‘“Holy Mother who knows so much. Help me for I’m destroyed in the heart. Tell me is it love to be like this. That measures me on my days like the shadow on the mountain.”
On a remote island off the West coast of Ireland in the 1970s, young farmer Miceal catches sight of a girl on the beach with long hair so blonde it could be white. Befriending the girl and her travelling companions, a world of possibility opens up to Miceal – but where there’s opportunity, there is also peril…
Juanita Casey’s astounding first novel is a cult classic ready to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers. Drawing on her own life and speaking for her marginalised community, Casey offers a feminist and class-conscious story that explores the eternal choices of youth, between the comfort of a stifling domesticity and the promise and risk of the unknown, characterised in the incomparable wildness of the West of Ireland.
The bestselling Casey takes her place alongside such writers as JM Synge and Kevin Barry – the missing connection between the two.’
I’ll start by saying that I really wanted to love The Horse of Selene. The promise of a neglected classic returning to popularity pulled on the Stoner fanatic in me, while the West of Ireland setting and comparisons with Kevin Barry drew me in hook, line, and sinker. Ultimately, and sadly, I was disappointed with the novel, and struggled to finish its two-hundred or so pages. The narrative follows Miceal, a young, orphaned, painfully naive farmer from the fictional island of Aranchilla, whose bovine enslavement to habit and acutely Catholic shame is upended by his encounter with a group of exotic libertines spending the summer in Ireland. Hailing from Sweden, the United States, Cornwall, Greece, and even Dublin, the motley crew of travellers enchant Miceal with their verbal gymnastics, their sexual magnetism, and their redolence of a world beyond cattle fields, regular mass attendance, and eventual marriage to second cousins. Miceal’s induction to this zoo of the new is interwoven with accounts of the wild band of horses roaming the island, emblems of all that is untameable and unbroken in the West of Ireland psyche. The raw spiritedness of the horses and the attraction of the nomadic way of life converge on the enigmatic figure of Selene, named for a goddess by her adoptive parents, who found her abandoned on a hillside in Greece like some mythical divinity. Long-haired, fiercely wild, and obsessed with the horses to the point of mania, Selene represents all of Miceal’s desires and fears, containing within her person all possibilities for his liberation and annihilation.
My disappointment with The Horse of Selene should not be taken as a wholesale condemnation, as there is much to admire in Casey’s debut. Square-jawed and playful, the prose attests to an irrefutable and original artistic talent, justifying critics’ placement of Casey as the missing link between J.M. Synge and Kevin Barry. The writing is tough, elusive, sparkling and mischievous, flowing beautifully and menacingly from the very beginning of the narrative. The opening in particular is wonderful, even breath-taking, as Casey lands her readers in a dangerous world characterised by an unsettling democracy that transcends manmade taxonomies of the animate and inanimate. Leading with descriptions of the island’s equine community, Casey intimates the secondary importance of humanity to her novel’s existential logic:
‘There had always been horses on the island, a wandering fluid band which had additions at times when a pony broke its hobbles and was away to them, and no one bothered to go and catch it when an ass is better, all told. Or the tinkers’ piebalds would join them, and these being usually entires it was pretty sure next year there’d be some magpie foals with some of the mares. Ponies, a couple of carthorses, and a few good lookers, all as unkempt and wild as mountainy ewes, and all colours.
Death took away from them too, but mostly the body lay where it fell, for it is a great business burying abhors, and the dogs of the island would eat their owners should they fall down. Often the beast would lie strangely by the sea’s edge, with the head stretched out on the tide as though it could see some great land afar off, or one of the colts could not meet the cruelties of the winter.
Their leaders changed too; sometimes a gaunt old mare, sometimes a cocky stallion.
A dun left behind still some of his wily breed which are a good for anything and indestructible in the heart. A black with a head like a curragh one year, and this time a white, a true white with a pretty way of going and a tail he held up like a gale warning.
They looked grand when lit by the sun, or drinking in the lake of an evening when the swans creamed down on the dark water to take their night’s rest, but most thought the horses were a nuisance, a danger, and not what you wished your daughter to see when some damned stallion began his stuff right outside your front windows and, seeing few houses had fences, often right on your very doorstep.
