Terminology, pace of story hurt ‘Brenach’

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books set in the Pine Tree State or with other local ties.

THE HARP OF BRENACH, by Clifford Stevens, Jay Street Publishers, New York, N.Y.; 372 pages, paperback, $17.95

Jeffrey McCabe, a brilliant young man who speaks fluent Latin, has studied Jung and researched chaos theory, transfers to College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor to pursue a master of philosophy in Human Ecology. During a vision quest near Otter Cliffs, McCabe spies what appears to be a doorway in the cliff face. Joined by experts on Celtic history and religion, he discovers a many-chambered monastery filled with treasures brought from Ireland centuries ago. He also meets a centuries-old monk and discovers his destiny.

“The Harp of Brenach” moves rather slowly, the way historical novels and sagas tend to, with fits of adventure. At certain points it reads like the Hardy Boys meet Indiana Jones. At others, the storyline drags. The middle section features extensive background on the life and times of the Irish monks interspersed with lengthy passages of bardic poetry. The Vikings come off rather poorly – like the barbarians in the Capital One commercials, only worse. Celtic terms – skellig, gillie and custos are among the most used – are explained, but a glossary would have been helpful.

Mount Desert Islanders will be especially engaged. Nice to have MDI transformed into the Irish’s Isle of the Blessed or Tir na n’Og, “beautiful to behold and fragrant with apples.” There are references to the Jackson Laboratory, Wendell Gilley Museum and Bar Harbor Airport. COA should be most pleased by the promotion: on several occasions the college is likened to Plato’s Academy (a kinship Father Stevens may have picked up from the Washington Post columnist Coleman McCarthy who famously made that analogy).

Father Stevens, a priest of the Archdiocese of Omaha, Neb., has written dozens of novels based on religious history. The beauty of this particular book lies in the plausibility of its implausible premise. That there might actually be such an ancient retreat somewhere in the cliffs of Mount Desert Island makes one want to start exploring the coastline.

The book deserves a D for design: perfunctory cover art (a digital rendering of a harp), miserable typeface, plus hundreds of typos. Its engaging conceit, however, manages to rescue it. As one character puts it, “This is like going back and talking to Homer on the shores of ancient Greece.”

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

STOLEN ISLAND REVIEW 2005, University of Maine, Orono; 70 pages, large format perfect bound; free.

Stolen Island Review is the literary magazine published annually by UMaine graduate students. This year’s edition, released in July, contains only poetry, no fiction.

You can get a fairly accurate picture of what’s on the graduate students’ literary minds from these entries, and some of it is worth paying attention to because of a certain amount of raw energy uncharacteristic of academic writing programs.

The two most evocative and emotionally penetrating poems in the collection are by Burton Hatlen, one of UMaine’s senior professors – the editors wisely open the magazine with “Mappings.” Travis Baker nails the academic wood solidly in “Christmas Comes But Once a Year,” a three-line piece of intentional doggerel hyperbloated by a page of scholarly footnotes in tiny type. Matthew Fessenden’s “unreading,” on a similar topic, exemplifies the energy.

The magazine closes on the ridiculous, about 20 pages of deliberate and worthless nonsense by Kevin Davies, who may well be unaware that experiments with odd and various typefaces exhausted themselves more than 80 years ago, and that by 25 years ago about as much as should be done publicly with kooky-sounding but thoughtless word combinations, had been done. System of a Down has butchered this general category of special effects far more entertainingly, Kevin.

To find out what’s going on, you can get a free copy of Stolen Island Review by e-mailing Travis Baker at travis.baker@umit.maine.edu or writing to him c/o English department, Neville Hall, University of Maine, Orono 04469.