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The phrase is Wittgenstein’s, who in 1948 lived for several months in a cottage on the lip of Killary Harbour, in north-west Connemara. It was in that ascetic, westerly, ice-carved landscape that Wittgenstein found himself able to think, and while there he completed sections of his great last book, Philosophical Investigations. ‘I can only think clearly in the dark’, he observed, ‘and in Connemara I have found one of the last pools of darkness in Europe.’
Robinson takes Wittgenstein’s phrase as a sign beneath which to read Connemara: a landscape in which beauty and suffering wrap closely around one another, and in which geology and mythology fuse together as ‘systems of description of what can be seen in terms of what lies too deep to be seen’.
Each intricately structured chapter of the book begins in or at a specific Connemara place, before gyring off into history, metaphysics, politics, ecology, geology. Robinson weaves the stories and actions of smugglers, fabulists, priests, landowners, actors, farmers, fishermen, poets, herbalists, talkers, industrialists and entrepreneurs — the cast of people who comprise the alternative history of the region. He writes of Marconi, who established his first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission station on the edge of what is now Roundstone Bog; of the Cleggan fishing disaster of 1927, in which 16 men from a single small village were drowned by a storm that came upon them with murderous speed; of the Famine and its ‘persistent effects’ upon the landscape and human relations of the region; of the desperate history of the Letterfrack Industrial School, run by the Christian Brothers, where decades of physical punishment and sexual abuse of young boys took place, undenounced until recently.
One particularly brilliant chapter concerns the artist, Dorothy Cross who swims most days in a cove and sea-cave below her house [near Mullaghglass]; she sometimes takes a can of sardines down into the depths of Killary Harbour to feed conger eels, black monsters as long as herself that come wavering out of holes.
Cross is one among many divers into darkness — metaphorical and actual — about whom Robinson writes. For this is unmistakably a bleak book, that considers the many black aspects of Connemara’s past: poverty, famine, violent death, exile and emigration, sectarian conflict. Robinson also reflects sadly on Connemara’s present economic and ecological problems: how, after ‘the unimaginable climb out of the common grave of the Famine’, the region has failed to renew its old ways of life, its language and skills, so that the young need not leave for the cities and the attempts to employ them here would not disfigure the countryside.
But Robinson is also alert to the dreams, mirth and optimism that Connemara has inspired: flashes against the gloom. His sense of the region is probably closest to that of Oliver St John Gogarty, who wrote of the fairy land of Connemara, at the extreme end of Europe, [where] incongruities flow together at last…[where] the sweet and the bitter are blended.
Robinson describes himself as an ‘obsessive topographer’. His 36-year obsession, expressed as books and maps, has transformed the way the mid-west of Ireland is imagined, studied and encountered. Save for Iain Sinclair’s writing on London and its fringes, I can think of no comparable literary work that engages with a landscape on such a scale, at such density and with such intelligence. The Aran books are now firmly acknowledged as classics (I’ve just written an introduction to Pilgrimage, for its reissue by the superb New York Review of Books Classics series), and I have little doubt that the Connemara trilogy will attract similar renown.
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