They trampled the island gardens, broke down walls, splintered fences, ate washing and at times terrorised strangers with teeth and bullying.
The worst thing was the harm they did in the graveyard, to which they were irresistibly driven by its lush grass, and if not seen in time and driven out they would doze propped against the headstones, or lie in a newly dug mound and roll in its flowers, and the great rubbery farts they let out were enough to wake the poor defiled dead themselves.’
The unsentimental equality between man and beast implied by this passage carries echoes of Liam O’Flaherty’s short stories, and stands as one of the novel’s darkest and most magnetic strengths; the world of the island is one in which sexuality is potent and weaponised, a viscerally physical, even brutal, world in which death comes to all without ceremony, and human grandiosity is totally deflated.
The total indifference of the horses to the human population of Aranchilla is paralleled by a sense of the island’s landscape as brooding and capricious, both ambivalent towards and absorbing of all human endeavour. Although Casey threatens to alienate the reader entirely by obviating the significance of the lives and relationships of her human characters, she brings the discomfort of such naturalistic intensity back from the brink, interweaving domesticity through her descriptive passages in a way the bends the novel’s stunning imagery from the majestic to the mundane:
‘On bright days, from the furthest distance you could see clearly the white milk-can in a man’s hand, or the tinny flash of fish on a strung, so intensely luminous the eye would bruise with colour. Light, that came in stealth with the cold dawn, needling and ferreting over the rocks and prominences, sending the shadows rabbiting for cover; light that triumphantly unrolled the colours of the island so that every field and bog and lake flew its flag of mustard yellows, violets and greens, printed with the blue of scabious, the red poppies, and the white pennants of the bog cotton.
It flashed off the white cottages, which on Aranchilla seemed not to have been put together not built at all, but put down by the hand, and pressed well into the turf to firm them in.
Light transformed the lake to sapphire and the rivers to bronze, signalled among the quartz stones, ricocheted off walls. Cartwheels fizzed like comets, horses’ shoes spun like sixpences; the light frothed and flickered and flung out the patched quilt of the island to the sun.
Everything steamed and shimmered as though a thousand lids were off the puddles and their stones nearly soft to the fork, and the roads writhed like cooking eels. On these days the sky full-sailed over Aranchilla, and the sea flung a rainbow at every headland. And the people of the island, though watchful for the wind’s dog that circles unseen to nip in when the jacket is off, would smile and bless the day.
They knew well how the grey storm, the wind dog’s master, can rise in minutes out of the Atlantic, and snatch off all the colours, twist the heads from the flowers, clear the washing lines, anger the leak, jump on every beast’s back and hammer his sides, and cut the skill from the sun’s face with one swipe. It was therefore not often a man took off his coat for very long, and he did, never let it far off.
The only one not caught out at all was the mountain, who wound a cloud round his bald rock at the first spit, and accepted the inevitable.
This was the land that had made Miceal; made him of darkness and thought, from rocks and waters of endurance, of the quick light.’
In this scheme, the brutality of life on Aranchilla poses both an existential violence to human life, and an emboldening strength to human character. The complex symbiosis Casey conjures is indeed reminiscent of Kevin Barry’s recurrent implication of the influence a landscape can have over men’s temperaments and mental states, particularly the watchful, melancholy landscapes of the West of Ireland.
