Set in the remote countryside of the west of Ireland, The Beasts They Turned Away, the debut novel by Ryan Dennis, follows an ailing yet stubborn farmer and the mute child he cares for, a pair at odds with both the surrounding community and the wider world which seems intent on its gradual invasion. There’s an unspoken history, talk of a curse. A sense that progress and ruin are intertwined. Dennis’s characters carry an innate understanding of Paul Virilio’s scepticism toward advancement. “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” Virilio wrote. “Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
What follows is an odd and haunting novel which holds its intentions close to its chest. With its grey skies and thick mud, the prose is rooted in the Irish land, but this realism is challenged by both the cryptic narrative and the half-deranged characters at its heart. The short chapters accentuate this sense, acting like jump cuts between scenes and lending the feel of a dream. The result is peculiar but stronger for it, addressing the concerns of twenty-first century rural living but evoking a far older relationship to the land and the people who work it. So though Dennis’s style slots in alongside contemporary works like Cynan Jones’s The Dig or Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, it does so while maintaining an unsettling strangeness that is entirely its own.
The Beasts They Turned Away is out via Epoque Press.