptional warmth, wisdom, and wit. Now, in The Last Storyteller, Delaney weaves an absorbing tale of lasting love, dangerous risk, and the healing power of redemption.
 
“Every legend and all mythologies exist to teach us how to run our days. In kind fashion. A loving way. But there’s no story, no matter how ancient, as important as one’s own. So if we’re to live good lives, we have to tell ourselves our own story. In a good way.” So says James Clare, Ben MacCarthy’s beloved mentor, and it is this fateful advice that will guide Ben through the tumultuous events of Ireland in 1956.
 
The national mood is downtrodden; poverty, corruption, and a fledgling armed rebellion rattle the countryside, and although Ben wants no part of the upstart insurrection along the northern border, he unknowingly falls in with an IRA sympathizer and is compromised into running guns. Yet despite his perilous circumstances, all he can think about is finding his former wife and true love, the actress Venetia Kelly.
 
Parted forcibly from Ben years ago, Venetia has returned to Ireland with her new husband, a brutal man and coarse but popular stage performer by the name of Gentleman Jack. Determined not to lose Venetia again, Ben calls upon every bit of his love, courage, and newfound gun-running connections to get her back. And as Ben fights to recapture his halcyon days with Venetia, he must finally reconcile his violent and flawed past with his hopes for a bright and loving future.
 
Brimming with fascinating Irish history, daring intrigue, and the drama of legendary love, The Last Storyteller is an unforgettable novel as richly textured and inspiring as Ireland itself.

About this title

About the Author:

Frank Delaney is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Ireland, as well as The Matchmaker of Kenmare, Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show, Tipperary, Shannon, and Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea. A former judge for the Man Booker Prize, Delaney enjoyed a prominent career in BBC broadcasting before becoming a full-time writer. Born in Tipperary, Ireland, he now lives in New York City and Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

He comes back to my mind when I smell wood smoke. We had a clear and crisp October that year, and a simple white plume of smoke rose through the trees from his fairy-tale chimney. The long, quiet lane ended at his gate. My nose wrinkled as I climbed out of the car. Applewood? Not sweet enough. Beech? Possibly, from the old mansion demesne across the road. Could it be elm? Twenty years later it would be, as the elms died everywhere.

A white fence protected his small yard and its long rectangles of grass. He had a yellow garden bench and rosebushes, pruned to austerity. Around the side of the house I counted one, two, three fruit trees. If, on a calendar, a tourist brochure, or a postcard, you saw such a scene, with the golden roof of thatched and smocked straw, a pleased smile would cross your mind.

Not a sound to be heard, not a dog nor a bird. My breathing went short and shallow, and I swallowed, trying to manage my anticipation. Somebody had polished the door knocker so brilliantly that my fingers smudged the gleaming brass.

They said that he was eighty. Maybe he was, but when he opened the door our eyes came exactly level, and I was six feet three and a half inches. He shook hands as though closing a deal, and I was so thrilled to meet him at long last that my mouth turned dry as paper.

“Do you know anything about houses like this?” he asked as he led me into the wide old kitchen.

I knew everything about the house, I knew everything about him—but I wanted to hear it in his words, his voice.

“It feels nicely old,” I ventured.

He laughed. “Hah! ‘Nicely old’—I’ll borrow that.” Then, with some care, he turned to survey me, inclined his head a little, and smiled at me as though I were his beloved son. “I’m very pleased to meet you at last.”

I said, “I’m more than pleased to meet you, sir.”

He waved a hand, taking in the wide fireplace, the rafters, the room.

“This was what they called a ‘strong farmer’s’ house. Now with ‘all the modern conveniences,’ as they say. I suppose you know what a strong farmer was?”

“Wasn’t it somebody who supported his family from what he produced on his farm?”

“The very man,” he said.

He showed me the walls—two feet thick: “They keep in the heat for the winter, and they keep out the heat of the summer—those boys knew how to build. And look, I can put wide things on the windowsills.” He lifted a great bowl of jade, glinting with dragons. “Feel the weight of that. I carried it all the way back from Ceylon in 1936.”

Looking up, he stretched an arm and patted a beam.

“Did you know that people used to hide weapons in their thatch?” He had a habit of nodding when he made a statement, as though agreeing with himself.

Such endearing pride: he drew my attention to everything—the floor of huge flagstones, shaped by a local stonemason; the handmade chairs from a neighboring carpenter, who had also built the long table dominating the middle of the room. He rubbed it with his hand. “In the original they’d have used a timber called white deal. I had to settle for pine.”

“When did you buy the place?” I asked.

“Twenty-eight years, two months, and four days ago. When I finally came in off the road.” He surveyed the walls. “There was only the shell here. It was burned out by the redcoats in 1848—there was that bit of a rebellion that year, and evictions everywhere. When I bought it you could still see the black streaks at the top of the walls where they’d burned out the straw on the roof.”

