Product Description

Driven from the only home he has known during Ireland’s Great Hunger of 1847, Fergus O’Brien makes the harrowing journey from County Clare to America, traveling with bold girls, pearl boys, navvies, and highwaymen. Along the way, Fergus meets his three passionate loves–Phoebe, Luke, and Molly–vivid, unforgettable characters, fresh and willful.

Based on Peter Behrens’s own family history, The Law of Dreams is lyrical, emotional, and thoroughly extraordinary–a searing tale of ardent struggle and ultimate perseverance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32690 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-28
• Released on: 2007-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Screenwriter Behrens follows his 1987 story collection, Night Driving, with an ambitious epic that follows a hapless wee lad from the rotten potato fields of 1847 Ireland to a New England horse ranch. Fergus O'Brien, the teenage son of a tenant farmer, is sent to a workhouse after his parents are murdered. He quickly escapes, joins a band of brigands and, after raiding his former landlord's farm, drifts to Dublin and then to Liverpool, where he is primed to work as a "pearl boy" (read: male prostitute). He hits the road again, this time settling in Wales, where he works on a rail line and meets Red Molly, a married woman who becomes his lover and traveling companion to America, where he plans to become a horse trader. The book veers dangerously close to melodrama on more than a few occasions, and Fergus, for all the contretemps encountered and indignities suffered, remains thin and unconvincing as a narrator. But readers may be able to overlook Behrens's authorial missteps and enjoy the sprawling, cinematically rendered immigrant story. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Behrens's impressive, swiftly paced saga tracks the life of an Irish boy after his family dies during the Great Potato Famine. Fifteen-year-old Fergus O'Brien takes up with a group of child bandits in Limerick, then makes his way to North Wales, where he works as a "tip boy" (a dangerous job that involves emptying carts of earth being cleared for the railroads). By the time he sets sail for Canada, hoping to make a living as a horse dealer, it is hard to believe that only a year has passed, such is the variety of his experience. In scope and subject, Behrens's work recalls Liam O'Flaherty's epic novel "Famine"; both writers have a stark style admirably suited to conveying the horrors of starvation and despair. But Behrens's language also has a visceral rhythm, and his similes meld the humble with the lyrical: whales rise "hissing" in a river, light "stutters" off an iron roof.
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From The Washington Post
The Law of Dreams is a fearsome story of such prolonged agony and unquenchable spirit that you can't escape till the final page abandons you to astonished silence. Peter Behrens, a screenwriter who lives in Maine, based this debut novel on his family's history in Ireland, but the private tragedy he describes was common to hundreds of thousands of people during the Great Famine of 1847, and the language he uses constantly soars above that calamity toward the mystery of human struggle.

His young hero, Fergus O'Brien, endures abuses and deprivations that would make a lesser man feral, but there's a native decency in him, a natural grace that renders his decision to survive all the more agonizing. He belongs to a tenant family that subsists for 10 months of every year on the potatoes they grow on a quarter-acre of mountainous land. It's a tough existence, but Fergus prides himself on caring for his mother and sisters, and there's pleasure in the success of his labor: "Potatoes were not made or cut, like the farmer's hay or corn," Behrens writes. "They were lifted, joyfully, the surprise of the world."

We meet Fergus just before a virulent mold spreads across Ireland, withering and blighting the country's crop. Throughout the novel, Behrens stays close to Fergus's experience and knowledge, but everything that Fergus witnesses resonates with the horrible facts of this period. About a third of the 8 million people in Ireland lived almost exclusively on potatoes before the blight struck. Farmers were completely helpless to stop it. Cruel economic policies in England quickly exacerbated the situation, and widespread poverty, starvation and disease followed. Those who survived (and many who were soon to die) took to the roads, desperate for food.

That's the general history most of us know, but in this extraordinary novel Behrens conveys a kind of visceral comprehension of the events that only one who survived them could surpass. Ten weeks into the famine, Fergus's stubborn father still refuses to take his family away, even as their landlord rides around the mountain knocking down shacks and sending families off with a little money. In the first of many unforgettable scenes, Fergus's siblings and parents are finally burned alive in their beds, too weak with hunger even to object. Only Fergus survives, and, in what's considered a great act of charity, he's deposited in a workhouse, where he's immediately stripped, shaved and sprayed with acid to kill the lice. "Paupers lay about the yard," Behrens writes, "soft as gutted trout."

