Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan review – hilarious, beautiful and very violent
A hapless young idealist sets sail for utopia, in this wild epic of colonial chaos in the late 18th-century AmericasIn that dimple of European history between the French Revolution and the coronation of Queen Victoria, there lived a not inconsiderable number of men – usually young, dumb, and full of opium – whose foremost ambition was to set sail for the Americas, and there, in their own parcels of conveniently cheap and plentiful wilderness, found utopian communes where society could be forged anew in accordance with the principles of enlightenment. It certainly didn’t hurt that these endeavours would enable – even necessitate – quite a lot of shagging. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his mates, Roberts Southey and Lovell, laid plans, between blasts of nitrous oxide and versification, for the foundation of a commune on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, chosen for its “excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians”. Lack of funds quickly became an issue, and soon our intrepid Romantics had compromised on location, proposing to found their “Pantisocracy” in rural Wales instead of the New World. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan never came off.Angel Kelly, the hapless protagonist – or perhaps initiator would be a better word – of Oisín Fagan’s second novel, Eden’s Shore, is one of these Coleridgian dreamers. At the opening, we meet him as a young and feckless law student at the University of Dublin, hanging around Parliament Street with his “broad-brimmed hat, a cravat and a small book of Montesquieu under his arm, from which he partook of no more than five sentences a day”. Secretly, he believes he will “one day prove to be a great man”. An inheritance from a beloved aunt allows him to further augment his epicurean lifestyle, but when the pleasures of whoring, drinking and tobacco begin to pall, he resolves to spend the last of his wealth on an expedition to Brazil, with the intention of founding “the harmonious society” of which he and his friends “had so often and so manfully spoken”: “a colony that is free from the sins of the old world – a place free from tyranny, discrimination, illegality, religion, persecution, taxation”. Continue reading...
A hapless young idealist sets sail for utopia, in this wild epic of colonial chaos in the late 18th-century Americas
In that dimple of European history between the French Revolution and the coronation of Queen Victoria, there lived a not inconsiderable number of men – usually young, dumb, and full of opium – whose foremost ambition was to set sail for the Americas, and there, in their own parcels of conveniently cheap and plentiful wilderness, found utopian communes where society could be forged anew in accordance with the principles of enlightenment. It certainly didn’t hurt that these endeavours would enable – even necessitate – quite a lot of shagging. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his mates, Roberts Southey and Lovell, laid plans, between blasts of nitrous oxide and versification, for the foundation of a commune on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, chosen for its “excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians”. Lack of funds quickly became an issue, and soon our intrepid Romantics had compromised on location, proposing to found their “Pantisocracy” in rural Wales instead of the New World. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan never came off.
Angel Kelly, the hapless protagonist – or perhaps initiator would be a better word – of Oisín Fagan’s second novel, Eden’s Shore, is one of these Coleridgian dreamers. At the opening, we meet him as a young and feckless law student at the University of Dublin, hanging around Parliament Street with his “broad-brimmed hat, a cravat and a small book of Montesquieu under his arm, from which he partook of no more than five sentences a day”. Secretly, he believes he will “one day prove to be a great man”. An inheritance from a beloved aunt allows him to further augment his epicurean lifestyle, but when the pleasures of whoring, drinking and tobacco begin to pall, he resolves to spend the last of his wealth on an expedition to Brazil, with the intention of founding “the harmonious society” of which he and his friends “had so often and so manfully spoken”: “a colony that is free from the sins of the old world – a place free from tyranny, discrimination, illegality, religion, persecution, taxation”. Continue reading...
