Sheep May Safely Graze, L.M. Clancy, 2015, 423 pages, paperback, $14.95, available at AmazonIrish sporting artist Liam Clancy has expanded his repertoire. He’s written a novel.
While foxhunting, prodigious drinking, and sex are well-handled ingredients of Clancy’s story—which takes place mostly in Ireland and England—those ingredients are only a framework upon which hangs a larger story of people, relationships, and the times. Our times: the Millennial, hunt sabs, the pathos of the hoof and mouth epidemic, the runup to the hunting ban, the dagger thrust into the heart of the English countryside by a government focused elsewhere.
If the publishing industry were not in turmoil, as it has been for the last decade at least, and if publishers would give first-time novelists half-a-chance, Clancy’s book could well replace titles by authors with household names that now occupy undeserved spots on the Best Seller lists. His dialog crackles, and his characters are wholly-formed individuals that you will care greatly for. Think of Maeve Binchy on steroids.
Sheep May Safely Graze is the sometimes poignant, frequently hilarious tale of the two young Delaney brothers finding their place in the world, falling in and out of love, and gradually coming to realize that taking the man out of Tipperary is a simpler matter than taking Tipperary out of the man.
Clancy’s characters and dialog provide a window into the Irish soul. If one seeks a place where a spade is bluntly called a spade, don’t go to Ireland. Life has been hard for the Irish over the centuries, and the last place an Irishman will expose that harshness is in his favorite medium—conversation. He’ll play the English language like a musical instrument, but he’ll never say the blunt, hard thing. Ask for directions and no matter the complication or convolutions you need make to arrive there, he’ll answer, “Straight on; you can’t miss it!” He’s not willfully lying; he just doesn’t want you to get discouraged.
In all my travels, admittedly limited, there is no place where I have felt more warmly and genuinely welcome than in Ireland. Even when the joke was on me. Like the time in Galway when the young owner of my hireling and his buddy laughingly ran an entire field to retrieve my horse after I got dumped. They held it, eyes twinkling, as I remounted.
“Sure, he might have a bit of a buck in him in the first field, but after that he’ll be loovely.”
And he was! At the time, I thought, If only I’d known, I could have been better prepared for it. But then I remembered where I was. In Ireland, no one will say the hard thing.
Here’s Clancy’s character, Barry, as he waits for a horse that has been promised him for the Tipperary meet that morning:
“She’s got a four-year-old of Martin Duggan’s she’s going to lend me to hunt for the day.”
“I know the lad you mean,” Young Mick declared animatedly. “Jaysus, but he’s a grand, solid butt of a horse. He’d carry three times the weight of you for the day and not feel it.”
Which was all very well, but the ability to carry thirty-nine stone with ease wasn’t one of Barry’s top priorities in a hunter. “Will he jump?” he asked suspiciously.
“Ah, sure, he might or he mightn’t,” was Young Mick’s equable prognosois.
Later, in England, Barry’s brother Darren feels premonitions of the gathering storm against hunting. He’s had a good day on Exmoor, his first experience with the Devon and Somerset Stag Hounds. The selected hind has been put to bay after a satisfying run, killed and butchered by the huntsman, the choice portions being distributed amongst the neighboring farmers for their dinner tables:
Darren wondered how long this had been happening here, and decided as quickly that the question was superfluous—it had always happened here. All this—the hounds and the steaming horses by the moor-land stream, the older men doffing their caps round the slain deer—was the very essence of an England he had barely suspected existed. He knew that there were grey men in London who sought to end it all if they could, and he felt a strange, unsuspected sympathy for them that they should so little understand the timeless, brutal beauty of the workings of their world.
In between moments of philosophy and mindlessness, duty and sport, conflict and love, the silly and the serious issues of the day, Clancy’s cast of young characters will bring prodigious drinking and outrageous behavior to new peaks of accomplishment for your reading pleasure. Available through Amazon.
Posted July 29, 2015