Fergus soon realizes that the workhouse is a trap where he'll either be starved to death or carried off by fever. Over and over, he confronts the frightening powerlessness of his position, but it never loses its ability to shock him -- or us: "Awareness pierces the chest like a spike being driven in. The world doesn't belong to you. Perhaps you belong to the world, but that's another matter." Fergus reaches out everywhere for friendship and love; he's a kind, loyal young man, but he's doomed to outlive his companions, constantly forced to pull pennies from the pockets of freshly dead friends who won't need them anymore. "You had to stay alive," Behrens writes, "every instinct told you. Stay in your life as long as you can. If only to see what would happen. Every breath told you to keep breathing."

When he manages to break out of the workhouse, his ordeal continues: He joins a gang of young thieves, he lives in a whorehouse, and he works on the rails spreading across Ireland almost as fast as the potato blight. All this time, he dreams of a place called America, about which he knows absolutely nothing. Still, a vague sense of its possibility eventually draws him across the Atlantic in one of the novel's most arduous sections.

The Law of Dreams rings with a strange, hard poetry, a mingling of Behrens's rich narrative voice and scraps of startling wisdom that seem to emanate directly from Fergus's mind. Here he is in Liverpool, outside a pub, starving and barefoot, as always:

"Trying to make up his mind, he hopped restlessly from one foot to another, one coin in each fist. The door opened and [a] pack of thick-shouldered men came out, and he caught a tantalizing whiff of the smoky, meaty atmosphere within.

"You could stand outside, bootless and chewing fear like a baby; or take the bold plunge. Offer a coin for a feed and see if they would take it.

"The world, latent; a gun loaded with chance and mistakes."

In the life of this determined young man, Behrens illuminates one of the 19th century's greatest tragedies and the massive migration it launched. A novel that animates the past this vibrantly should make volumes of mere history blush. "Life burns hot," Fergus thinks, and so do these pages.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Truth of Dreams
History and biography are already stories, so why bother with historical fiction and additional layers of make-believe? In The Law of Dreams, Peter Behrens shows why. The book centers on a young 19th-century Irishman, Fergus O'Brien, who is driven by circumstance, some imposed and some of his own making, first to England and then America. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sees history as a nightmare from which he is trying to awaken; half a century earlier, the hero of Behrens' odyssey lives the Irish nightmare of famine and exploitation. Fergus can't escape from history; the best he, or indeed anyone, can do is to follow the "law of dreams": keep moving, in the hope of creating space for possibility and further dreams. Life teaches Fergus all too well that dreams can turn into nightmares, but its hard lessons never extinguish the spirit that drives him forward, or at least onward. Behrens shows, through language that is sometimes brutally poetic and a narrative drive that is always strongly focused, how the forces of history intersect with the contingencies of everyday life to forge our selves and our destinies. A history that is both remotely of the past and ever-present in the products of that past is brought to life through events and characters that are deeply imagined and richly described. My sole disappointment is that this is Behrens' first novel, so I'll be denied the pleasure of paging through his backlist. At least I have the consolation of having discovered a major writer and realizing that historical fiction can treat significant areas of human experience in ways that its more academic relatives aren't equipped to approach.

a superb novel
I read this book at a gallop. The language is spare, brisk, and sometimes achingly beautiful. The world that Peter Behrens evokes is a brutal place, full of accident and malice, loss and longing, and endlessly surprising. To what lengths will human beings go in order to survive? Can interpersonal relationships be trusted, or is each person essentially alone? What do we lose or gain when we try to leave the past behind? What combination of information and sheer desire allows -- even impels -- us to look to the future with hope? These are some of the questions that the novel raises as Fergus, its central protagonist, struggles to save not only his physical life but also the life of his soul -- his integrity and his capacity for kindness.
There is only one thing that bothered me about The Law of Dreams: now that I've finished it, I don't know what to read next. Most other novels seem limp by comparison. Thank you, Peter Behrens, for a fabulous book.

brilliant
The Law of Dreams is an astonishing excavation of both human vulnerability and resilience. Whether you give a rotten potato for historical fiction, or Irish history, or not, Fergus's story will compel you to keep on with it. The genius of it lies in the author's gift for blending traditional, familiar storytelling with a starker more modern but no less lyrical voice you've never heard before. His characters speak like no others and though a muscular novel, it moves inexorably towards its finish with the lean telling of a short story. Indeed, Peter Behrens is able to bring together seemingly disparate styles of storytelling -- ancient and modern, language-drunk and spare -- and the final effect is one of enduring beauty and relevance. The book tells an archetypal and epic story but perhaps its best bits lie in the dark corners that Behrens illuminates with his particular gift for immediate, sensory detail. While the story is loaded with cinematic action and peopled with a huge cast of characters, private, interior moments of melancholy are equally recognized within the great scope of the author's abilities.