Review: The Crock of Gold

The Crock of Gold by James Stephens
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was sold to me as a comic novel (and by "sold to me" I mean I was convinced to download it from Project Gutenberg because it was on Michael Dirda's list), but it falls short on both comedy and novelness.

The first section (or "book") is mildly amusing, as the author gently mocks a couple of philosophers. But then he starts into his own philosophy, asserted (not argued) in a great many poetic words which boil down to "all men are rational, and all women are intuitive, and because of this all men and all women are inevitably at war forever, until they both manage to be both intuitive and rational (which has never yet happened), and then Paradise will come." Which is obvious nonsense, from a 21st-century perspective; during the time I was reading this, I had a great conversation with my very rational wife, in which we supported each other as equal partners in understanding and expressing our feelings. I'm aware that that would have been a lot less likely in early-20th-century Ireland, but that doesn't excuse unsupported generalizations about the nature of humanity.

As the book progresses - more as a series of disparate events that are loosely connected than as a plot, which is why I cast doubt on whether it's a novel - we get rural Irish life and some romanticism about it; a generous helping of Irish myth; and a not-at-all-comic exploration of what it looks like when there's no social safety net, with an old widow woman forced to wander the roads begging, and two thieves who turned to crime because they lost their jobs (one through illness, the other through age). The thin thread of what might generously be termed a plot involves one of the philosophers being framed for murder by leprechauns, who are angry at him for helping a neighbour steal their crock of gold. At the end, unable, apparently, to bring together Irish myth and contemporary Irish social injustices in any coherent way, the author declares (tells, rather than shows) a literal deus ex machina to finish his book.

I'm sure that if I was better acquainted with the Ireland of 1912, which I know very little about, or Irish myth, which I have only a passing knowledge of, I would have got more out of it. But the philosophy is bad (and tedious) whichever way you cut it, the story hangs together poorly through the shifting tone and disparate elements that aren't well integrated, and overall, for me, it was far too much crock and not nearly enough gold.

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