Fishing for Amber: A Long Story

by Ciaran Carson

"It was long ago, and long ago it was; and if I'd been there, I wouldn't be here now; if I were here, and then to be now, I'd be an old storyteller, whose story might have been improved by time, could he remember it." So begins the latest work of the writer of whom Charles Simic has "He is one of the best poets we have on both sides of the Atlantic and the publication of every one of his books is a major event in both our literatures." In the way it dazzles us with a weave of narratives, Fishing for Amber surpasses Carson's previous book, The Star Factory; in the sheer pleasure it takes in stories it is at least the equal of Last Night's Fun, his first prose work. In form it is a kind of magic alphabet, from A-Z, with the subjects drawn from chillingly comic Irish fairy tales; from Ovid's Metamorphoses; and from the history of the Dutch Golden Age, the time of Vermeer the painter of light and Van Leeuwenhoek the inventor of microscopes. These three strands of fiction? fable? are united by the author's wonder at the preservation and enrichment of stories by time, and the transformation of vision by art.

Genres: Ireland, Poetry, Novels, Fiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.

He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.

Reviews

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a display of eclectic erudition and wide-ranging scholarship, one could do worse than this very weird book. The literary conceit is that every chapter is titled after a letter in the alphabet, and so it takes on the feel of a kind of esoteric, kabbalistic magic book of secrets, something that might have been at home in the library of Ficino or some other Renaissance figure. The writing is very fine, as one might expect from a poet of Carson calibre, and there are passages of genuine incantatory power, especially when Carson reels off long lists of items pertinent to the subject being described. One learns a lot from reading this book, a lot about Dutch art and history, Greek mythology, Irish folklore and storytelling technique, about genius and fraud, and yes, about amber--but in the end, what is this book about? I am not sure, but I think the best hint comes toward the end of the volume when Carson permits himself some musings about the nature of perception, memory, and biography. Perhaps the book is about our own efforts to bring sense and structure to the scattered and disparate stuff that passes through us in the form of experience, a sense and structure we know from within to be as contrived and singular as any work of art.

[Zeba Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, erudite, joyous, packed with glorious tales and moments of serendipity, a celebration of reading and story telling.

[Tania · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was both intrigued and confused while reading this one. The Dutch connections kept me wanting to keep on reading the meandering prose.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn between 3 and 4 stars for this book. I really wanted to give it 4, but for some reason just couldn't. It seemed like it never quite reached the book that it COULD have been. I appreciate Carson's breadth of knowledge and his skills of weaving together the different stories, but I feel like it could have been a better book. The thin plot that held the stories together was just too thin (though I'm sure it was supposed to be thin, I still think it was too thin) - just a way to tell the other stories.

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's a book I came predisposed to like, read with some enjoyment, and yet many times put down the book – totally bored. Carson's learning and research shows, as does his flair and interest in layered, Shaharazad storytelling, but the hook here – his father's memory, essentially – is far too weak to motivate an interest proper in the conflated labyrinth of tale-tellers, paintings, herbology, mythology, and other thematized odds and ends.