A LAND WITHOUT WOLVES BY DANIEL WADE, A CRITICAL REVIEW

 

                                                                                  

A Land Without Wolves

A Novel

By

Daniel Wade

Publisher: Temple Dark Books, 2021.

Pages: 250

 

The Wolf has always played a very interesting role as either a sign or trope in literature. One only has to think of Saint Francis in connection with the animal; one of the saint’s apparent miracles was the taming of the wolf of Gubbio in Umbria and which had been marauding the countryside there to all of the farmer’s frustration. Francis bid the wolf to stop, invoking Christ, and the beast relented. Or, possibly, Sigmund Freud in connection with the Wolf Man a reference to Sergi Pankejeff his first major case and who made him so notorious as a psychoanalyst. Pankejeff had a recurring dream of several wolves perched on a tree surveying him and from this image, which the patient famously drew, Freud interpreted the dream to signify the subject’s Oedipus complex. His sister, who had been both his parent’s favourite, had been his apparent object of anxiety, wanting to replace her in the affections of his parents his subconscious, according to Freud, had conjured up this image of the tree of wolfs which was a symbol representing an event he had witnessed of his parents copulating. Classic Freud, the wolves were deemed by the Viennese Clinician to be symbolic of the bestial act, Pankejeff had apparently witnessed his parents doing it “doggy style”. In popular culture then you have the Wolf Man littering comics, or Werewolf of film, the famous lycantrophe of ancient Greece, conjuring up both images from Hollywood, from the special effects of the eighties, to the costumes of the late forties in the black and white horror films in which the creature appeared alongside such other Gothic literary characters like Frankenstein.  

However, in Daniel Wade’s debut novel, which is historic in genre, the wolf is more evocative of Milton’s reference to the animal in his political tract in defence of Cromwell and his rebel army who fought against King Charles I. “ Be therefore, in the name of God, the master of a wolf.”[i]” Milton had been commissioned by Parliament to respond to a text in defence of the King. This is a very interesting insight into Daniel Wade’s novel, all the more so since it is coming directly from the writer himself. Daniel Wade is a poet, first and foremost, with a deep reverence for the historical. So, to see him write a novel set in revolutionary Ireland during the end of the 18^th century is a very wonderful thing. As Milton, a revolutionary himself, permeates Wade’s novel. As well as the symbolism of the wolf.

The novel begins in cinematic mode. We are introduced, on the very first page, to one of the main protagonists, a certain Mogue Trench, who is about to be hanged by the neck on the scaffold, complete with audience. As the Hangman approaches him, Mogue goes into total recall, and so we quickly flashback 12 years earlier in chapter 2 which bears the date 1786. Mogue is a young man of 27 on the gallows, so we start the book proper while he is in the bloom of adolescence.

Before I continue on the plot, a word first on the language that is being used.

it looked withered and egg-shaped,

a maw of agape nylon gently swinging from

the traverse beam in the dawn like a hypnotist’s pendulum.

 

Such is the description of the noose upon the scaffold. As I have said, Daniel Wade is a poet, and it is language like this, plus the very cinematic pacing of the story that make this book instantly enjoyable and so approachable. I foresee Daniel writing a screenplay and some talented director making a superb action film adaptation.

Of course, ideally, Martin Scorsese would be the man behind the camera. Or at least directing the film. Why do I say this? For the simple reason that Daniel Wade’s debut novel A Land without Wolves is an extremely violent tale. Why Wade positively delights in the almost ceaseless mayhem that he so graphically depicts. For instance, chapter iv The Crucible, which is dated Wexford 1786, is an extremely harrowing account of how the MacTíre family met their gruesome end, all barring Joseph who becomes the mentor for Mogue Trench whom we were introduced to upon the scaffold in the opening chapter. So the crucible in the sense that it because of this extreme violence inflicted upon his older brother Redmond, and his sister Fiadh ( the parents long since dead) who is gang raped by a gang of local Ribbonmen, or revolutionary Irishmen, typically Catholic, and so rebelling against the appalling caste system that was in exitance in Ireland during the eighteenth century when the country was under the yoke of the mighty British Empire.

