There’s always seven to ten days of confusion when I get back from Ireland, a complex mixture of jetlag, homesickness, and ‘what the hell am I doing on this side of the planet’ style reflection. Usually, I stay indoors and shun company over this period, clinging to the shreds of home that thirty hours of international travel haven’t yanked out of me.
This time, surprisingly, I emerged from my travel funk during a moment of quiet beauty in the rough greenery of our local park - a pretty wild spot that’s usually quite deserted. I’d stopped by the local stream and, for a moment, the sun cracked through the clouds and I found myself standing in a shimmering pool of yellow light. I stood there for a good minute, watching an acrobatic kaka (a kind of New Zealand parrot) ripping chunks of wood off a tree, and for some reason everything suddenly made better sense.
Ireland will always be home, but New Zealand certainly has its compensations.
There’s a picture of the stream below. I have a video of the kaka which I’ll send out via the Substack ‘Notes’ later today/tomorrow.
In Production
The first creative project I jumped into on my return to the office was Fionn: The Betrayal – the fifth (and probably the second-last) book in the Fionn mac Cumhaill Series. Despite a distance of 18,500 kilometres and an absence of several weeks, it was surprising easy to slide back to the plotline and ease into the personalities of the various characters.
Actually, it probably wasn’t that surprising. This is a something I’ve been building up to for some years after all and the finale of this particular volume – critical to the overall narrative – is very much engraved in my head.
So far, I’ve completed a draft of Chapter One – a segment of which is included in the ‘paid’ section of the newsletter. At this stage, I’m still aiming for a December release but, if I’ve learned anything over the last few years, it’s that life has an annoying way of jumping in – either through work or family responsibilities – to disrupt my well-made plans. Although I’m always ready to give pessimism the one-fingered salute, I’m realistic enough to recognise that it might well be 2024 before the final product is officially released.
But there’s More!
During my first week back in Wellington, I also made use of my memories and the heightened emotional connection from my return home to develop an outline for a proposed television series based on Beara: Dark Legends.
Part of that involved rereading the original novel – a work I hadn’t looked at for seven or eight years – to refresh myself with the content and the plot and …
Well, damned if I hadn’t forgotten how much there was in that book!
On top of the core mystery plotline (there’s actually two mystery plotlines because the book’s structured as two separate but interconnected reads), there are several overlapping layers of history, ‘mythology’ and Beara folklore in those 380 pages. So much so, in fact, that in at least two major character scenes, I recognised material from an eight- and twelfth- century manuscript that I’d adapted and included in the narrative (and then completely forgot about).
Looking back now with a more distant eye, I can see that for a first complete novel, Beara: Dark Legends was incredibly ambitious (my first ‘book’ was a collection of short stories called ‘The Irish Muse’). At the time, I clearly had no idea how much work I was letting myself in for, and I can now fully understand why it took 3-4 years to complete.
The original remains available online but I’ll probably be updating it next year slightly (to reflect an improved knowledge of certain elements) when I start on the sequel .
Anyway, the screen proposal’s gone out to the first indigenous Irish production recipient (my preference) and I’ll get around to sending it on to others in time. To be honest, I’m never in too much of a rush when it comes to screen-related work. In my experience, even for a successful project, it takes years to get greenlit. Unless you’re a dedicated scriptwriter or work specifically in film, such work is useful as an add-on but shouldn’t form the central part of one’s work life.
Non-Fiction Projects
While not working on Fionn: The Betrayal, I’m working on a non-fiction project called ‘The Irishness Conceptual Framework’ which I’ll be releasing in the first quarter of next year. As this project isn’t really book related (although it may have one attached later) it does take suck time from my fiction work but I’ll restrict further updates on this to the ‘paid’ section of the newsletter. Another non-fiction project (Irish Mythology 101) is also still ongoing.
Faraway Fields
Speaking of ‘indigenous’, my friend Marina recently turned up on ‘Faraway Fields’ (an RTE programme where an Irish farmer, a forester and a fisherman travel to some of the world's poorest countries to see how indigenous communities there live off the land and sea.
Marina, a forester, spent a month with the Pataxó - one of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. I had a yack with her about her experiences when I was home and she told me there’d been an awful lot on the programme that had to be cut. This was mainly due to legal challenges from some of the multinationals who’re happily cutting down native forest to grow commercial plantation forest and horticulture. Global multinationals, they’re not overly concerned about the fact that the people working for them are stealing land from the indigenous people to do so.
In any case, Marina being Marina, she was completely honest on the programme and she was clearly quite upset at how these people have been treated.
Fortunately, things have improved somewhat with the recent removal of Jair Bolsanaro and his gangsters from the Brazilian government but there have been several further attacks on the Pataxo people since the programme aired. Marina started a ‘Go Fund Me’ to help raise some funds for them and which outlines some of her thoughts. You can find that here: Pataxó
The Faraway Fields Series can be found on the ‘RTE Player’ but it’s probably only available in some countries (it’s not available here in New Zealand, for example)
Concerto in O Minor for Harp and Nitroglycerine
If you appreciate modern day graphic novels (as opposed to ‘comics’) then you may be familiar with a series based on the character Corto Maltese, a philosophical – if somewhat cynical – boat captain with a laid back, laconic style.
Corto Maltese (written and illustrated by the Italian artist Hugo Pratt) first appeared in print in 1967, but I only came across him while living in France in the late 1990s, when I received a book as a present. The book in question was called ‘Celtic Tales’ and included the story “Concerto in O Minor for Harp and Nitroglycerine” where Corto gets dragged into the fight for Irish independence.
Like most of the other stories in the collection – this was very much a romanticized piece of ‘Oirish’ malarky, written and drawn by someone (Pratt) who’d clearly never been to the country and who fell back on fantasy and tourism iconography to form the basis of his story and drawings. That’s immediately obvious when Corto encounters the key romantic interest – a young female revolutionary called ‘Banshee O’Danann’ (FFS!).
Despite that first unimpressive encounter, over time I did come to appreciate the series and the arty ponderings of its antihero sailor. Corto Maltese remains a bit of “cult” character in the European graphic novel scene (particularly in France and Italy) and they really take him far too seriously, but some of the graphic novels are actually quite literary in style (and beautiful in their sketched simplicity). Some of the books (Mú, for example) are self-indulgent and are simply hard work. Others however, perfectly hit the creative nail on the head and are immensely satisfying.
Given the status in which Corto Maltese is held (and the associated commercial success), a number of animated films were made of his adventures over the years. Below, you’ll find the animated film for Concerto in O Minor for Harp and Nitroglycerine. I shouodl warn you, it’s a bit dated, the ‘Oirish’ diddle-dee-dee stuff is a bit vomit-inducing but some of the accents (not just the Irish ones) are quite funny and, overall, it’s a good representation of Pratt’s dialogue and artistic style.
The End
That’s it from me this month. Vóg will be back to its usual monthly format from now until Christmas. Hopefully, I’ll be able to start adding some audio in by then.
Until next month …
Slán go fóill!
Paid Content
This month’s paid content section includes part of the first Chapter from FIONN: The Betrayal and additional ‘creative notes’.
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