Geata Póeg na Déanainn

The ruins of the garden January 26, 2020

Books making use of Irish mythology and medieval Irish literature are a really hard sell for me: when you have a PhD in the subject, it’s very hard to be objective with stories that merrily disregard the scholarship, or go all in for a romanticised, Celtic Twilight approach. So I approached Mary Watson’s duology, The Wren Hunt, and The Wicker Light — which posit that families of feuding druids survived in secret into the present day, working magic and battling for control of various objects of power — with great trepidation. I shouldn’t have worried: while I did have to switch off the academic corner of my mind when it came to some components of her druid families’ history (and how their magic expressed itself), the actual story she’d built around this mythological scaffolding was incredible.

This YA series is set in Kilshamble, a fictional small town in an indeterminate Irish location (but within commuting distance of Dublin). Unbenknownst to the town’s residents, their home has been a battleground for centuries for two branches of a secret community of druids: the judges, and the augurs. The Wren Hunt, the first novel, is narrated by Wren Silke, a teenage girl brought up by augurs and sent on a dangerous mission to infiltrate the organisation in charge of their judge enemies. The Wicker Light is told from two viewpoints: David, a judge boy caught up in his family’s political machinations and escalating war with the augurs, and Zara, a girl outside this druidic battleground who stumbles on its secrets.

But what the series is actually about is the painful, visceral horror of growing up with trauma, raised by parents who are at best disappointing, and at worst outright abusive. Both Wren and David have been raised by parents (or parental figures) who view them as weapons to be wielded, keeping secrets from them the better to mould them into perfect, unquestioning, loyal soldiers. Zara’s father is a liar and a cheat, and his actions are destroying his marriage, leaving Zara’s mother emotionally absent and unable to recognise or mitigate her daughter’s deep pain. The druidic magic which permeates every corner of the characters’ lives is violent, cruel, and violating, bound up in an honour culture of brutal loyalty for the sake of the cause, and a tendency among both judges and augurs to view their foot soldiers as expendable. The bitter weight of parental expectation becomes monstrous and frightening.

The solution, in the face of all this cruelty, is kindness, truth, and an active rejection of familial cycles of abuse and violence. The judges’ and augurs’ battle of life and death is played out in rural Irish fields and hedgerows, ruined houses, and the gossipy high streets of small, insular towns, and Watson evokes brilliantly the secretive claustrophobia of living in such a small community where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and the weight of distant historical slights is still felt centuries later. Her teenage narrators must each individually make the choice to move beyond that: to reach out, to think creatively and compassionately, to end the war, and, hardest of all, to think of themselves not as weapons but as people. The result is at once satisfying, hopeful, and healing.