He gave me the tour—but let me cut this short and give you the essential fact. This man, regarded (and jealously guarded) by the Folklore Commission as the most powerful remaining storyteller in the country, and possibly in the world, had restored fully an old farmhouse of considerable proportions. The conservationists, while allowing for the modern plumbing and electricity, had applauded him. “An elegant and authentic reconstruction,” they’d said, “solid, proud, and wholeheartedly traditional.” And that’s what I mean by “the essential fact”: the house was the man, and the man was the house.

He stood with his back to the fire. “So I’m to be yours now, am I?” he said. “How’s James doing?”

“I believe he’s holding on.”

Mixed feelings were always going to leak into this visit. For years, my superior, my mentor, otherwise so good to me, had kept this man for himself, and I had not been allowed to visit him, write to him, have anything to do with him. But now my mentor had bequeathed him to me because he himself, the inimitable James Clare, lay silent and still in Dublin, his lungs closing down day by day to emphysema. That morning I had made a note in my journal: I think that James will die soon.

“He won’t hold on long,” said Mr. O’Neill—full name, John Jacob Farrell O’Neill. “What color do you think Death’s face will be when it comes for James?”

“Gray,” I said, without thinking, “It’ll be gray.” I knew that color. From the war.

“That’s what I think, too.” He nodded, and turned his head around to look into the fire. When he turned back he said, “Then you’ll be ready.”

My mind asked, Ready for what?

Even though I didn’t speak the question, he answered it.

“Ready for everything.”

He couldn’t have known what “everything” would come to mean—or could he?

2

I wasn’t ready for anything—and in particular, not for the events of the next day, when I halted for a pub sandwich in the little town of Urlingford.

It was the siesta time, and raining. Nothing should have been happening, and nothing was. Using no energy, I eavesdropped on the silence around me, punctuated by snatches of idle conversation.

“They say she will.” This came out of the blue from an old coot at the bar, his nose hooked as Punch’s.

“I bet she won’t,” said his drinking companion.

“She told Midge Corcoran,” said the barman, “that all he wants to do is look at her.”

“God, then he’s paying dear for that,” said Punch, whose pal had wide-open nostrils like little gun barrels.

The pal said, “There’s fifty-two years between them.”

To which Ted, the fat and fatuous barman, said, “One for every week of the year.”

I knew these people well—not as individuals, but as a culture. Filthy old cords, worse boots, scant hygiene, no (you can bet on it) underwear. Every day of the week I saw men like them. Sitting at some bar everywhere, gossiping like knitters, stitching and bitching. Doing no work because there was no work, rarely a job that one could call a decent hire. Just sitting there talking. Talking, talking, talking. Or being silent. Silent in the hatred of their lives was what I’d always figured, until I realized that their emotions stood at zero. Their needles flickered only for sport or gossip.

In their faces I could see the blue veins of perdition, lines on a map of the country. That’s why I listened but kept my distance: I didn’t want to be infected with their ruin or catch their low-rent banality. Shallow as a saucer, they had no value to me in terms of what I collected.

Yet they caused some affect. For no reason that I could identify, I felt my chest tighten, and I heard the question in my mind: What’s making you anxious?

Ted the barman had a smarm to him, aiming to please everyone. In the past, before I’d mellowed down, I’d have needled him, picked a fight. The frosted glass panel beside me hadn’t been cleaned in a generation.

Most Irish pubs had a snug, a little room shuttered from the world, open only to the barman, where, typically, ladies were supposed to do their drinking because it was too indelicate for them to be seen in the public bar. Thus, I often found the snug a useful place to sit and listen.

My anxiety climbed. I fought a pricking of my thumbs and turned my ears inward. A frigid Saturday in late 1956, in my struggling, depressed native land.

Silence fell. We had a cough or two, a clink from a glass, a match being struck to light a cigarette. The rain no longer lashed the window. Weak sunlight spread a mild and yellow fire on the roofs of the houses across the street. With a clang of a latch rudely lifted, the pub’s front door burst open. Jimmy Bermingham flew in, landed, and came straight toward me. Thus began the most dreadful part of my life.

3

Once upon a time, and it was a long time ago, when boys were boys, and girls were girls, and bears combed the fur on their coats, and the soldiers of the north carried spears of ice, and giant frogs who spoke in rhymes ruled our hemisphere, there lived a man who had a love as noble as the mountains, and as deep as the deep blue sea.

The story John Jacob Farrell O’Neill told me on that night of my first heady visit to him took so long that we didn’t part until three o’clock in the morning. With the comfort of the chair by the fireplace, and the logs he kept heaping on the broad orange flames, I felt so safe.

“What’s that you’re burning?” I asked.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “cherry. For the aroma. I had an old cherry tree out the back—I tried for years to save it, but it wanted to go. And do you know what? When they took it to the sawmill they found a musket ball in the heart of the wood.”

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About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1400067855
• ISBN 13: 9781400067855
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400