|
“At
Swim, Two Boys,” pecked out on Jamie O’Neill’s
laptop while he worked for a decade at night as a
London hospital porter, has deservedly received much
attention. Nothing but this novel’s title reminds
you of Flann O’Brien, but much would of other
Irish writers from nearly a century ago. A reviewer
on Amazon.com panned it as being of interest only
to the tiny subculture of “gay Irish historical
scholars.” In my response (from which the foregoing
phrase was removed upon the posting of my reply on
that site), I commented that I had been lent my copy
by just such a scholar (from a well-known republican
family in the Bogside, in fact). The confluence of
these two streams, homosexuality and republicanism,
while surely the subject of analysis in our postmodern
academies, has largely eluded or been excluded from
the wider world of popular fiction. Often, professors
and critics forget that for many “common readers,”
groundbreaking into fresh turf can unearth hidden
bones and beauties. Particularly in the struggle undergone
by one key character with his echoing voices of madness,
O’Neill confronts the possibility of revolution
beyond Fenianism from either the Starry Plough or
St. Enda’s.
In
the author’s characters, we ponder the transformation
of a new nation through a new realisation of love--and
exactly what and for whom it is sweet and fitting
to die. Freshening familiar imagery, O’Neill
takes us into the minds of those perhaps only half-able
to grasp the new panoramas they imagine as they enter
into realms of idealism, ideology, and violence. The
novel shouldn’t be jailed within the ghetto of
“gay romance,” to which many of its readers
eagerly confine it. Rather, it’s a Joycean re/creation
of 1916, told as if through the insights of a Bloom-ian,
Eva Gore-Booth-ian, a Wildean wannabe, and a couple
of comrades in the Citizen Army who share more than
soldierly solidarity. Connolly and Pearse both appear
in appealing cameos, that display the shine of both
icons while dulling with a bit of tarnish their human
tempers and grimier self-delusions.
I
wouldn’t recommend O’Neill’s story
to a reader who’s never read Oscar Wilde, a factual
account of 1916, and “Ulysses.” Not
due to snobbery, but for enjoyment-for one who recognizes
the stylistic experiments with which O’Neill
conveys his narratives an added level of familiarity
with early 20th century cultural and historical context
would ease one’s encounter with the author’s
dense miasma of slang, allusions, and reliance upon
Dubliniana. He teaches must to the novice. However,
one addition that would've helped non-Dub readers:
remember when historical novels had beautifully-drawn
maps for the endpapers? One of "Kingstown"
and one of greater Dublin might've aided those unfamiliar
with some of the terrain. Being a native of Dun Laoghaire
(post-1922 "Kingstown"), O'Neill seems a
bit too confident that all of us can follow the intricately
mapped travels of his protagonists without much assistance.
Like
much in his novel, nevertheless, a slow immersion
into the swim proves salutory to ease reader's cramps.
I found the Joycean imitations in his various narratives
fascinating, but those less enamoured of "Ulysses"
seeking a more straight(pun?)forward telling of historical
romance understandably may become frustrated with
the experimentation O'Neill indulges in and the expectation
that we're familiar with the dense context and subtext
surrounding characters such as Eva MacM and Mr Mack.
Not to mention a heap of allusions and jargon within
the whole Irish-Ireland milieu of nine decades past.
But, slowly, persistence and attention to nuance cue
you in to essentials.
The
novel actually lightens about halfway in its telling,
only to in its final chapters go back to a Bloom's-eye
passersby look at the beginning of the Rising that
I found appealing. Once again, however, O'Neill keeps
the p-o-v shifting like the Wandering Rocks and we
have to tag along with his Odyssean urge to plow forward
into a more Gertie McDowell style and almost a parody
of popular page-turners before shoving the plot into
the climactic battle scenes, that I found surprisingly
moving in parts and cluttered and nearly slapdash
elsewhere. "The fog of war" reified?
The
ending let me down quite a bit. You anticipate when
beginning the last chapter perhaps a sequel to this
book. Having lived so long with his characters, O'Neill
and I didn't want to let them go. But the last pages
telescope too much into too little space. As with
many epic stories, the telling of the journey becomes
the reason to follow the adventures O'Neill recites,
more than the rapid rush to hurry up for a rapid but
flaccid denouement. After such an emotional and temporal
investment in reading “At Swim, Two Boys,”
the sudden deflation of what seemed to be another
tale in the future telling disappoints the committed
reader.
The
musings captured especially in the novel’s final
segments recalled for me Ernie O’Malley’s
memoir “On Another Man’s Wound,”
mixing careful observation of the natural and literary
worlds with the shock and altered consciousness brought
by war. As with O’Malley, O’Neill combines
a flair for the dramatic with a focus on the honest.
The raw material of O’Malley’s own transformation
and the traumas endured in the subsequent battles
for full Irish independence deserve more than Richard
English’s biographical but limited study of this
neglected Irish predecessor to the fictional creations
limned by O’Neill. O’Malley’s unflinching
blend of tenderness and severity deserves recognition
for those today seeking to reconcile a brutal past
with a compromised present.
For
comparison, as well as O’Malley one could study
Patrick McGinley’s fictional evocation of this
era, “The Lost Soldier’s Sad Song,”
taking the plight of a republican in the field and
in prison and adding to the genre often consigned
to the thriller or the memoir a lyrical and melancholy
defiance that captures again what O’Neill and
O’Malley convey. The common striving of young
Irish men dreaming that with the triumph of the gun
would arrive the dawning of the sunburst, a vision
of a land changed not only in flag or slogan but spirit
and loyalty to ideals believed dormant too long in
the Irish mentality. And, for O’Neill most of
all, the physicality of those who bled and starved
for liberty.
The
cumulative power of the novel, despite its sputters,
provides an engrossing and sensitive look from a fresh
perspective at events familiar to "Irish Historical
Scholars," gay and straight alike. Like another
recent look at these events, its own narrative alternately
assured and maddening--Roddy Doyle's revisionist take
on Dublin and its struggle towards (partial) independence,
"A Star Called Henry"--O'Neill offers
us a well-told story inescapably in Joyce's long shadow
but struggling towards its own light, nourished and
bloodied by 1916's history tangled with Irish fiction's
stubborn roots.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