Casey’s deterministic conception of the relationship between landscape and humanity underpins a vibrant and amusing knack for characterisation. This talent both strengthens and weakens the novel in different ways; on the one hand there are wonderful lines that capture the myriad oddities and contradictions of a personality in a few words:
‘The tirade over, his shaken flock emerged into the sun, drawn their ordinary selves back on again like comfortable old coats, and Father Muldoon, tipping back the last measures of the altar wine, was unaware he had said “Good luck now” to the Crucifixion as he did so.’ Similarly, the description of Paudi, Miceal’s tigerish younger brother, is fantastic, summoning a clear and recognisable type in a deflationary, arch style that narrowly skirts cruelty:
‘Paudi enjoyed his own voice and was argumentative though without having the wit or learning to construct or defend his views. He was dark and at first glance handsome, but when seen closer certain slips, like faults in rock, became visible. His face could change so that he no longer seemed good-looking. His bright blue eyes would not be held, and had the same unbalanced shine of certain grey hounds. He was a devil with women, he liked to think, and was such a clever talker he could lead astray a Plato, both ending up brilliantly speaking on subjects neither knew how they came to, and which meant nothing at all. Paudi was a magpie with language; he picked out bright phrases and glitter laughter, he stole from literary nests. Such a voice naturally charms the ears off women and horses, and can lead a man away on a brilliant verbal jig which leaves him breathless at the finish, but no better off. Paudi was an Irish Orpheus, his voice his lute.’
Casey’s characterisation has a biting wit to it, but she indulges the pleasure of portraiture too frequently in The Horse of Selene, verging on the slapstick at times. In this fault, comparisons to Synge are indeed justified, as the novel’s cast of eccentrics and deviants carries strains of the stage Irishman, or the patchy comedy of Pat Shortt’s Killinascully. Casey’s range is certainly impressive, as the tiresome caricature of the breast-obsessed Garda Mulloy and his flatulent wife Philomena is reigned back by the poignant subtlety of Father Connolloy’s philosophical torment, but ultimately, despite their occasional virtuosity, the novel’s intensive character descriptions disrupt and interrupt the thrust of the narrative, leeching its plot of substance and direction. In other ways, The Horse of Selene simply seems dated; Selene’s characterisation is so esoteric as to prompt eye-rolling from this reader, who has a considerably high threshold for the arcane and obscure. Described as a feminist narrative, The Horse of Selene rather perpetuates a tired and histrionic conflation of sex and wildness, juxtaposing Selene’s exotic sensuality, as conveyed by her appearance, dancing abilities, seductive nature, and equine mania, with the buttoned-up self-chastisement of Catholic Ireland in a way that has simply lost relevance for modern readers.
Overall, The Horse of Selene could fairly be described as a novel of style without substance. The natural imagery of the novel is indisputably irresistible, albeit too generously sprinkled with similes, and lays promising foundations for a dark narrative atmosphere that never really gets off the ground. There are passages that are nothing less than beautiful, the prose ringing with a hypnotic resonance and begging to be read aloud:
‘The splashed horse stamped a foreleg, swung his head and snapped round at his side. He lanced himself into a quick jerking canter squealing and snorting between curious short trilling barks. He snaked his head, bit the air, nipped his speckled chest. His striped mane flashed with each bound, and his tail, curved up over his short strong back, flew its pennants of hair like a pirate ship its colours.
The spots and splashes all over him mingled and reformed with his movements, as though someone was painting him into life’s startling design, writing him into the eye.
On each leg a flurry of black and white markings chased down to the hooves, and a hail of white spattered his neck and forequarters. Black shoals of spots gathered and dived over the curve of his rump like a pouring of fish.
Like erased hieroglyphics, the colours scratched and ran together over the tomb of his big head, and Selene saw with amazement that one eye was pale brown, the other a cold blue.
You could hardly believe that he was real, that he was not carved from marble and amethyst, agate and onyx, the eyes set with topaz and moonstone, or his colours fired on him with an antique design of water and stars.
Stick on the streamers of the windy cirrus, the horsetails of the sky, and set your fanfare horse on fire.’
These passages showcase the fierce potential of the heat and originality of Casey’s style, harking back to an oral tradition of storytelling with wistful force while speaking with the voice of the marginalised Traveller community from which she stems. The novel is peppered with such menacing and visionary poetry, and it is a great pity that these stylistic displays fall flat at times, their effect on the reader running a gauntlet between energising and wearying. I so wanted to love this book, and maybe my hopes for its brilliance have led to unfair judgement. However, it seems to me that much of the promise of Casey’s artistic flair and keen nose for character could have been much better served by a stronger editorial hand, and a more exacting narrative compass.