The Maker of Swans by Paraic O'Donnell, book review: Strange and captivating look at a magical realm

This lavishly entertaining debut novel uses magic as a metaphor with which to address less fantastic questions

Magic in fiction tends to operate like karate, in that it’s often a case of characters having to learn when not to use it. Something Mr Crowe, the mysterious figure at the centre of Paraic O’Donnell’s lavishly entertaining debut novel, has never quite got the hang of.

Mr Crowe, long since fallen into a life of louche dissipation, has for years neglected the gifts that made him the most brilliant member of a shadowy magical order. But it is a misuse of these powers that sets the events of the book in train. Namely, killing a minor poet in a fight over an attractive soprano. A misuse for which he will be held to account by his order, in the form of chilly Professor Chastern.

Mr Crowe’s intemperance also endangers his mute ward, Clara, and it seems to be up to Eustace, the butler-cum-factotum who oversees Mr Crowe’s crumbling country estate, to protect them both. The story unfolds from Eustace and Clara’s perspectives. Several hints are dropped as to when the book is set, and, flashbacks aside, it does seem mostly to take place some time around the 1950s.

Eustace is brilliant: Jeeves as Christopher Nolan might have imagined him, with a tragic backstory, an ominous turn of phrase and a very violent temper. Clara, a singular child, spends much of her time transcribing the intricate stories and images which “crowd her thoughts”, such as the “devious machines that assemble themselves in the darkest chambers of smugglers” caves, snatching secrets from the fug of rum’.

The first half of the book, where Eustace enlists various petty crooks and shabby lawyers in preparations for the showdown with Chastern, reads like a Young Adult fantasy – if you understand that to mean a novel that treats a child’s perspective seriously, involves wizards, and relishes such staples of genre fiction as car chases and inscrutable foreign henchmen. When, in order to foil Chastern, Clara is forced to explore the nature of the gifts she shares with her guardian, The Maker of Swans becomes altogether more difficult and unsettling.

Magic, as in the works of Ursula Le Guin, among others, is used as a metaphor with which to address less fantastic questions, in this case, the moral responsibilities of the artist. Deliberately vague and allusive, the second section might frustrate readers looking for more concrete answers to the questions raised in a rollicking first half. But this book is like the swans Clara makes in her dreams, though it may assume a familiar shape, it remains very much its own thing, strange and new and captivating.

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