West Cork is a place apart. In the last third of the last century it became something of a refuge for those hoping to forge – a suitably ambiguous verb – what used to be known as an “alternative lifestyle”. There are still quite a few antiquated hippies down there, as well as a few artistic types and the odd retired media tycoon. Something of the old magic survives; step into the market in Skibbereen on a Saturday morning and, despite the rain and the grey hair all round, it could be Berkeley, 1968.
But something survives too of an older magic, one that goes back to the pre-Christian Ireland of the sídhe, or fairy folk, and Yeats’s sorcerer queens and tragic warriors, and it pervades The Well of Saint Nobody, Neil Jordan’s beautiful and deceptively simple tale of love, rejuvenation and losses restored.
A retired English concert pianist, William Barrow, has settled in an unnamed west Cork village. The place is as dull as anywhere else can be but will become, for him, the capital of Tír na nÓg – the Land of Youth.
He has had to give up the piano because of an incapacitating and, so say the doctors, incurable case of psoriasis in his hands. He seems reconciled to his loss, more or less, and to the loss of much else in his life. “And so began his reacquaintance with himself. Music had abandoned him, but who remained when it had gone? Or what?” He lives alone, without partner or child, and the last thing he expects is that before the story is done he will have acquired, or reacquired, both.
Enter Tara, a middle-aged piano teacher who replies to William’s advertisement for a cleaner at the former rectory that is his home. He hires her, she does the job more than assiduously – “So she unpacked his life” – and in time, with the inevitability of these things, ends up in his bed. As it will turn out, however, this end is really a beginning.
Although William has to be reminded of it, they have encountered each other before; three times, in fact. They first met when Tara was a young music student in Dublin and William – “a rather thin, tall and indefinably distracted figure” – was brought over from London to judge a music competition in which she was taking part. She didn’t win, but received a diploma and an honourable mention. Then there was a concert at Wigmore Hall when she plucked up the courage to congratulate him on his performance. And then the third time, “in Brighton, and the less said about that the better, maybe”.
The Covid pandemic is at its height, and when she is at the rectory she wears a mask: could this be the reason William doesn’t recognise her? Alas, no, even though they had slept together, that time in Brighton. She was just another girl, one of many eager to offer themselves up to a superstar of classical music, caressed at night and forgotten by morning.
In the grounds of the rectory William discovers a disused and seemingly ancient well, connected somehow to an underground stream. Tara pretends it is a holy well, and invents a legend for it – “It was fun, of course, to test his gullibility” – but to her surprise and vague dismay, the place proves to possess qualities at least verging on the magical. One day, on an impulse, she smears William’s hands with wet moss scooped up from the walls of the well. It effects a cure; William can play the piano again.
At this point it should be said that Jordan, with the skill and cunning of a true artist, manages to make these unlikely consequences seem not only plausible but also inevitable. The late-onset love affair between Tara and William is depicted – and we do see them – subtly, generously and convincingly. Tara is particularly vivid, one of those tough yet tender survivors who take life’s vicissitudes on the chin and stay stubbornly on their feet.
Halfway through the book, what began as a straightforward tale with touches of the mystical takes a wholly unexpected turn. Suddenly we are introduced to a young man named Hughie, lying on a bed in a caravan in, of all places, Cleethorpes. He is coming out of a heroin daze, and beside him is another addict like himself, only this one is dead, with a needle still in his arm. The survivor takes the other’s wallet, and his identity along with it. Tara and William have no inkling of what they are about to be enmeshed in. From here on, the plot becomes as intricate as any reader could wish, and ends with a twist that few will foresee.
This is a marvellous novel – literally, for it is filled with marvels. Neil Jordan is best known these days as a film-maker, but as The Well of Saint Nobody vigorously attests, he has lost none of his skills, of his magical skills, as a novelist.
• The Well of Saint Nobody by Neil Jordan is published by Head of Zeus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
