By Stephen F. Day
In most fantasy novels, wars are fought with swords and sorcery. In Stephen F. Day’s Planxty Irwin, they begin with a whisper.
The book’s world runs on a strange cycle. People’s private thoughts and feelings, especially the ugly ones, wash into the ditches and soak into glowing “fire rocks.” If those thoughts go unheard, they harden into bullets. These bullets don’t kill, though. They make people prisoners. It is a quietly radical idea: war as the product of everything we failed to listen to.
A Hero Who Sweeps the Road
At the center of the story is Planxty, a gifted fiddler who can see the future. What he mostly sees is war. Even so, he keeps sweeping the road and bagging the fire rocks that will become bullets. Readers are left to wonder whether that is duty, complicity, or something harder to name.
Planxty is also one of fantasy’s most memorable oddities. He has no eyelids and sleeps under his hat, so no one can tell whether he is asleep, awake, or gazing into the future. Add a single fiddle note that makes a face appear in the sky, and you have a protagonist who feels both ancient and wonderfully strange.
Day sees something of himself in him. “I play the fiddle,” the author explains, and it was the fiddle that led him to Planxty. Like his hero, he says, his own journey hasn’t been a traditional one.
A Cast of Unforgettable Characters
Around Planxty orbits a cast that feels like it stepped out of a dream:
• Marion, whose task is to walk into the center of a yellow swirl and listen to people’s thoughts. After her first test, her hair turns gray, a physical toll Day describes as a way of showing “a task that’s very important, but very stressful.” Her unsettling dream of her mother in a torn white dress, with green liquid, hints at a hidden lineage and a darker story the author may yet explore.
• Najai, the wildest of the travelers, who dislikes civilization and tastes the air with his tongue, yet ends the book as a prince. His transformation comes through the touch of Janica’s primary colors.
• Janica, whose paintbrush seems to decide where the travelers go. Is she an artist, a god, or the author’s stand-in? Day’s answer is delightful: if she were a god, “it would be a child’s god,” one who sees the world as if for the first time.
• David, born disabled after the birthing herbs were mismanaged, is the character who seems to understand how things should be. He was inspired by a boyhood friend of Day’s who had polio. The author calls David the wisest person in the book, and he even chooses him as the character who would embody Time itself: neither friend nor enemy, simply what it is.
Even small details carry charm. Two characters, Omnurs and Bevaris, meet only on the Tuesday of the crescent moon. Why Tuesday? Day admits there was no mystical reason: he simply needed to set a time and place from which the culture could grow.
Even the Box Has an Opinion
One of the book’s most playful inventions is the Box, a living character born from the cliché “think outside the box.” Day, who spent years in school administration, wondered what the box might want to say. In the novel, the Box complains that everyone thinks outside of her, and urges them to think inside, where something is waiting too. It is the kind of whimsical, idea driven touch that gives the novel its flavor.
A Book That Began as a Dream
The novel’s dreamlike quality is not an accident. Planxty Irwin began with a dream about a tree, an image that stayed with Day for many years. When he finally sat down to write, he followed it “like a dream could unfold,” letting the story take shape without forcing a rigid map onto it.
He wrote most of the book in Costa Rica, where he lived for about six years on an acre he turned into a food forest. The rainforest rhythm, with the sun rising and setting at six, temperatures steady between 65 and 85 degrees, and a calm, soothing culture, shaped the book’s sense of cycles. Learning to live in another language, he says, made him vulnerable in a way that “opens up a freedom in your mind.” He finished the book in Virginia.
Big Questions, Gentle Answers
For all its whimsy, Planxty Irwin takes on serious themes. Asked whether the world of shared thoughts is a utopia or a surveillance state, Day says it is neither. The listeners’ work is never complete, and there is a constant cycle of people sharing their worst thoughts. On war, he says the book neither denies nor endorses it. It simply acknowledges that it exists.
The ending is meant to be hopeful. Planxty returns to the crooked tree to await the next cycle, which will be different, and trusts that he can understand whatever it brings. Asked which rule from this world he would bring into ours, Day answers without hesitation: “Be a good listener.”
Music, in his view, is the book’s true language. It is how Planxty expresses thought and feeling with a single note, much as music has always allowed people who cannot speak to say everything.
The Author Behind the Fiddle
Day’s own story is as full of cycles as his novel. Originally from New York State, he worked as a teacher, high school principal, and school superintendent, then spent about ten years in real estate. After six years in Costa Rica, he moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, where he works in the Colonial Williamsburg area. He is a master gardener and master naturalist, and he turns 80 next year.
Age, he says, shaped the book’s most touching irony: Planxty, the one character who is always certain, ends up unsure. “You know that more things are uncertain than they are certain,” Day reflects.
What Comes Next
Readers who finish Planxty Irwin wanting more are in luck. The next book in the series will be Janica’s Garden, which will draw on Day’s master gardener and naturalist studies and dive deeper into the mysterious painter. The author admits that Janica’s transition from the snake’s scale into the field was the scene he struggled with most, and he hopes to explore it further.
Day describes his book in three words: fantasy, dreamlike, and ingenuous. It is a childlike way of seeing the world, where bad thoughts become bullets, a fiddle note paints the sky, and the most important skill anyone can have is the willingness to listen.
