Listen to the Land Speak review: Fractal account of myth, history and loss

Much of Manchán Magan’s work is concerned with loss and the retention of precious remnants. In his Tamagotchi projects, Magan sought to preserve Irish words slipping from the lexicon. In 32 Words for Field (2020), which began as a cult hit, becoming one of the most talked-about Irish books in recent times, the focus was on the wealth of beauty within the Irish language and how it connects us to place, spirituality, nature and each other.

In Listen to the Land Speak, he offers a fractal version of Ireland, where myth overlaps with history, the fantastical with the practical, the superstitious with the scientific. “Just as a fractal can be limited to a finite area and yet is infinitely magnifiable,” he writes, “so too is Ireland host to an infinity of wisdom and wonder.”

Here, we are presented with how loss typifies our land; the loss of bogland, of great oaks and other trees and forests, of fairy forts, neolithic sites, place names, and ancient roads, but most of all, the loss of wisdom and the kind of knowledge that, were it known and appreciated more widely, could inform a deeper connection from which a new spring could rise.

Eclectic approach

Magan’s eclectic approach to colouring things in for the reader happily traverses the anthropological, philosophical, environmental and experiential. The results are hugely informative and entertaining. Magan doesn’t stoke rage, but it’s hard not to miss what we’ve thrown away. Simultaneously, there are moments of true awe here regarding what still exists in Ireland, from Lough Gur to Uisneach, hurling to Samhain, fairy stories to bog bodies.

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There is a strange comfort in his assessment of our context. St Patrick does not come off well. Of successive government’s cavalier attitude to the sanctity of our natural riches being ever-stripped, he offers, “Only in traumatised countries would the state decide that maximising profits and maintaining industrial growth should take precedence. This is because the connection with heritage and with the legacy of those who preceded us isn’t necessarily present in colonised societies.”

Besides containing a wealth of history and mythology – inextricably linked of course, this is Ireland after all – Magan has composed an antidote to the paralysing nihilism of the overwhelming climate crisis discourse. Throughout it all is an implicit call to action that could well be transformative.