Now, as a fellow Irishman myself, what I find really admirable about Daniel Wade’s deep exploration of late 18^th century Ireland which he portrays in this novel is the entirely unsentimental appraisal of the various motivating factors of the characters who people this most extraordinary debut novel. I have said already that Wade is deeply interested in history, as a poet, and this is also on full display in the little details which he peppers the text. For example, the depiction of the Hedge School Teacher, Hugh Ó Doirnín, who teaches all the MacTíre children before their tragic end. In a brief appearance, we hear the man speaking to Joseph, one of the main protagonists of the novel, when he is a very young boy about the Cyclops. The Cyclops were the one-eyed Giants which marauded the islands in the Mediterranean. Sicily is singled out particularly as the place where Odysseus encountered Polyphemus who had his eye famously burned out by Odysseus and his crew after the said giant ate some of the Greek captains men alive washing them down with Maron’s wine.

Yet, Daniel Wade evokes Aeneas in A Land without Wolves and Virgil’s Aeneid. He has written a poem about Achamenides, “the sole survivor of Ulixes’ crew. Sir.” As the young Joseph explains to his learned Teacher. Hedge Teachers were common at the time, as Catholics were not allowed to attend schools publicly. The were outlawed. With revolutionary pamphlets and books being printed aplenty, particularly in revolutionary France, the colonial power wanted to keep the population as ignorant as they possibly could. So, Wade’s insertion of the Cyclops in this chapter is perfectly judged, being a deeply historical and metaphorical symbol of brutish power and ignorance which, most importantly, will also come to a brutish end.

The violence which poor Joseph is subjected to himself, he is almost strangled to death, by the local revolutionary thugs, and which he sees his poor brother and sister subjected to makes difficult reading. No prude myself, and pretty well versed in gore, having read countless volumes on Stalingrad, Monte Cassino and other hell holes from WW2 , I must say that I found this chapter hard going. Wade’s descriptions of the savagery that are inflicted upon Joseph’s two siblings is truly harrowing.

 

“Up, ye Judas melt” he hissed from behind his cawl. “ On yer feet, MacTíre,

c’mon!” He turned to one of his men who’d lingered by the door and

beckoned him over, who in turn approached Redmond’s stricken form.

Kneeling, he lashed the elder MacTíre Brother’s hands together with a

bit of hawser, the taunts and mockery and spitting of his fellows bubbling

about them. A length of chord was tied around his neck and tightened;

the tip of his tongue was forced out, and the leader sliced part of it with

a gralloch. ( p.XXVII)

 

A gralloch is a hunting knife of Scottish origin and which typically would have a six inch blade, spear pointed, and they were used for ‘gralloching’, that is removing the offal of the beast with sharp cuts to the thick hide of whatever poor beast one had downed.

Wade’s savage five- page description of the violence is of course deliberate, as the perpetrators, remember, of the savagery are supposed to be rebelling against the forces of the Crown which have subjected the Irish people to some of the most brutal laws ever inflicted upon a people, and yet here they are terrorising members of their own race which they proclaim, and at every opportunity, that they are defending! And of course, this is historically true. It is, indeed, often the case. Yeats perhaps said it best, I am poorly paraphrasing, when he said that the whip remains, yet only the hand that holds it truly changes. It is a point that the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the one time defender of socialism, is constantly making, and that is the fact that revolutions, by their very nature, are all doomed to failure due to man’s fundamentally flawed nature. It is the subject of Samuel Beckett’s final full length epic novel How It Is. Hence the insertion of the Cyclops at the beginning of the chapter referencing Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid which also charts the violent bloody genesis of Italy as a nation. According to Virgil, Aeneas leads the last remaining Trojans who have been kicked out of Troy by the Greeks after years of war, only to wander the seas to finally settle on the shores of Italy, thus subsequently founding Rome and its subsequent bloody murderous empire. Do unto others as has been done unto you. One only has to look at the middle east today. It is the subject of poets and writers, ever eternal. Man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. Of course, poets, like most people, are also looking for justice too. Hence art! What did Nietzsche say? We have art in order not to die of the truth!

