In that dimple of European history between the French Revolution and the coronation of Queen Victoria, there lived a not inconsiderable number of men – usually young, dumb, and full of opium – whose foremost ambition was to set sail for the Americas, and there, in their own parcels of conveniently cheap and plentiful wilderness, found utopian communes where society could be forged anew in accordance with the principles of enlightenment. It certainly didn’t hurt that these endeavours would enable – even necessitate – quite a lot of shagging. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his mates, Roberts Southey and Lovell, laid plans, between blasts of nitrous oxide and versification, for the foundation of a commune on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, chosen for its “excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians”. Lack of funds quickly became an issue, and soon our intrepid Romantics had compromised on location, proposing to found their “Pantisocracy” in rural Wales instead of the New World. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan never came off.
Angel Kelly, the hapless protagonist – or perhaps initiator would be a better word – of Oisín Fagan’s second novel, Eden’s Shore, is one of these Coleridgian dreamers. At the opening, we meet him as a young and feckless law student at the University of Dublin, hanging around Parliament Street with his “broad-brimmed hat, a cravat and a small book of Montesquieu under his arm, from which he partook of no more than five sentences a day”. Secretly, he believes he will “one day prove to be a great man”. An inheritance from a beloved aunt allows him to further augment his epicurean lifestyle, but when the pleasures of whoring, drinking and tobacco begin to pall, he resolves to spend the last of his wealth on an expedition to Brazil, with the intention of founding “the harmonious society” of which he and his friends “had so often and so manfully spoken”: “a colony that is free from the sins of the old world – a place free from tyranny, discrimination, illegality, religion, persecution, taxation”.
His friends’ mirthful reaction to Angel’s grandly stated intent precipitates a feeling of disgust, “gliding through his throat like an internal bruise”, and incites him into realisation of his quixotic plans. He takes a ship from Dublin to Liverpool and from there secures passage aboard the Atlas, bound for Santana, Brazil. Due to a week-long bender with a dockside sex worker, he neglects to make thorough inquiries into the ship’s business.
Emerging from his cabin some time later, after a viscerally described bout of sea sickness, Angel discovers that the Atlas had, during a stopover in Nouadhibou, North Africa, taken on a human cargo. Our slipshod young revolutionary has now become an unintentional witness to – and, arguably, participant in – the barbarities of the Atlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage. The Coleridge comparison is apt beyond the biographical, because the episode that follows as the Atlas is beset by rebellion and mutiny reads like a sort of roided-up Rime of the Ancient Mariner. When Angel and his newfound ally Flores, a Muslim scholar who boarded the ship with the intention of buying his mother’s freedom at the far end of the passage, finally reach Brazil, thoroughly battered and bloodied, they find themselves at the centre of a conflict between imperial interests that threatens to swallow them more totally than any ocean.
Angel Kelly’s story ends up functioning almost as a prologue to Eden’s Shore. This sprawling epic of the late 18th-century Americas examines questions of complicity, violence, the limits of philosophy, and what place love could have – what redemption it might begin to offer – in a world governed by the extractive logics of colonialism. If that sounds like an enormous drag, I assure you, this novel is unexpectedly hilarious and very beautiful. As well as deftly controlling and differentiating a vividly realised ensemble of dreamers, drinkers and mercurial freebooters, Fagan achieves a sultry, skirling prose that captures with equal precision both the beauty of the tropics and the spiritual and physical mutilations practised in their shade-bound midst. A “dreamish” light lingers in bearded jungle trees; a bloated tick rests in a navel “like a dolmen on a white plain”; the shoulders of a weeping man vacillate “rapidly, like the amputated stumps of wings”.
One of the things I appreciated most about this novel was Fagan’s attentiveness to the polyglot confusion of Latin colonial life in a place where African freedmen, Chinese street hustlers and French Freemasons all muscle against each other to stake out ideological and literal territory, the complexity of communication in their many native tongues yielding moments of high comedy and intense pathos (often simultaneously). There is the Spanish cook on a slave ship, whose drunken declarations of guilt over the horrors in which he is made complicit are the more haunting for their linguistic derangement. There is the young Parisian revolutionary whose exuberant and ultimately futile idealism bursts the seams of his threadbare English: “I want to share my learn with all the paysans of the world … we love the revolution so much, the equality, the liberty, the universal thing …”
It perhaps ought to be said that, despite its many pulchritudes, Eden’s Shore is a strikingly violent novel (as was Fagan’s debut set in medieval Ireland, Nobber). I would argue that it needs to be, but some readers might blanch over the lingering, half-page descriptions of infected wounds and severed ocular nerves. To me, Eden’s Shore often felt like a sort of maritime Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy’s portentous masterpiece of the American west – and it will no doubt divide readers along similar lines. But I’d be hard pressed to think of higher praise.
• AK Blakemore’s novel The Glutton is published by Granta. Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan is published by John Murray (£16.99).
