LITERARY WEATHER: Rain might be the order of the month. But let's not forget the importance of the wind in our weather - and our books.
This summer sees the bicentenary of the birth in 1802 of Alexandre Dumas, père. Dumas is chiefly remembered nowadays for two romantic novels: in The Three Musketeers you will find much derring-do and buckling of swash, but nestling within the intrigue and mystery of The Count of Monte Cristo is a little gem of meteorology - a chilling picture of a terrain perennially affected by the mistral.
The mistral is a cold, dry, penetrating, parching wind in the south of France that sweeps down the valley of the Rhone at intervals, most frequently in winter and in early spring. It drives the local populace indoors, to wait behind closed shutters until this raw and dusty menace spends itself. The mistral is most common in the region around Avignon and Marseilles, where indeed Dumas sites the Inn of Pont du Gard, on whose landlord, Gaspard Caderousse, the anti-hero Edmond Dantes plans to take revenge.
Dumas describes vividly how the mistral, "the scourge of Provence", leaves its mark upon the countryside: "A few dingy olives and some stunted fig trees struggled hard for life, but their withered dusty foliage showed abundantly how unequal was the conflict."
The scourge of Provence is just one of several hundred winds around the world whose particular characteristics are such that local inhabitants have given them a special name. Nor is Dumas the only novelist to have exploited their potential. In P.C. Wren's Beau Geste, for example, the focus is on the harmattan.
This stirring yarn tells of three affluent young men who, for the very noblest of reasons, forsake their comfortable English life to subject themselves to the harsh conditions of the Foreign Legion. Our heroes, of course, are faultless to a man, and their hardships are endured with cheerful fortitude. But still, "Life at Zinderneuf was not really life so much as the avoidance of death - death from sunstroke, heatstroke, monotony, or even madness."
Then, of course, there was wind: "Across all, the harmattan blew hard, that terrible wind that carries the Saharan dust a hundred miles to sea, not so much as a sandstorm, but as a mist or fog or dust as fine as flour, filling the eyes, the lungs, the pores of the skin, the nose and throat; getting into the locks of rifles, the works of watches, defiling water, food and everything else; rendering life a burden and a curse."
By far the most comprehensive literary list of local winds is to be found in a relatively recent novel. In the early pages of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, the eponymous Englishman sets the scene by describing in his notebook how "There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome, and the bistroz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days, burying villages."
The English patient goes on to name several dozen other winds that are rarely heard of outside their local areas of influence. "And the nafhat, a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen, a violent and cold south-westerly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls'. The beskabar, a black and dry north-easterly out of the Caucasus, the 'black wind'."
In Ireland, we have never attempted to name our winds like this, but Myles na gCopaleen, in The Third Policeman, produces a theory equally exotic. "No doubt you are aware," he writes, "that the winds have colours, and that a record of this belief can be found in the literature of all ancient peoples. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine white shining silver; the north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend the whole day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, and the magic of neighbouring winds when they are interweaved like ribbons at a wedding."