So, Joseph MacTíre ‘The Notorious Highwayman’ is born. After seeing the last of his family so cruelly dispatched in such a fashion, his older brother eventually drowns a year after their home was burnt to the ground, Joseph settles on a life of crime, being orphaned and now homeless, what else was there for him to do? Human’s, at the end of the day, were simply a bad lot. It is a realistic, and philosophically at least, also a reasonably sound truth. What follows then is an account of Joseph’s life of criminal vagabondage. He starts off living in a cave in County Wexford not far from Hook Head. This conceit is totally within keeping with Joseph’s newfound vision of Man, caves being the abode of the first, so called, originators of society as we know it. The Cyclops, those one-eyed kings, vision obscured to everything but criminal bounty. Daniel Wade, remember, is first and foremost a poet. So, Homer is never too far off, though he shall be replaced by Milton.

But firstly,  I should say, at this point, that most of the action in the novel takes place in either Wexford or Dublin city. Wade spent a lot of his childhood holidaying near Tintern Abbey, a key location in the book, and in a promotional film accompanying the book he explains the origin of the character of Joseph MacTíre and his accomplice Mogue Trench. Apparently, when he was a very young boy, the author wondered about the highwayman whom he had read about when he was holidaying by the dark woods near the old abbey. This is an extraordinary revelation, and it does help to explain the very unique atmosphere that Wade creates when he is describing the origins of his singular late 18^th century Irish highwaymen. Among Joseph’s library, in the inventory of the cave, Wade does not forget to mention a copy of Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe. This is timely, of course. Dafoe’s classic tale of the castaway was first published in 1719, the book is often considered to be one of the first examples of what we now know as the modern novel. Again, Wade is acknowledging his literary origins. As a poet, and also as someone who has lived by the sea, Wade delights in maritime poems and, again, in this respect he is unique in Irish literature today.

After, we see the young Joseph grow and develop in the country like some feral Anti-Rousseau, we eventually get to witness our new -found villain plying his trade in the Augustan capital that was Dublin in the late eighteenth century. This is the Dublin so lovingly described by Maurice Craig[ii] , this is the Dublin of James Gandon whose Four Courts ( 1786) had just been erected, rotund and domed with pillars resplendent. Yet, almost forgotten now by the city dwellers today, the few bridges that traversed the oozing Liffey river were patrolled by armies, or gangs, of thugs who often fought pitched battles among one another in a vain attempt to outdo one another in business. The cities denizens were obliged to forfeit a toll if they wished to cross the river, in those days, or failing that hire a boat. Wade clearly delights in depicting one of these bloody battles. Although, I must say, I kind of delighted in reading his superb bloody accounts, as I feel that this it is a very neglected side to the city’s history. Its brutal bloody past. We in Ireland are always gorging ourselves on films and series depicting the violence going on in other nations, in metropolises so very distant, when all the while the invisible thread of history, stained and bloodied that she is, garlands the very air we breathe.      

But the narrative really kicks up a gear in part 2 of the novel, this is when Mogue Trench is introduced proper into the story. After having been wounded and taken hostage by Joseph in the final chapter of part 1, Wade depicts the pseudo-couple hiding out in MacTíre’s cave. There is an element of Captain Jack Sparrow in Wade’s creation, no doubt. The dialogue between the two main protagonists, as they fight one another before eventually pairing up as a team, all reads like the dialogue in some Hollywood blockbuster. But this is not to detract or takeaway from the overall tone of the novel. It is more a moment of welcome light relief after the rather gory episodes of part 1. So well judged, and besides, the scene depicted also provides a moment of seeing again the character of Joseph MacTíre through the eyes of another. Trench! As Joseph presents himself to the young man, whom he has almost killed, in a very different light as he is known by many. For example, after the two protagonists have fought, and whereby Trench proves himself to be a dab hand at the arts of wielding a knife, MacTíre recites a passage from Book XII of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the final chapter in that illustrious tome. In this final book, we remember, the Archangel Michael explains man’s fate to Adam after the crucifixion of Christ.

