There is a tendency and almost an expectation that all home-town-heroes are great. If someone is Irish than they are ours and we take ownership of them, therefore to criticize them is wrong. While contrarianism in the shape of Dunphy, Hook or Spillane or even some restaurant reviewers or even the loathsome Emer o’Kelly becomes a mere parody of itself, genuine criticism of poor Irish work is sometimes met with a “how could you”. The response earlier this year to Eileen Battersby’s less than stellar review of Dermot Healy is a case in point. In My Opinion Battersby was right, Healy’s work was full of cliché and over wrought sentimentality.
Personally I don’t get Colm Tobin, he is often presumed faultless. I see little but fault. The Booker Prize nominations are bizarre in the best of years but when I see Tobin nominated for any prize, I despair.
However when genuine Irish talent shines it’s good to enjoy it. Three recent books have genuinely opened my eyes to the heights that Irish writers can reach.
The three books in this review are not about the what, they are about the how. They are all uniquely Irish but none of them resort to faux Irish cliché. Their Irishness is important and fundamental but not crippling. They all have a poetic layer where the words that are being used are as important as the story being told but they are all told by masterful storytellers.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride is enigmatic in the true sense of the word. There are layers of mystery here. A friend of mine was reading it while on his travels during the summer. He sent me a message asking if I had read it, I hadn’t at this stage. He indicated that it was either the best or the darkest and most depressing book he had read. He was right on both counts. It is truly dark. It is like dipping your head into a bucket of tar.
The core of the book is a first person interior monologue written (or spoken) by an unnamed girl growing up in a small town in Ireland. We follow her in a broad narrative arc which runs from her birth through childhood then into adolescence and her years at university. She is always ‘I’ in this text; the ‘you’ here is addressed to her brother. He is born with a brain tumour which requires surgery to remove, an operation which leaves both physical scars and psychological echoes that haunt him through his youth.
It’s the style which hits you first. It’s the kind of thing which used to be called a ‘stream of consciousness’ even though that hardly works as an adequate descriptor here. There are no speech marks, and next to no commas. The sentences are ungrammatical, broken-up andrestitched with the seams showing. They’re peppered with Irish slang and colloquialisms. The flow approximates speech, but the content is frequently far more poetic than anything this character would actually say to anyone. A manifestation of the unconscious, perhaps.
‘Howl winter all through the night that year in the trees where we climbed on and the hedges on the road. No cars here. No one comes.Things crying in the fields for me. Say they want me and coming down the walls for. She’s coming Mammy. Who? The banshee. Don’t be silly. Sure isn’t your brother here? Won’t he mind you if anything comes along. Should I close the door or leave it open? I don’t know. Shut bad out or shut it in?’
And then there’s her uncle. She and he develop a relationship in her adolescence which wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It’s the precipitating event which sparks off a stream of encounters with boys in her later years at school. It’s hard to read about, this stuff, and I think intentionally so. She is not a victim, and at times there is even a disturbing edge of complicity to her actions in the strange, hostileworld around her. In her own words, she is: ‘Calm sliding down into my boat and pushing out to sin.’
The Gamal by Ciaran Cronin has a world that is equally disturbed. "Dr Quinn can talk and talk so it's OK going to see him really most of the time. I just agree with whatever shit he's saying and that keeps him from upsetting the mother and father saying to them I'm not making progress or that I didn't turn up to the appointment."
So what we have is just maybe a very unreliable narrator. Or maybe not. The Detective near the end of the book tells us that Charlie can’t talk. But he does. The contradictions here are intriguing rather than annoying. What does Charlie want us to know. There are hints in the court case of an alternative death for one of the characters. Is this what really happened?
The story line involves the love between Sinead and James. It is not an unusual one. Two outsiders drawn together in small town Ireland,it could be straight out of McGahern or John B Keane. It is how this story is told that makes the difference. Hence The Gamal is not only the name of the novel but also its most important character. He has a photographic memory which makes him no longer the unreliable narrator since he has recall of so much. However, the author’s real skill is in leaving us with questions.
Charlie has been a disaster in school. Here is one description of ateacher whose patience with him had run dry: "Her big long nose was inches from my face and her spit was spraying on me. I knew she was best friends with Anthony Murphy's mother. I seen them go walking together in the evenings and they were in charge of the choir in Mass too, the two of them. I felt like boxing her in the face but I didn't want her to stop. I'd never seen anything like this before. I gave her a little smirk to see if I could get her head to explode."
