Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Unfortunately, this novel wasn't for me. I found the writing style extremely grating and difficult to get through, which ultimately made it really hard for me to read the novel. I was so attracted to the premise of this novel, specifically its historical elements, but the writing style just proved too distracting for me to look beyond it and focus on the story. I'm really interested in reading Fagan's other work, though.

I received this pre-publication e-book from John Murray Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. (Review posted on NetGalley, Goodreads and Amazon.)

It is the summer of 1348 in rural Ireland – stifling and oppressive, and the plague is rampant. A small group of travellers – an opportunistic young English nobleman intent on buying up land from plague-ravaged communities, his translator, a servant and a boy – arrive at the tiny town of Nobber. Their journey has been interrupted by marauding Gaels, and as they approach the town they come across a surreal sculpture, a wooden cross with live crows nailed to it.

You’d think this would be enough to warn them off, but no – they enter the town and meet the inhabitants. The mayor and priest are gone, killed or driven off by the townsfolk in some unspecified but violent incident, and an unnamed man is controlling the town on behalf of a sinister but absent figure named de Fonteroy, aided by the deranged blacksmith Colca. The inhabitants have been placed under strict curfew, ostensibly to stop the spread of the plague, although it seems Colca also has other motivations.

This book is an odd, dreamlike thing. It meanders and weaves, with prose at once vague and startlingly, shockingly lucid – a fever dream of a narrative, echoing the context of oppressive heat, madness, sickness and rot that pervades the story. We meet more of the inhabitants of the town, some locked in their homes in the stifling heat, and we follow some of them as the town descends further into madness and arrives at a final shocking denoument.

This hallucinatory quality is at once a strength of the book, and a weakness. The overbright, surreal quality of the writing is driven throughout the book, which is quite the feat by the author, but it is not easy to read for long periods, or to keep in memory – it twists and slips in one’s consciousness, with details and threads being lost or half-remembered. I had to backtrack a number of times, and even now, having finished the book and allowed myself a few days to process it, I don’t feel I have entirely come to grips with it.

As a debut novel it’s an impressive project, taking on themes of oppression, occupation, insanity and decay in a hyper-real narrative that challenges and ultimately shocks. I can’t honestly say it’s an easy read, but it certainly repays perseverance.

From the outset reading this book I felt that the writing style didn't flow for me and I found it hard to become absorbed in the book. The story also didn't do much for me as it all seemed quite shallow.

This is a dark very well written story. It is not like anything else that I have read and not really my cup of tea. Some of my friends will love this book and I will recommend it to them.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Nobber is an oddly disturbing novel that I at first struggled with, and was then entirely drawn into. Fagan brings the Black Death to life in all its horror, as well as highlighting the potential for the inhumanity of mankind at times of great stress, whether it be for power, sex or greed.
This is an absorbing book, that reminded at times of folk horror - It’s not a horror, but I detect influences that underpin the vivid description of Nobber

“What the heck have I just read?” This is hardly my usual reaction to a book, but it doesn’t seem out of place for Oisín Fagan’s debut novel. Nominally, “Nobber” is a historical novel set in Ireland during the Great Plague of 1348. That said, the landscape, ravaged by the Black Death and marauding Gaels, gives the book that timeless, apocalyptic feel typical of dystopian fiction. At the start of the novel, we meet one Osprey de Flunkl who, taking advantage of the panic induced by the advancing sickness, sets out to appropriate swathes of land through fraudulent contractual transactions. He is accompanied in his dubious quest by the strong but surprisingly sensitive Harold, the intellectual William of Roscrea, interpreter of the Gaelic tongue, and Saint John of Barrow, a sort of Holy Fool, although, admittedly, less holy than fool.

On a hot Irish summer’s morning this ragtag band makes its way to the small town of Nobber. Flunkl et al however are hardly the only people who have set their sights on the settlement. Following the murder of the mayor and his family, another “outsider” – a certain Ambrosio known affectionately as “Big Cat” by his common law wife - has already usurped leadership of the town with the help of Colca, a local farrier with a propensity for unnatural congress with goats, geese and horses. Bands of Gaels are also threatening to attack the town. These characters converge on Nobber and it is no spoiler to reveal that this will not end well.

How best to describe this novel? Imagine watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail whilst under the effects of some devilish drug. The funny passages seem funnier, the raunchy passages seem raunchier, and the darker parts of the novel seem as black as hell. The high-faluting mock-archaic dialogue, particularly the exchanges between De Flunkl and his men, can be side-splitting. Other scenes are nothing short of revolting. Then suddenly one comes across poetical passages which read like a ray of sunshine through a rain-cloud. As the novel progresses, it becomes more nightmarish. Someone nails several crows to a cruciform structure – some sort of dire warning perhaps? A desperate young mother loses her wits watching her baby die of hunger and her husband die of drink. An old man who has lost his family to the plague digs his own grave and buries himself alive with the help of travelling salesman Monsieur Hacquelebacq. And every so often gangs of Gaels appear and unleash mayhem and peltings of live rats.

Fagan has allegedly stated that he has not included an acknowledgments section, because he does not want to associate people he loves with an “evil book” such as Nobber. Such statements make me suspect a marketing ploy, an attempt to attract attention to the book by naming it as the next “cursed” read. At the same time, Fagan does have a point. With the dead literally piling up, the novel becomes ever more nihilistic. One starts to wonder whether there is any “message” behind all the deaths and violence portrayed, whether there is any “meaning” to the increasingly surreal vignettes. The real punch to the guts comes when the reader realizes that the whole point of the novel is that there’s no point at all.

At the end, the townspeople try to find a scapegoat to assume responsibility for all their suffering. They know that they’re wrong, but blaming somebody for the evil which has assailed Nobber helps to impose logic and meaning onto a tragedy which seems senseless. Ultimately, the questions which the novel raises relate to the perennial mysteries of suffering and evil. Why has the disease claimed so many lives, including so many innocent ones? Why have some of the more evil characters been spared? Nobber refuses to venture a reply to these troubling queries and ultimately offers no respite to the doom and gloom.

3.5*

This is a dark and original story which vividly describes the enterprise of a small band of 14th century conmen during the plague in Ireland. As they arrive in Nobber, Co Meath, they come across a pair of even less scrupulous deviants holding the town hostage. The story is very well told with a range of the most unusual characters none of which have any respect for each other. Prepare to sit uncomfortably as this wonderful tale unfolds.