Oliver Cromwell, during his grim subjugation of Ireland, confiscated and burned 2,500 harps and crowded the prisons with harpers. Old Ironguts was one smart tyrant: he knew that to bring a people low, he needed to destroy their deepest cultural beliefs. Ultimately, of course, it didn’t work; today Ireland’s money and passports are emblazoned with Celtic harps.

To those who know and care about such things, Carolan is a name to conjure with. Terence Carolan was arguably Ireland’s greatest composer of harp music, although never more than a middling performer on the ancient brass-stringed instrument. He rose to prominence after the English had done their worst – after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 – so his career was marked by an elegiac tone, a hungering after the bardic days of yore, as well as by new musical influences wafting in from continental Europe, especially Italy.

Charles Foran’s new novel focuses on the final months in Carolan’s life, as he moves about the Irish countryside on horseback, accompanied by his faithful guide and companion, Owen Connor. Carolan is blind – not from birth but from being stricken by the pox in his teens – and experiences the world through hearing (the sound of birdsong is almost deafening throughout the novel), touch (he grabs ladies’ hands whenever possible in order to feel their “bone stems,” those delicate bones on the back of the hand that remind him of a caged thrush), and the physical rhythms of slow horseback-riding and rain dripping from his hood. And of course through taste: Carolan’s world is a constant circuit of genteel Irish country seats, all fallen on hard times but all still able to rustle up enormous four-course meals washed down with flagons of wine, ale, and whiskey.

As Carolan and Owen amble along, Foran fills in the landscape around them. There’s the domestic landscape, featuring Carolan’s recently deceased wife, Moira, and the seven children he never visits. There’s the social landscape, in which one of Ireland’s periodic famines quietly haunts the land, a fact that goes unnoticed inside the walls of the country homes where the famous harper plays for his supper. There’s the cultural landscape, with Jonathan Swift going mad down in the deanery of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, and local gentry misquoting the fashionable poet of the time, Alexander Pope.

There’s also the complex political and religious landscape in the wake of the Penal Laws, forbidding Catholics to be lawyers, hold public office, go to Trinity College, marry Protestants, buy land, or pass landholdings on to their eldest sons (unless these agree to convert). The statutes, muses Carolan, a rotund Celtic Don Quixote, “have done more harm to the honour of men than to their possessions, turning them into knaves and schemers and muddying relations between neighbours and friends.”

But Carolan’s peripatetic adventures are only half of this richly detailed novel. As his health deteriorates, Carolan and Owen return to home base, Alderford, a country house presided over by the harper’s lifelong patroness. Carolan takes to his bed and the narrative switches to Owen’s point of view.

A foundling child who was brought into the household at age 12, Owen has been guiding Carolan for two decades, since his late teens, and once his master dies he will face a grim future. He is a middle-aged male virgin (not an uncommon Irish type, even recently) and obsessed about his unattractiveness. A highly intelligent self-taught reader, he has fallen into the bad habit of stealing books from the libraries of various Irish aristocrats, and the constabulary are now on his tail.

In this section of the novel, Foran digs disturbingly into the imprisonment of class that trapped so many in the pre-modern era. Carolan is older and of a courtier nature, content with the notion that the idle rich who support him are his “born betters.” In Owen’s breast beats the inarticulate but passionate heart of a democrat, several decades before his time.

Owen steals the books, he finally confesses, because the ideas inside them should be free and available to everyone. (His would-be girlfriend then tartly questions why he keeps them locked up in his own little hut.) Owen is no farmer, he craves the life of the mind, but to the Dublin worthies who are acquainted with him as Carolan’s guide, he is nothing but a jumped-up hayseed giving himself airs.

Foran is a master of language and metaphor, and the structure of this novel allows him full range, particularly with his ear for clever, funny, very human dialogue. He employs comfortably modern phrasing and diction that still manages to sound right coming out of the mouths of early 18th-century Irish men and women. This book is about many things, but primarily, ultimately, about the twin powers of art and friendship. It’s a deeply satisfying read.