In his latest venture into richly eclectic prose fantasy, Ulster poet Ciaran Carson figures that if
Shamrock Tea (a herbal remedy which when imbibed cleanses the windows of perception and can aid flying and time travelling) were to infiltrate the waters of a Belfast reservoir, peace would prevail. But the stores of Shamrock Tea have been depleted and the young narrator of Carson's book must drink a brew and travel back to 15th-century Bruges and into the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck to hunt for its source.
Reading like Harry Potter for intellectuals, the unusual Shamrock Tea is both mystifying and spectacular by turns. Carson begins fairly typically enough with childhood and a boy remembering the chalky taste of the wallpaper in his bedroom. He then muses, like every poet, on the names in his paint-box: Burnt Sienna, Prussian Blue and Hooker's Green. But where another writer might end up on the streets of Manhattan, Carson traces Vermilion to dead worms and Hooker's Green to two frog-skinned children who appeared at the house of Arnolfini in Bruges and then to the robes worn by the female figure in the van Eyck painting. Each short chapter is named after a colour or pun on a colour--"Dorian Gray"--and is linked to the previous one like beads on a string, sparkling, but separate:
All life is a great chain, the nature of which is known when we are shown a single link of it.
In many ways
Shamrock Tea is about how the sheer elasticity of imaginative verve works, making it astounding, funny and quite mad.
Cherry Smyth
This clever and original novel is about Shamrock Tea - an Irish drug that enables users to see things others can't. It lets them see colours more vividly; sounds more clearly; users can penetrate the surfaces of paintings and can even cross time. The principal characters - the narrator, his cousin and a strange Belgian friend - know that their lives are ruled mysteriously by the magnificent van Eyck painting, The Arnolfini Portrait. They have traveled in dream-like moments through the painting into other times and they discover that each moment is linked to every other. However, in the odd world of Shamrock Tea, nothing is straightforward. This title combines dry wit and beautiful prose - the author is a poet - and the result is a novel that is entertaining and very funny.
Synopsis
Shamrock Tea is an Irish drug that enables its users to see things not given to ordinary mortals. They can sense colours and sounds more vividly; they can penetrate the surface of paintings; they can cross time. The narrator, his cousin and a strange Belgian friend know that their lives are ruled mysteriously by the great van Eyck painting, The Arnolfini Portrait, and they have travelled in dream like moments through the painting into other times. They discover that each moment is connected to every other. But in the strange world of Shamrock Tea, no story can be straightforward. With a cast of characters that includes the gardener Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book will blow your mind.
From the Publisher
Media ReviewsIf it sounds weird that is because it is. It is weird but it is a delightful weird in an Alice in Wonderland way. A modern fairytale for adults each of the chapters is a delight in itself. Irish Tatler
Bristling with creativity [it] cannot fail to enchant even the most cynical reader. Focus
Carsons new book is an eccentric disquisition on the world
you feel flatteringly well-read by the end. Shamrock Tea is a marvellous, entirely idiosyncratic book Marie Claire
Carson has already done for poetry in Ireland what he is now doing with fiction, changing its contours, extending its borders. The characters inhabiting the tale are fantastic
the narrative has a formal grace, strictly modulated and precise
intriguing and gripping
a book for lovers of whimsy, imagination and the bounty of language. This is a novel moving out of space and time and thereby throwing new light on the human heart Irish Independent
A clever and original novel that combines dry wit with beautiful prose Books Magazine
This is one of those volumes that shimmer on the shelf. He gives his readers an opal-bright insight into the world not to come but through the looking-glass Independent on Sunday
A giddy mix of autobiography, folklore, myth, tail tale, anecdote, scholarship and the recognisably novelistic. There is a true jouissance in Shamrock Tea whereby lovingly and gleefully delivered learning unsettles received ideas and perceptions Irish Times
It would be a great injustice to attempt to precis this stunning novel. The narrative is strikingly original and
fairy-tale, dream-like work of art which is flawlessly put together. Every word of this novel counts, so dont be tempted to rush through it; savour it, then go back to the beginning and start all over again The List
The pleasures of this utterly original work
lie in the small narratives with which the larger narrative is spiced. Time spent in the company of a humane writer in thrall to the magic of connections, who knows something unexpected about almost everything, [is] an eccentric treat Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Ciaran Carson is an acclaimed poet and novelist and has been awarded the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize, the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, as well as the Yorkshire Post Prize for The Star Factory, published by Granta Books. His translation of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He lives in Belfast.
