Review: Flint and Mirror, by John Crowley

“In every true story there is a ford.”

---Flint and Mirror, page 167

John Crowley threatened that his 2018 novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr was his last. Luckily for us, he was bluffing.

Flint and Mirror bills itself as a novel of history and magic. Accurately, as far as it goes. True, its subject matter is Elizabeth I’s constant—but barely intermittently successful—efforts to completely subjugate her Irish dominion under English administration, supported by local elements of the indigenous aristocracy whom the unsympathetic might now call quislings. That judgment might be a tad harsh; Ireland had been united more frequently in fable than memory, if at all, and local chiefs saw no shame in accepting help from overseas against their neighbors’ pretences. Thus tribal heads and the descendants of Norman interlopers from previous centuries frequently bore titles bestowed by the English crown. Such was the novel’s protagonist, Hugh O’Neil, who became not only Earl of Tyrone by Elizabeth’s gift, but an O’Neil—the O’Neil, head of his numerous tribe through a not entirely uncontested inheritance.

But that was later. Before is where the magic comes in.

As a boy Hugh is sent to England, ostensibly to polish off some rough Irish edges and acquire some smooth English surface, but in part as a hostage against his family’s good behavior. On his departure, a blind bard—and aren’t they all?—gives him one of the two talismans around which the book revolves. It’s a curiously carved piece of flint. When it’s received Hugh sees, at the edge of perception, some of the otherworldy figures that populate his island’s mists and lakes and the interiors of its hills, and on whom he can call in his hour of need.

In England he acquires the other. Soon a favorite at Court, he receives from John Dee—a figure who appears frequently in Crowley’s other work—Elizabeth’s court astrologer, alchemist, and angelologist, a bit of mirror through which he can occasionally see, and even communicate with, the Queen. Neither this nor the flint, we see, will serve him well.

On his return to Ireland, Hugh becomes embroiled not only in the island’s factional and national turmoil but his own family’s. Crowley traces the machinations, marriages, and murders by which he achieved ascendancy over his clan and territories, which he ruled as an absolute monarch. At the same time he is by turns an ally to Tudor interests and Irish insurgents as expedience dictates.

But ultimately he crosses the ford and becomes a ceaseless antagonist to England in an almost-successful grinding battle known as the Nine Years’ War. Despite initial successes—one, the Battle of the Yellow Ford, considered to be the worst defeat ever suffered by the English in Ireland, and they’ve had some whoppers—O’Neill had a catastrophic loss outside Kinsale. As Crowley shows it, his ruin was in part the result of his misplaced reliance on the bit of flint he’d been given so long before. Nor can Elizabeth’s mirror save him; she’d long since branded him a traitor, and even had she been inclined to exercise her legendary fickleness in his favor, James would shortly occupy her throne. After burning his own castle to keep it from English hands and suffering a humiliating trick in negotiations, Hugh flees to Rome as his family and surviving supporters shelter in Spain—a familiar story leading one to wonder whether, if all Ireland’s exiles and expatriates were ever to return, that misfortunate island would sink under their weight?

Aside from the talismans of the title, magic is always present in the story. One plot line features a silkie, a shapeshifting seal that emerges from the water to mate with a woman who must then surrender their child to the sea. The rebellion of the Earl of Essex is seen to have had its roots in a sighting of fairies—described as “transparent children”—at which he becomes infected with a madness that leads to suicidal treason. (When his head and body, now separate, are laid to rest in the Tower Yard church, the ghost of Anne Boleyn whispers him a welcome.) And the recurring presence of Dr. John Dee is never without the supernatural; one riveting, cinematic passage describes his disembodied presence floating through the Escorial to scry Philip II ordering the Armada, enabling him to forewarn England.

However deeply informed and lovingly plotted, this book’s greatest appeal is its author’s prose. None is so well-equipped as Crowley to dissect and illuminate Ireland’s ancient strife as well as its transcendent myths. This is a book not to be missed.