Eden’s Shore
By Oisín Fagan
In that dimple of European history between the French Revolution and the coronation of Queen Victoria, there lived a not inconsiderable number of men 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. His story ends up functioning almost as a prologue to the novel. This sprawling epic of the late 18th-century Americas examines questions of complicity, violence, the limits of philosophy, and what place love could have – what redemption it might begin to offer – in a world governed by the extractive logics of colonialism. If that sounds like an enormous drag, I assure you, this novel is unexpectedly hilarious and very beautiful. As well as deftly controlling and differentiating a vividly realised ensemble of dreamers, drinkers and mercurial freebooters, Fagan achieves a sultry, skirling prose that captures with equal precision both the beauty of the tropics and the spiritual and physical mutilations practised in their shade-bound midst. AK Blakemore
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