Pat O'Shea (1) (1931–2007)

Lots to like in this tale of brother and younger sister in rural Ireland, caught up in the conflict between the Dagda (the good God) and the triple goddess, the Morrigan. She wants to regain her full power over death and war, by retrieving a lost pebble, splashed long ago with a drop of her blood, and absorb the poisonous power of a serpent, Oc Glas. The story starts when Pidge is given the writings of (Saint) Patrick in a bookshop and two aspects of the Morrigan come after him, and eventually turns into a quest to find the stone, on which he and his sister Bridget, are trailed by the Morrigan's Hounds, and meet a lot of interesting characters on the way, many of them insects and other animals, or else famous figures from Irish mythology.


I liked the portrayal of the insects and spiders and the elements of comedy around those, though the brogue used by the frogs is a bit tricky to make out at times. I also loved Cooroo, the fox who joined them about halfway through the quest and helped them thwart their pursuers. However, the book does drag in places, with some of the incidents coming across as padding, and there is rather an obsession with the details of what everyone eats. The book is well written, with vivid descriptions of nature, and some of the characters are well developed, though I found quite a lot of the adults rather unsatisfactory.

The main aspect which falls down for me is the lack of tension: for example, the Morrigan imprisons the children at one point, but you know they will soon escape because she needs to follow them to the pebble. Also, due to magical rules, the Hounds can only trail the children rather than hunt them, as long as the children don't run in their sight. It does pick up towards the end, with a terrible battle and the children in real danger from a giant who doesn't work for the Morrigan, but the status quo is soon reinstated and they are off again, trying to take the pebble to where Oc Glas is imprisoned, to destroy it with the blood on the pebble.

I also don't like the ending where a) despite the carnage of the battle, everyone comes to say goodbye, so somehow none of them actually died, and b) Pidge and Brigit are made to forget their adventures. This means that when Cooroo keeps turning up, they are puzzled by the tameness of this fox that will even eat out of their hands, and of course, being back in the real world rather than Tir na Og, where the quest happened, can no longer understand what he might be trying to communicate. This is almost the "it was all a dream" ending of John Masefield's Box of Delights, which I totally rejected as a child, having loved the book, so l'm sure I would've found the ending of Hounds just as much of a letdown if I had read this book as a child.… (more)

There are many books I read as a child that I've thought to pass on to my own children, but only rarely have I discovered the same sort of books as an adult. The Hounds of the Morrigan absolutely fits into this category. It's longer than many of those favorite childhood books, but it contains just the right amounts of adventure, humor, and sweetness. And if it proves too long for the children in my life to read themselves, I think it'd be tremendous fun to read aloud. If you enjoy fond memories of Lloyd Alexander, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, or C.S. Lewis, give Pat O'Shea a read.… (more)

My new favourite book.

Well, almost. There's one other ([Peace is Every Step] by [[Thich Nhat Hanh]]) that is never likely to be displaced. But it is Buddhist mindfulness teachings and this is fantastic fiction, so they aren't really in competition.

So why do I like this book so much? Well, to begin with, there's the writing. O'Shea is a deft and able writer, with that bit extra that makes her prose yet more vivid. I open the book to grab a random example and get this, "In a moment, there was the creaking of wings in the sky and everyone looked up at a string of wild geese flying in a broad V in from the lake and across the sky above them."

This is not the most poetic of her sentences, but I like it because of that one word. "Creaking." Not flapping--these wings are too vast to flap, these birds so large they need the stiffness of long feathers. And there are so many of them above that even though they aren't calling, everyone hears them as they approach. This is one of the strengths of her writing. Nearly every moment of it takes place in the outdoors, and always there is the clear sense that the author knows intimately the domain that she describes.

I am a great fan of Irish mythology. Rarely (if ever) have I read a novel written by someone who knows and understands Irish myth. O'Shea does. She also knows and values the modern Irish world, and she knits the two together playfully, beautifully, and frighteningly.

The book is a quest novel, and after several decades of quest novels I've grown tired of them. Much as I enjoyed each meeting in the book, the characters, the actions, the settings and so much more, I thought I might get tired of them--it is 465 pages. But I didn't. In fact, the gradual unfolding of the different meetings and how they changed the children's trajectory through both this and the Other world began to slowly shift my plot-focussed reading style to one where I was free to simply engage with what was happening before me in each chapter and fully appreciate it. I don't know how long it took me--quite a while!--to realise that this was a much preferable type of quest for me. It wasn't obsessed with great clashes and thudding hearts (though there was clashing and thudding in places).

Funnily enough, the book that comes to mind when I look back at The Hounds of the Morrigan, which I finished reading a month ago, is [Middlemarch] by [[George Eliot]]. Of course, they are nothing like each other. But there are certain echoes. The enjoyment I took in the wordcraft, pausing now and then to savour a line or an image. The realisation that the plot was not so terribly important, that much more relevant was the time spent with the characters in their particular worlds. The sense that not one moment of this book was padding, despite their both being on the long side. And the sense that I had learned something in reading them. Perhaps the authors didn't intend that I learn anything, or at least not what I did--no one was preaching to me, or if they were they were awfully subtle. But in spending time with them my perspective on reading was in some way changed.… (more)