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The Meeting of the Waters: Book One of the Watchers
Trilogy
by Caiseal Mór
(Earthlight, £6.99, 477 pages, paperback, first published in
Australia 2000, this edition published 17 July 2003.)
Review by Nicholas Whyte
Many authors have attempted to grapple with Irish mythology and transform
it into something lucrative for today's market; there  seems
to be a whole sub-genre of Celtic Mist fantasy, which no doubt sells
well among the 60 million strong Irish diaspora, with a subsidiary market
among the smaller (but probably on average more highbrow) Pagan community.
I blame Marion Zimmer Bradley, myself; her Mists of Avalon is
taken almost as holy writ in some quarters. (Perhaps Robin of Sherwood
should take some responsibility too.)
Caiseal Mór, an Irish Australian writer, has chosen not to
take the tried and tested tropes of Cuchulain or Finn MacCool, but instead
tries here to inject some life into the obscure story of the arrival
of the Celts in an island populated by the Fir Bolgs and the Tuatha
de Danaan. (Julian May, of course, plundered this myth much more memorably
in her Saga of the Exiles.) The story revolves around the royal
household of the last Fir Bolg king, pushed by the druids and bards
into allying with his traditional enemies against the invaders, with
the sinister supernatural Watchers (who are the author's own invention)
trying to sow dissension and chaos.
It's a pleasant read, but not really profound. It's also too long,
with too much dialogue and not enough action. The dialogue is a bit
clunky as well; selecting a page at random I find characters stating,
raging, laughing, telling, frowning, confessing and demanding in direct
speech, but without actually saying anything. The characters
are nicely sketched, though the means and motivation of the villains
remain unclear, and the effectiveness of magic seems entirely dependent
on the needs of the plot.
What I miss most in Mór's work is a real sense of place. Although
the book is supposedly set in what is now County Clare, which has a
distinctive limestone terrain, there is barely a mention of the physical
surroundings -- enough to set each scene and no more; it feels like
a series of close-range snapshots rather than a landscape. What geography
there is seems rather arbitrary. One crucial scene takes place in a
forest that just happened to be in the way -- an unnamed forest, of
which we have not previously heard, though within easy walking distance
of our central characters' home.
Anyway, this is the first book of the author's second trilogy, so there
is clearly a market out there for him. I'm afraid I don't think I am
a likely future reader myself.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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