Bog Child
by Siobhán Dowd
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In 1981, the height of Ireland's "Troubles," eighteen-year-old Fergus is distracted from his upcoming A-level exams by his imprisoned brother's hunger strike, the stress of being a courier for Sinn Fein, and dreams of a murdered girl whose body he discovered in a bog.Tags
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I read this when I was in high school and it was absolutely heart-wrenching.
That is the one thing about Dowd's writing that you have to know. It will make you care about people and then break your heart. But I loved this book, Dowd writes a really masterful, very serious book without making difficult topics inaccessible. Her characters, felt, at the time, for me, very relatable and I really felt their struggle.
Her books have always been readable, despite how dark they are. In this book we follow a protagonist called Fergus whose brother is currently undergoing a hunger strike. There's other themes, sexuality, belonging, loneliness, the isolation of adolescence all captured in this book.
As a teenager, finding books for me to read was show more really hard because I didn't want to read about young dystopian women who were feminists but had no female friends, respected no female characters and spent their time in a love triangle. Or a young teenaged boy at school who desperately wanted X Girl to be his girlfriend but she couldn't be because he never communicated literally anything to her.
(No disrespect meant, but when I was young I was always hungering for books that weren't so easy as the current YA ones on the market. YA was just becoming a thing and it was really light and superficial at first.)
I wanted books that treated me with respect, and Dowd's did that. show less
That is the one thing about Dowd's writing that you have to know. It will make you care about people and then break your heart. But I loved this book, Dowd writes a really masterful, very serious book without making difficult topics inaccessible. Her characters, felt, at the time, for me, very relatable and I really felt their struggle.
Her books have always been readable, despite how dark they are. In this book we follow a protagonist called Fergus whose brother is currently undergoing a hunger strike. There's other themes, sexuality, belonging, loneliness, the isolation of adolescence all captured in this book.
As a teenager, finding books for me to read was show more really hard because I didn't want to read about young dystopian women who were feminists but had no female friends, respected no female characters and spent their time in a love triangle. Or a young teenaged boy at school who desperately wanted X Girl to be his girlfriend but she couldn't be because he never communicated literally anything to her.
(No disrespect meant, but when I was young I was always hungering for books that weren't so easy as the current YA ones on the market. YA was just becoming a thing and it was really light and superficial at first.)
I wanted books that treated me with respect, and Dowd's did that. show less
The late Siobhan Dowd was a beautiful writer of stories for young adults and this coming of age story is excellent. It is set in the border region of Northern Ireland in the 1980s, when political prisoners were on hunger strike. Not everyone was on the same side and there was dissension even among family members. The added twist of a body found in the bog where turf was being cut, was oddly out of place. The body was of a young woman who appeared to have been killed 2000 years previously. Presumably Dowd intended the old politics and the new would somehow be viewed as corresponding, equally brutal, but it just seemed like an odd mixture.
On a study break from preparing for his A-level exams, Fergus accompanies his uncle Tally on a peat-digging trip when they find the body in the bog. Police argue about which side of Ireland's north-south border the body is on and therefore who is responsible for handling this apparent murder case--but then the body is determined to be much older than any open murder case, possibly Iron Age. Fergus gets deeply involved in trying to unravel the mystery of who the girl was (as well as getting deeply involved with the archeologist's daughter, Cora), while trying desperately not to get involved with the other circumstances. The year is 1981, and Ireland is in the midst of the Troubles. Fergus's brother is on a hunger strike as a political show more prisoner, and his brother's friend coerces Fergus into ferrying small parcels back and forth across the border. This is a dramatic summer that will change everything.
