Review: Celtic Mist

C. L. Nightjar, Celtic Mist (Singing Selkie Press 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58719929-celtic-mist?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=1gK6sKJ0VL&rank=1

A bawdy tale of randiness, rebellion and revenge in 1790s Ireland, exceptional in the wealth of its sexual vocabulary
After a terrible first line: ‘The fateful course of events commenced that September night’, Declan is invited by Captain Blaylock to join his elite corps of ‘Crusaders’ at Kilmaedon Castle. His fighting skill earns him a place as the duke’s boxing prize-fighter.
To his shame, he learns the nature of the Crusaders’ secret night missions. An unwilling participant in a crime against the beautiful red-haired Aoife and her family, he risks his position at the castle to rescue her. The incident uncovers a memory from his childhood.
The two head off on the run, she none too willing. She runs away, but everywhere she goes, she is sexually harassed.
He wanders again, experiencing employment and amorous adventures. He joins the United Irishmen and due to his weapons skills is promoted to sergeant. The plans for rising are beset with spies and turncoats, and they struggle to acquire and hide arms. Ever dreaming of Aoife, and with the rising days away, Declan discovers that she, also, is after revenge, and he finds out just how far she will go.
I found the working out of the relationship between Declan and Aoife very interesting. He’s lusts for her, but is respectful and has finer feelings. He was one of her abusers, yet he rescued her. Without discussing much between the two of them, this erotic tension gets explored in silent actions, his covering her with his coat, her cleaning his wound; they sleep next to one another in a narrow cromlech.
This book is long, probably twice as long as you’re used to. Perhaps we didn’t need the entire account of Aoife’s childhood. She could have revealed certain highlights in conversation with Declan, and that would have also served as indication of her warming to him. The passages on Aoife’s youth were perhaps an opportunity to recount the many times men had tried to rape her or her female relatives.
The lengthy passages on Declan’s youth are more an opportunity to wax on about the ‘wee springy clover of Love’s dewy cleft’ than furtherance of the plot. Indeed, if this novel is anything to go by, at the end of the 1700s, life was chock full of men trying to rape women and women thrusting their ample bosoms and creamy thighs suggestively in front of young lads.
Effort has been taken to make the language believably antique, something which is important to me, and also believably Irish. It’s well written and edited, and offers up every word, description, metaphor or euphemism for sexual activity or genitalia that existed in the 18th century, more than I thought was possible, with supreme eloquence.
We know, sadly, that the Irishmen’s uprising of 1798 was a failure, but we can console ourselves to know that our heroes here, in this locale, County Wexford, were more successful than the rest.

Lots of graphic sex.