The Burning of Bridget Cleary. By Angela Bourke. Pimlico. 209pp. £10
Angela Bourke has taken the true and tragic events of Bridget Cleary's death and created a book that is as dramatic a murder mystery as any devotee of the genre could long for. This is as she intended: a senior lecturer in Irish at UCD and an expert in the Irish oral tradition, Bourke has chosen story as the medium to present her research because "narrative has the power to convey ideas".
And it is the rich abundance of ideas that makes this book a uniquely important historical work. She has combined detective work with acute social analysis of the rural/ urban divide, the conflict between old and new, and then integrated both with meticulous original scholarship.
The result must have permanent implications for our understanding of Irish folklore. Certainly, we will not be able to think the same way again of fairy tales as presented by Yeats (whom the author disposes of, along with George Russell, as `literary Protestants with a taste for mysticism").
Four volumes of Yeats's work on the tales of the peasantry had been published to a warm response from civilised Ireland when Bridget Cleary met her terrifying end in March of 1895. Civilised Ireland recoiled, followed by the civilised world.
Ballyvedlea and Hottentots were spoken of in the same breath as the Church, the law and the press, as far as the New York Times saw fairy-belief of a dark and barbaric strain at work in the Cleary cottage. This was hardly what the cultural revivalists had in mind. Even the trial judge in his summing-up referred to darkness: moral, religious, preternatural.
But what Bourke reveals is a community not really any darker than those in any urban metropolis of our own time. Human frailty of one kind or another was most certainly evident in the Cleary cottage, compounded by exhaustion, delusion and rage. The evidence, though, suggests that few of those present believed literally in fairies, and that there were about as many gullible in that regard in 19th-century Ireland as there are now who turn trustingly to horoscopes, fortune tellers, or the healing power of crystals.
In a gentle, almost leisurely way, Bourke points out that fairy tales were not a matter of belief but of social usefulness. In an oral tradition, the legends served many purposes, as a code of acceptable behaviour and as an art form with "the potential to express profound truths and intense emotions . . . particularly well-suited to the expression of ambivalence and ambiguity".
Fairy-narrative was part of the culture of the nod and the wink, allowing one thing to be said and another meant. "It permits face-saving lies to be told and disturbing narratives to be safely detoured into fiction . . ." In societies of the poor and non-literate, forced to live in mutual reliance and close proximity, ambiguity was a necessity if equilibrium was to be maintained.
As a euphemism, to describe someone who had transgressed the code as "away with the fairies" left everything open; the possibility of chastisement followed by forgiveness or blame as required. It is likely that no one really intended Bridget Cleary to die.
But then the fairy narrative was also a powerful imaginative tool, "with the same potential for misuse as mind-altering drugs and therapies. In 19th-century Ireland it was a currency, capable of being used for good or evil". Bionn dha insint ar gach sceal, agus dha ghabhail deag ar amhran, Bourke comments at the end of her book: there are two ways of telling every story, and 12 ways of singing a song.
Her way of telling this story has swung a lantern over a world of presumed fantasy and superstition and illuminated instead something quite different: a social order served by a system subtly fitted to its needs, and open as all human systems are to corruption with terrible consequences.
Mary Maher is an Irish Times journalist