The writing is sparsely beautiful; there is not a wasted word or plot thread here, and while the plot unfolds slowly, it is compelling and suspenseful from beginning to end. Major characters are richly developed; minor characters are developed enough to be distinct and realistic. There is a clear sense of the time and place, and this may be the only flaw in this excellent novel: the setting is so well-integrated into the plot that the reader would be helped by knowledge of Ireland's recent history, because many elements are not well-explained for those who have no background. Readers may puzzle over some of these details, but most can be understood in context, and any lingering questions can be addressed with minimal research. While the writing and some of the plot threads are accessible to bight middle-schoolers, this is a title that will do well in the hands of motivated high-school readers and adults. show less
The writing is sparsely beautiful; there is not a wasted word or plot thread here, and while the plot unfolds slowly, it is compelling and suspenseful from beginning to end. Major characters are richly developed; minor characters are developed enough to be distinct and realistic. There is a clear sense of the time and place, and this may be the only flaw in this excellent novel: the setting is so well-integrated into the plot that the reader would be helped by knowledge of Ireland's recent history, because many elements are not well-explained for those who have no background. Readers may puzzle over some of these details, but most can be understood in context, and any lingering questions can be addressed with minimal research. While the writing and some of the plot threads are accessible to bight middle-schoolers, this is a title that will do well in the hands of motivated high-school readers and adults. show less
The book starts in 1981, in Ireland, near the North-South border, with Fergus McCann, just 18 and doing his A-levels, hoping for a place at a university away from Northern Ireland and The Troubles, finding the body of a dead child in a peat bog near his home town.
The book is beautifully written and reads like a detective story, but offers a lot more: The Troubles feature prominently, and the difficulties of ordinary people living in Ireland (and the U.K.) are vividly drawn - but very subtly, i.e. in the attitude of Fergus' father (pro PROVO) and mother (against any violence) and the effect this has on their relationship.
I loved this book.
The book is beautifully written and reads like a detective story, but offers a lot more: The Troubles feature prominently, and the difficulties of ordinary people living in Ireland (and the U.K.) are vividly drawn - but very subtly, i.e. in the attitude of Fergus' father (pro PROVO) and mother (against any violence) and the effect this has on their relationship.
I loved this book.
When the narrator first read the background of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strikes I thought, hell no, I'm not up for reading or listening to anything this heavy. Maybe it was the lilting Irish narrator (fab job) or the exquisite layering of the three storylines but I fell in love a bit. The time period is handled seemlessly and the story within a story about the doomed Iron Age Bog Child is heart breaking.
Susan says: This is a fascinating book pulling two threads of a story together - first, Fergus McCann discovers a preserved body in a bog near his home in Ireland. The story of the bog child is told through archaeology and radiocarbon dating. Then there is the story of Fergus' life - the Troubles which have always divided Ireland and the ways in which Fergus' family is split by these Troubles. His brother is in jail, and begins painfully dying on a hunger strike. His mother and father are divided over what is right, and Fergus just wants to escape Ireland and become a doctor. His life is ahead of him, if he can get out of helping the Provos. This book is compelling, and while it doesn't really explain the Troubles for teen readers on show more this side of the ocean, it gives enough context for kids to figure out what's going on. And the parallels between Fergus' story and the story of the Bog Child, whose life he dreams at night, is very interesting as well. The suspense keeps the story moving along, painful as it is. Very good, but probably only a strong or intelligent reader would keep reading through the foreign-ness of this story. show less
Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd is an Irish story within a story. Fergus, the main character, lives in a town bordering the Irish south and the British-occupied north. In the span of the book he discovers an ancient bog body, Mel, a young dwarf woman sacrificed in 80 A.D. to stave off the crop failure and starvation of a prolonged winter perhaps caused by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius far to the south in 79 A.D. Caught in the Troubles between his devotion to his brother Joe, a hunger-striker in Long Kesh prison, aka The Maze, and his growing friendship with Owain, a Welsh soldier in the British army who enlisted to avoid working in the Welsh mines, he finds distraction when he discovers the bog body while illegally cutting peat with his uncle show more Tully. While his days are occupied with running, studying for exams, and first love, at night Mel comes to him in dreams to tell him her tale of love and sacrifice. The story is a page-turner that offers insight into Irish politics and ancient Celtic culture, as well as some modern Irish slang, as Fergus’ choices lead him first down one path and then on to another as he longs to make sense of the world around him, past, present, and future. 4 stars. show less
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The last novel of the late Siobhan Dowd and winner of the Cilip Carnegie Medal, Bog Child is a spectacular demonstration that books for younger readers can handle the big themes. It's a historical novel, set in a Northern Irish border town in 1981, and focalised through Fergus, teenage son of a Fenian family. He finds the body of a girl buried in a peat bog – not, as he first thinks, a show more victim of the Troubles, but an Iron Age girl who might have been murdered, or ceremonially sacrificed.
