Nostos

Nostos by John Moriarty, 698 pages

"Nostos", I am told, means "homecoming", in particular referring to the homecomings of the heroes of the Trojan War.  In John Moriarty's poetic memoir, his particular home is an impoverished farm in the Irish countryside, a shadowy place of earth and blood, far from the seemingly well-ordered certainties of modernity.  He is exiled from this place by Darwin and his companions, whose arrival was as fatal to the old European mythos as that of Cortes was to the Aztecs.  His restless wanderings take him first to England, then to Greece, and finally to the New World, through myths both ancient and modern, before he is allowed to return at last to that still point he left in his beginning.

It is natural to compare Nostos to Finnegan's Wake, not only because the authors are both Irish, or because both delight in wordplay and allusion and repetition, or because the Liffey features in both works, or even because Moriarty explicitly references Joyce repeatedly.  Both attempt to describe something that eludes description, to discover or recover something mysterious yet fundamental, although Moriarty's commodius vicus of recirculation begins and ends upriver of Howth Castle and environs, and even beyond Eve and Adam.  Nostos is a unique and unforgettable work, full of beauty and wonder and (best of all) hope.