Lord Dunsany Review: The Hurricane

Because it was so short, I thought this would be another vignette like Dunsany’s “The Whirlpool,” but it’s just complicated enough to be considered a story. Not even three pages long, “The Hurricane” still focuses on two characters instead of just one like “The Whirlpool,” and is more open to interpretation.

In “The Hurricane,” the embodiment of hurricanes spots his old friend, Earthquake, and suggests that they raze the world. Earthquake, who appears as a giant mole agrees, but when Hurricane prepares to wipe mankind off the Earth, Earthquake lets him down.

Unlike “The Whirlpool” which explicitly stated its moral in the last sentence, the theme of “The Hurricane” isn’t so obvious. Should we sympathize with the Hurricane? Feel relieved? Move to a non-coastal area away from a fault line?

I wondered about Dunsany’s choice of a mole to model Earthquake on until I remembered that plate tectonics didn’t become widely accepted for another half century after “The Hurricane” was published. I’m sure in 50 years from now, we’ll have equally important discoveries. I don’t know how people explained earthquakes in Dunsany’s day but giant moles mustn’t have seemed quite so far-fetched.