Other authors have played with structure, Mark Haddon is an obvious point of comparison throughout the novel, Roddy Doyle’s Giggler Treatment, (Chapter My Fridge) being obvious examples but here itallows us to see Charlie’s state of mind his ability to get distracted and his game playing. 80 pages before finally getting to chapter 1.This is the point when he decides to "use chapters." Why? "Came across a book in a bookshop in Cork today. Fifty-three chapters it had.And only three hundred and seventeen pages.]..." This is where our narrator determines the length of chapters and then violates his theory by having some very short ones and others that are very, very long.
Then he realizes he needs to include similes. But he hates similes. But since they are a requirement for a good novel, he does what he needs to: he writes a bunch and that's that: "Cos I hate them."
The novel is filled with Irish, the language, as well as the natural rhythms of a very musical place. Music is one of the other motifs that stretch through the book. The three are united by their love for music and this has a great soundtrack.
But something serious has happened, and "the Gamal" gives hints all the way through. He recalls verbatim the actual testimony in court although the reader has no idea what the court hearings are about--not for a long time.
This is a mesmerising read by another great new author.
Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane hardly needs an introduction. It is another Irish boundary pusher. Set in 2053, on the west coast of Ireland, the City of Bohane is a dangerous place to be. Peopled by gangs, hoors, druggies and fashion conscious gang leaders, there is no evidence of technology, phones, computers, cars etc. It's written in a kind of cant and can be hard to read and understand sometimes. The descriptions are brilliant and it's easy to picture the surroundings and characters.
"you wouldn't make eye contact with the Long Fella if you could help it. Strange, but we had a fear of him and a pride in him, both. He had a fine hold of himself, as we say in Bohane. He was graceful and erectand he looked neither left nor right but straight out ahead always, with the shoulders thrown back, like a general. He walked the Arab tangle of alleyways and wynds that make up the Trace and there was the slap, the lift, the slap, the lift of Portuguese leather on the backstreet stones."
It was no place to be a woman though. Locked up in cages and treated like dogs were the `lurchers' - girls kidnapped from their homes and kept as captive sex slaves by the sand pikeys, a brutal and primitive kind of people living on the edges of this warped society. Barry's initial pages make for a difficult read, as he gives the reader no relief from the Bohane twist of language. But, as the reader gives himself over to the smashed syllables and dropped consonants, he finds himself deep in the streets of Bohane--the city which is almost a malignant character in the novel, but one that also inspires the consistent melancholy and yearning for the halcyon past (that may have never existed) in the main characters. The city sits astride theBohane River, flowing from the Big Nothin', a corner of near future peat bog abutting the Atlantic. The river pours the endless frustration and desolation of the wilds into Bohane proper, influencing the city with its corruption. Barry constructs a city of back alleys and high rises all tainted by the river and its constant flow--ever onward with little care for the darkness it leaves behind.
Barry's narrator is invisible for much of the book, which leads to the reader's sense that the narrator is the voice of Bohane itself--which, for all intents and purposes, is true. His characters are mainly a rogue's gallery of gangsters, bruisers, killers, and slumlords. The reader meets the albino leader of the Back Trace Fancy, Hartnett, whose jealously sets the whole novel. Along the way, the reader comes to know Hartnett's past, but never too much, and never in a truly linear fashion. Barry does a deft job at weaving in the pieces of memory, which float about Bohane like golden-lit late afternoons, with the grim dark today. While reading, the reader never imaginesthe events of the pages occurring in clear daylight, but in the gloom of night, dark of taverns, and mist of the bog. In this absence of light, Hartnett's nemesis returns, leading to questions of whether the past is ever truly gone, whether it can be relived, or dragged forth into the harshness of the present.
Barry's characters find different answers to these questions--for some, it is enough to live surrounded by the memories of the past; for others, they seek to re-live the dreams and deceptions of those they recently deposed. Like the Bohane River, the past continues to flow away from Hartnett and company. They strive for it, angry that it continues to slip away, and yet, in the end, the same Bohane awaits the next generation.
Barry, Collins and MacBride are debut novelists; each has the bravery of a debutant. There is little joy to be got from the stories they tell, there is much for the future of Irish writing.