At night the girl comes to Fergus in his dreams, and gradually unfolds her story to him; by day, he has to contend with his parents' quarrelling, growing tension in his community over the Troubles, his brother dying on hunger strike in prison, A-levels and first love.
The weighty themes are leavened by humour and sympathy for characters on both sides of the divide, and the plot is full of surprises. It doesn't pull its punches, but ultimately the message is of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation. In one sense it's a novel about death – and Dowd must have known how ill she was with cancer when she was writing it – but it is suffused with a love of life. show less
At night the girl comes to Fergus in his dreams, and gradually unfolds her story to him; by day, he has to contend with his parents' quarrelling, growing tension in his community over the Troubles, his brother dying on hunger strike in prison, A-levels and first love.
The weighty themes are leavened by humour and sympathy for characters on both sides of the divide, and the plot is full of surprises. It doesn't pull its punches, but ultimately the message is of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation. In one sense it's a novel about death – and Dowd must have known how ill she was with cancer when she was writing it – but it is suffused with a love of life. show less
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Author Information
10+ Works 3,752 Members
Siobhan Dowd was born on February 4, 1960. She received a degree in Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University and an MA with Distinction in Gender and Ethnic Studies at Greenwich University. After a short stint in publishing, she joined the writer's organization PEN. Initially she was a researcher for its Writers in Prison Committee, but show more eventually she became Program Director of PEN American Center's Freedom-to-Write Committee in New York City. After seven years, she returned to the United Kingdom and co-founded an English PEN's readers and writers program, which takes authors into schools in socially deprived areas, as well as prisons, young offender's institutions and community projects. She has written novels, short stories, columns and articles, and edited two anthologies. Her first novel, A Swift Pure Cry, was published in March 2006 and won the Eilis Dillon award in Ireland for a first-time children's author and the Branford Boase Award. Her other novels are The London Eye Mystery, which won NASEN/TES Special Educational Needs Children's Book Award, Bisto Book of the Year prize, and Salford Children's Book Award; Bog Child; and Solace of the Road. She died of breast cancer on August 21, 2007 at the age of 47. Before her death, she set up the Siobhan Dowd Trust, where all the proceeds from her literary work will be used to assist disadvantaged children with their reading skills. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2008
- People/Characters
- Fergus McCann; Thaddeus 'Tally' McCann; Michael Rafters; Mel; Cora O'Brien; Felicity O'Brien (show all 7); Owain Jenkins
- Important places
- Drumleash, Northern Ireland, UK (fictional); Ireland
- Important events
- The Troubles
- Epigraph
- The bog lay in the bright, slanting morning light, the dew-drops sparkling like millions of diamonds. A large crowd of the local inhabitants had already gathered... They were tightly grouped in a ring around a dark-coloured h... (show all)uman head, with a tuft of short-cropped hair, which stuck up clear of the dark brown peat. Part of the neck and shoulders was also exposed. we were clearly face to face once again with one of the bog people.
P.V. Glob, The Bog People - Dedication
- For my three sisters, Oona, Denise, Enda - my love as ever.
- First words
- They'd stolen a march on the day.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)He turned away and walked across the deck to the other side.
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