by JULIET WATERS

Near the end of Peter Behrens’ stunning debut, The Law of Dreams, the novel’s hero, Fergus, arrives in Montreal aboard one of the “coffin ships,” which often contained as many dead Irish immigrants as living ones. Soon after his arrival, a girl hands him a flyer advertising jobs at Factory Island in Biddeford, Maine. My family has a summer cottage 10 miles from Factory Island, so I know it well. These days The Factory is mostly condos overlooking the Saco river in an increasingly pretty former mill town. But in 1847, I imagine, it was probably nothing close to pretty.

W.B. Yeats once described Ireland’s political history as “a terrible beauty.” Peter Behrens’ version is more like a beautiful terror. The Law of Dreams opens in 1846 just as the potato famine and a legendary epidemic of typhoid are starting their devastating spreads. Farmer Carmichael, who leases the land that he in turn leases to Fergus’s family, has just been told to evict his tenants.

All his young life Fergus has been in love with Carmichael’s daughter, Phoebe, his childhood playmate. Though Carmichael is not a warm man, he’s been more of a father figure to Fergus than his own father, a wilful and occasionally negligent labourer with nomadic tendencies. Fergus lives a difficult life of subsistence poverty, but it’s a life. A life that will be swept away in a matter of weeks as Fergus watches his siblings die slowly in the bedroom they share, and his parents die fast and brutally when Carmichael allows soldiers to burn their home to the ground.

Fergus has little choice but to swallow his rage and depend on the charity of his landlord who calls in favours to get Fergus into a workhouse. To the masses, desperate to survive, the workhouse seems like a refuge. It isn’t and it becomes the first of many places Fergus must escape. “Walk outside. That is what you must do in dreams. The law of dreams is, keep moving.”

If the novel were judged solely on the language, precise and poetic in a way that cuts into the heart like a razor, no one could deny Behrens’ brilliance. But for those readers sometimes left a little cold by the technical virtuosity of lyrical Canadian novelists like Anne Michaels or Michael Ondaatje, it’s worth pointing out that Behrens can also spin a wild yarn. The Law of Dreams is a novel with as much craft as art, an adventure tale as epic and gripping as a modern Dickens.

Fergus leaves the workhouse and sets out on the road where he joins a gang of thieves called the bog boys who are led, it turns out, by a bog girl. Fergus has long ago lost his innocence to brutal circumstances. When he loses his virginity it’s to a girl whose character and complexity could fuel a whole other novel. It is, however, his second love’s unfortunate plan to rob and terrorize the farm and family of his first love. Love never just dies in The Law of Dreams, it screams and wails and forces Fergus further on. Whatever joy he experiences must be immediately forgotten and buried. “What you lost weakened you, could kill you. What you wanted kept you going, gave you strength.”

Fergus has his rare moments of joy, even amidst a year in which he will learn prostitution, hard labour and eventually make the brutal passage across the Atlantic. He also has rare moments where he actually has time to wish that it “were possible to live inside your head” and not in a world “so surprising and ruinous.” Such a world, the one we take for granted, with roofs over our heads, and books to read, is unimaginable to Fergus, as it was to the millions of Irish who lived and died lives like his. Behrens has at least made their lives vividly, if too briefly, imaginable to us.

The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens, Anansi, pb, 393, 408pp, $32.95