The Story Collector (June 2018, Urbane Publications), by Evie Gaughan–author of The Heirloom and The Mysterious Bakery On Rue De Paris–is a haunting mystery novel set in Ireland. Part fantasy, part magical realism, part literary, The Storyteller is narrated in a parallel timeline, from the perspectives of modern-day Sarah Harper and the journal entries of Anna Butler, a farmer’s daughter, a century before.
Sarah visits Ireland on a drunken whim, needing to get over loss she experienced in the United States, and ultimately decides to explore this land of folklore, myth, and natural beauty. One of the first thing she learns is that hawthorn trees are sacred due to fairy mythology–but we also get a sense in reading this tale that all trees are sacred when it comes down to it. As Sarah learns, most folks nowadays would laugh at the idea of fairies traveling between this world and theirs–via mounds or hawthorn trees–but it’s not so uncommon to find a hawthorn tree still standing in the midst of a farmer’s field, the land having been plowed around it. In such a tree, she finds the hidden journals of Anna, who lived 100 years before. Sarah is also renting the cottage that had been on the Anna Butler’s farm. I talked with Evie about the hawthorn tree–as part of my world eco-fiction series. She tells me:
The hawthorn tree is a sacred tree in Ireland. They grace every hedgerow and woodland across the country, blooming majestically with little white flowers every May. On many farms, you will come across a large, open field with animals grazing and one solitary tree providing welcome shelter. This will undoubtedly be a hawthorn, because no farmer would dare take a saw to it for fear of bad luck
Between discovering the local village of Thornwood, and its inhabitants, particularly handsome Oran Sweeny and his daughter Hazel, Sarah reads passages of Anna’s diary, getting to know the legends of na Daoine Maithe (the Good People), or fairies. In Anna’s time, an interesting anthropologist, Harold Griffin-Krauss, comes from America to Thornwood Village and hires Anna to help him collect fairy stories. He wants to know what people believe in the early 20th century. Anna translates the stories told by locals from Irish to English. So together they visit villagers to learn more about legends, curses, and, in particular, varying degrees of suppression of beliefs.
In this journey of collecting stories, Anna and Harold come upon a secret that threatens their community and way of life. Anna finds herself at the heart of the mystery–similar to Sarah one-hundred years later who gets caught up in the story. The dark secret of the otherworld enchants and unnerves both women. Is the truth real? Or just superstition? Perhaps we will never know, but the truth is often subjective.
I found myself caught up in the story, partly because I was able to virtually revisit Ireland, a place I have great memories of, but also because Evie’s prose is magnetic and haunting. Evie and I talked a great deal about how important the natural environment is in the novel, combined with how the past can inform the present. As NowNovel.com points out, in an article titled, World Building Questions: Writing the Natural Environment, “The natural environment is omnipresent in the history of myth and storytelling.”
Evie states:
Folklore, I believe, is our collective unconscious and something we must preserve in order to retain a sense of ourselves and our place on this earth. I’m not an expert, but I do feel that the further we move away from our past, our ancestry, our heritage, the less human we become. I know that sounds dramatic, but when you think of how we are often described as ‘robots’ sitting in front of screens, or ‘zombies’ with our smart phones, it makes sense. There is so much beauty in the natural world, where we can find solace and (as Sarah did in the book) healing. At its very essence, my inspiration for writing this story was to re-engage people with our folklore and mythology, so the idea of preservation is very important to me.
As a child, I loved fantasies, and while this novel is part-fantasy, it’s also seeped in magical realism–a genre in which magical elements make sense in, in this case, the cultural history and reality of Ireland. And the novel puts into place a structure for questioning fantasy and lore in the form of the anthropologist Harold, who is a scientist gathering data. According to Bookriot’s explanation of magical realism:
There is a distortion effect in the very fiber of the prose that forces the reader to question what is real and often opens up avenues of reality we may not have thought possible before reading the story. The realities being questioned can be societal, familial, mental, and emotional, just to name a few.
The Story Collector is an intriguing tale of folklore and culture, stories and natural landscapes, and, of course, love. While romance is sprinkled into The Story Collector, we learn that chance can take it away or make it stronger. It’s all fate (one of the origins of the word fairy). Most interestingly, this tale, like many others combining folklore with the contemporary times, shows how slowly ideology changes. Fairy lore was, at one time in Ireland, central to the fabric of the culture. Now, though most don’t outwardly believe in fairies, perhaps that suppression of belief comes into play when it comes to cutting down a sacred tree. After reading this tale, I thought to myself, “Would I cut down a hawthorn tree in the middle of my field?” No was my answer to myself. But why? I cannot answer that.
