IRISH UP Peter Behrens says his book has no political agenda.

Many are aware of images of expelled tenant farmers, cadaverous, ravaged with fever, dying on the roadsides with grass-stained mouths; tales of feasting landlords who shipped food out of the country; and the coffin ships. But Peter Behrens’s debut novel, The Law of Dreams (Steerforth Press), goes beyond such surface understanding. It’s not only sprawling, cinematic, exquisitely detailed, exactingly researched, and keenly felt, it’s also a powerful work of excavation that achieves what historical fiction often can’t — credibility, along with a sense of the transportive.

A family history
The blight comes quickly. Walking home one night, Fergus notices the smell: powerful, horrible, like the scent of an open grave.

Reaching his plot, Fergus immediately saw that his plants, healthy and green that morning, were withered and black. Falling on his knees, he pulled one up, then another, then another. The potatoes clinging to the roots were shriveled and wet. He dug up every plant in the row and the potatoes were nothing, purple balls of poison, and he heard neighbors’ screams floating in the dark.

It wasn’t long before the true toll of phytophthora infestans became horrifically apparent. Behrens is unsparing as he describes the slow wasting away, the “bitter taste of iron and salts” on dehydrated tongues, the hair loss, accompanied, with grotesque irony, by simultaneous sprouting of a black fur — “hunger fur” — on victims’ foreheads, cheeks, and hands.

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When Fergus’s family is killed, he’s remanded to a fever-ridden workhouse. He escapes and falls in with a mob of parentless children, running wild across the bogs of west-central Ireland, thirsting for revenge. He heads to Dublin, then to the teeming streets of Liverpool, the railways of Wales, and finally onto a crowded, stinking ship toward “the Boston states.”

If that sounds like a familiar story, it’s told here like no other. When I visit Behrens at his home near the coast in Brooklin, Maine (E.B. White country), he insists The Law of Dreams is “not about the famine; it’s really about sex, death, and love.” True, but how richly he evokes time and place while telling his tale. Perhaps that’s because The Law of Dreams is his family’s story — at least as he imagines it. His ancestors entered the Saint Lawrence on a coffin ship and disembarked at Grosse Île, penniless and ill with typhus, in 1847. By the time Behrens was born, in 1954, his family had risen through Montreal society to become part of the city’s elite. But he was ever aware of their humble beginnings.

In Canada, however, “the Irish identity is definitely more removed than it is in, say, Boston — partly for historical reasons,” he says. “A big chunk of Irish came there early on, in the 1830s and ’40s, and they came at a time when Canada was just developing, so they were able to become kind of a pioneer people.” Compare that with Boston, where the Irish immediately had to fight their way through an entrenched Yankee establishment that viewed them as second-class citizens. “There was never any sort of stigma attached to being Irish in Canada.”

Sniffing out the truth
Behrens began his project with limited knowledge of the Great Hunger. So, in 1996, he got to work.

Among his sources were the novels of Liam O’Flaherty (Famine) and the histories of Robert Scally (The End of Hidden Ireland) and Kevin Whalen (Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape).

“Then I got bold enough to start contacting their authors. I started going over and meeting and talking to them. I made maybe four or five trips [to Ireland]. Sometimes they involved meeting people, but very often they involved just getting to know the landscape.”

Behrens’s decade of painstaking detective work imbues his writing with an unfeigned authenticity. You are there, among the “wrecks of cabins in little hamlets. Humps of rubble, the stink of moldy thatch.” The “snow scalped” hills. The peaty musk of cut turf.

Behrens knows intuitively that proper evocation of a place requires the full engagement of the senses. “I would go to Clare, where the famine had really happened, and I was able to really start understanding the way people lived on the land,” he says. “The physical sense of what it looks like and what it smells like and how light works there and the texture of the ground. That stuff’s really important.” He laughs. “I had someone tell me, ‘You’ve written a book about how Ireland smells!’ ”