 

Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves,

Who all the sacred mysteries of heaven

To their own vile advantages shall turn

Of lucre and ambition, and the truth,

With superstitions and traditions taint,

Left only in those written records pure,

Though not but by the spirit understood. [iii]

 

The prophecy for the Irish, when they did eventually break free some 200 years later, was that the wolves would come in sheep’s clothing. I am thinking now of the legions of people who suffered abuse, in some form, from the church which aligned itself with the ‘revolutionary’ movement, and who would together become the new tyranny, after the British had long gone. Wade, of course, as a writer, and an Irish one at that, is writing history from the all- seeing eye of retrospect. But, written on the eve of the centenary of Irish independence from Great Britain, you can be sure that by going back to the events around the time of revolutionary Ireland in the late 18^th century, the rebellion of 1798 in Ireland played out mainly in Wexford and the south east coast of Ireland and which failed dismally, was deliberate as here are the real germs of the revolutionary fervour which was to govern predominantly Irish and British politics for the next century.

Of course, the figure of the Highwayman, Joseph Mac Tíre, the Milton quoting overman, is the perfect tool foil for the so called enlightenment ideals which were sweeping across Europe and the newer colonies to at the time. Ideas about freedom, equality and fraternity which the French were calling on. Mac Tíre’s sister hardly saw much freedom the night she was gang-raped by a gang of so called freedom fighters. So, his cynicism is very aptly grounded in the Real, he will serve no Master. Not Crown nor Republican. Once again, Satan’s famous line ‘Better to reign in Hell, rather than serve in Heaven’ from Paradise Lost is very apt. As for Mac Tíre, Life is Hell. As he clearly states to Trench when he makes him an offer to join him as a highwayman.

 

“So, I’m offerin’ ye a chance to live a life where eventually

you’ll be free from wages, from hunger, from the petty laws men devise

to keep each other shackled. I’m offerin’ ye a chance for freedom, real

freedom now, not the abstract fancies they fill books with.” ( p.Ixxxix)

 

As Joe Mac Tígh makes this offer to Mogue Trench, symbolically it’s a pivotal secne in the novel, Trench casts his eyes about the Highwayman’s cave and the fire that is going in the cave illuminates all the many volumes which Mac Tígh has stacked against the walls. ‘All of Ireland could have been plundered to make this underground library.’( Ixxxvii.) The reference to Plato is again almost impossible to ignore, his parable of the cave, rather. The books, according then to the Highwayman, being likened to the ghostly shadows thrown against the walls of the cave in Plato’s enduring parable, which the prisoners, or cavemen, mistakenly construe to be reality itself. Whereas, Mac Tígh is not talking about abstract notions of freedom. His reading, if you will, is what we would now consider to be, with hindsight, a Heideggerian interpretation of Freedom – BEING! As Plato depicts, the sole cave dwellers who have the strength of purpose to get up, shake off their chains and leave the cave to step into the light of TRUTH.

This chapter set in the cave is echoed beautifully in the following chapter ( XI ) in which the two heroes find themselves taken prisoner while attempting to break into a local Lord’s manor. Like the trope of the Cave, the Big House is another motif which appears in many novels in the western canon. One only has to think of the wonderful novels of Jane Austen, all those period dramas which play out in the great houses of England, they are the natural theatrical stages for authors to frame their microcosmic explorations of societies, past and present. Sir Vesey Colclough (1745-1794) in Daniel Wade’s A Land Without Wolves, as we see him in the great library in his country estate set beside Tintern Abbey in County Wexford where so much of the action plays out, is an individual who actually existed at the time and this is one of the reasons why the novel is so interesting as a lot of the characters who appear in it are in fact historical characters. Wade has clearly immersed himself in the whole period, and not just in terms of political history, but in order to really imbue the text with a feel for the era it is in the character portrayals, the costumes, the weapons, the food and drink; every possible detail of the period is given due attention. In this respect, A Land Without Wolves is clearly an immersive experience, and of course this is one of the reasons why historical fiction as a literary genre has become so popular. As, living in a hyper modernistic age, with all of its unparalleled uncertainties, whether it be apocalyptic visions brought on by climate change, or visions of war due to imploding economies and global economic competition; perhaps by returning to the past we seek greater clarity in order to somehow comprehend the almost overwhelming tsunami of events which assail us day to day, and so take shelter within the confines of two secure covers which, once opened, give us almost omnipotent access into more, due to historical perspective, perhaps comprehensible periods in human history.

