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The Changeling of Finnistuath
by Kate Horsley
Shambhala Publications, 2004, 352 pages
Confessions of a Pagan Nun
by Kate Horsley
Shambhala Publications, 2002, 208 pages
Reviewed by Christy Risser-Milne
Like the Irish fairies inhabiting the lands and imaginations of the characters in The Changeling of Finnistuath, Kate Horsley writes a narrative that draws the reader into another world, the only escape from which is to reach her final pages and close the book; although even then the characters seem to follow you into this world’s realm. Favoring the Ireland of the plague-ridden Dark Ages, Horsley renders a picture of peasant life under the control of indifferent English lords and a priest who sees his fake relics as a means of monetary gain.
Into this world is born Grey, biologically a girl, but called a boy by both her mother and the midwife who delivered her. This strange ruse is brought about through the threat by the father to kill the baby if it is another girl. Over the years, Grey lives as a boy, a woman, a whore, a warrior, and a mother.
It is the complex and, from a twenty-first century perspective, often self-defeating, societal structure that necessitates this shifting identity. Grey must be a boy to carry on “his” father’s name. By virtue of puberty, Grey becomes a secret woman who, when discovered by a boy-loving priest, becomes a whore. By being forced into the role of a whore, Grey becomes a mother. The warrior identity is really the only identity Grey gives herself in the book, and it is, unfortunately, the least developed.
Horsley sets up a promising sequence in which Grey and a friend were to invade the English Lord’s manor in order to recover Grey’s abducted child. There is description of the initial sequence in which Grey emerges from the woods, stark naked in order to distract guards of the manor. Horsley’s vivid narrative leads the reader to believe that this powerful woman is about to annihilate those who have stolen her beloved child. Instead, the narrative skips from the naked emergence to Grey, her friend, and her child racing away from the manor on stolen horses.
Narratives describing the horror of the Black Death are excellent. The fear and superstition surrounding it, as well as the profiteering of the gravediggers, feels real. Listen carefully, and you may be able to hear the death moans of the priests in the monastery.
The longest and, in many ways most interesting, section of the book is the sequence in which Grey is forced into the life of a whore. Grey is kept by a priest in a monastery as his servant boy, all the while using Grey as a sex toy for other monks and priests who can do favors for the priest controlling her. It becomes obvious rather quickly that Horsley has little love of priests and the organized Christian Church -- at least in the context of the Dark Ages.
Horsley accurately renders the denigration of traditional Irish Celtic ways by the Roman-influenced English church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The priests destroy life-saving herbs because they are considered to be of the devil. God is present only in the churches built by the English. Anyone who acknowledges God’s presence in creation is a heretic who may be killed.
Nowhere is the suppression more acutely obvious than in Horsley’s earlier novel, Confessions of a Pagan Nun.
Set several centuries earlier than Changeling, Confessions of a Pagan Nun “translates” the diary of Gwynneve, a woman living at the time of the English religious conquest of Ireland. Gwynneve simply cannot understand why the Christian priests are so angry at the gods of Ireland. Why are the two traditions, that of the Irish people and that of the Christian God, treated as being wholly divergent? To her mind, and through Horsley’s explanation, they are kindred faiths.
Gwynneve, a druid by training, watches helpless as the traditions and faith of her kindred are changed to those of the English/Roman invaders. Eventually, out of sheer necessity for survival, Gwynneve herself claims a conversion to Christianity and joins a cloistered group of nuns. Because she is able to read and write, she becomes a scribe, transcribing the works of Patrick and Augustine. Yet, in spite of reading and comprehending the words of these respected and venerated religious men, she cannot quite relinquish her belief in the traditional Celtic ways.
An interesting side note is that Horsley brings into this story what is known among Christian scholars as the Pelagian heresy. Pelagius is thought by some to be an Irishman who got into a battle of words with the wrong Christians. His bringing together of the traditional theologies of the Celts and the Christians has, for some thirteen centuries, been considered one of the most heinous heresies of all time. Ironically, this judgement is based largely upon the writings of those who disagreed with Pelagius. Little of his own writing has survived to speak for itself.
Each of these titles has much to commend it in terms of a story that grabs, engages and won’t let go of the reader. Horsley spins a yarn as strong as any Irish storyteller I’ve ever known (although she’s an American living in New Mexico). Don’t take her histories too seriously, though, as there are inconsistencies and layers added which come from a twenty-first-century perspective. Realizing these stories are not intended as history lessons is easy -- just remember the fairies, and that Horsley is working with them.
Christy Risser-Milne is a freelance writer and photographer living in Boston, Massachusetts.
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