Of course, there is much that is familiar in the late 18^th century compared to today. The figure of Colclough comes across as a highly modern figure, as opinionated and self-serving that he appears to be, forming his own voluntary army to patrol his great estate while Whiteboys and Redcoats prepare for war. Wade very successfully manages to grant us access into the tumultuous world of late 18^th century Ireland which, as with most countries at the time, was experiencing also huge political and social turmoil due to the ideas which were circulating. So while the Highwayman Mac Tíre advocates personal freedom using the political ideas of John Milton and perhaps even more so the philosophical musings of the figure of Satan, the rebel angel who defied God in Paradise Lost, Colclough praises the ideas of Thomas Hobbes who was at pains to underline the concessions that citizens must make in order to be protected in society, hence the importance of the law and the maintenance of social order. But for who’s profit, one asks? This is where Wade’s novel perhaps differs from others, as he quite successfully manages to contrast the two wholly opposite views quite naturally with the narrative of the novel, as the characters wholly embody the different world views through their actions which push the events which take place and the narrative along, so as we readers we feel that we are participating with them rather than if the whole thing was merely descriptive. This is all down to Daniel Wade’s extraordinary attention to every particular aspect, as already mentioned, to 18^th century society. He is a Dubliner, after all, and 18^th century Dublin was in its prime. Today, as one walks around the city, the architecture bears witness to this fact. One only has to look to Gandon’s masterpieces the Four Courts and later the Custom House, they remain, after almost 300, the unparalleled architectural edifices in the city. There is absolutely nothing to rival them in terms of sheer grandeur and scale. Similarly, Daniel Wade’s debut novel A Land Without Wolves reaches the sublime, as it comes through the portrayal of its many characters, from a multiplicity of angles and perspectives so that we the readers may gain access into Dublin and beyond its borders in a time in the countries history which must have appeared extremely daunting for the people of the time. And surely, looking around us the world that we find ourselves in today, this must return us to our own time with a more philosophical bent.

I would strongly recommend A Land Without Wolves to anyone who enjoys a good rollicking yarn, first and foremost but also to anyone who appreciates language, for Daniel Wade, first and foremost, is a poet. The phraseology is constantly beguiling. It is a very physical read, in this respect. I have already mentioned the violence depicted in the battle scenes, but there is an almost Hemingwayesque attention to movement, particular when the author is describing the fighting, of which there is plenty, but also in the chases – it is, after all, a tale about highwaymen, so chases are a plenty. But, also, as already pointed out, the effort to embody the ideas of these very revolutionary times, be they advocating the Enlightenment ideas percolating on mainland Europe at the time, or the more realistic ideas of contemporary poets such as John Milton, there is a lot to contemplate in this tale. Personally, I think its an extraordinary debut for a contemporary writer, and if it does not put Daniel Wade on the literary map there is something seriously askew.             

 

 

 

 

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[i] Milton, John: The Works of John Milton- Historical, Political & Miscellaneous, In Two Volumes, A. Millar, London, MDCCLIII. p. 522.  

[ii] Craig, Maurice: Dublin 1660-1860, The Shaping of a City, With a Foreword by Mark Girouard, Liberties Press, 2006. 

[iii] Milton, John: Paradise Lost, An illustrated edition with an introduction by Philip Pullman, Oxford University Press, First Published 2005, p. 365.