New Voices: The Contemporary Novel
[In the following essay, Cahalan discusses the fiction of Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore, John McGahern, Aidan Higgins, John Banville, William Trevor, James Plunkett, Edna O'Brien, Janet McNeill, Iris Murdoch, Eilís Dillon, Julia O'Faolain, Jennifer Johnston, Michael Farrell, Walter Macken, Sam Hanna Bell, Anthony C. West, John Borderick, Richard Power, Thomas Kilroy, and Anthony Cronin, as well as several writers in the Irish language.]
IMPROVING CONDITIONS
During the last thirty or so years, an impressive growth in the number of Irish novels and Irish novelists has occurred. In 1960 Stephen P. Ryan asked, “What has become of the Emerald Isle's once promising literary revival?” …, but today one is hard-pressed to know where to best begin a discussion of the embarrassment of riches in contemporary Irish literature. In this period more than thirty worthy novelists must compete with each other for recognition. Historically linked to the growth of the middle class in England and America, the novel has typically prospered when a nation comes of age—which is exactly what finally began happening in Ireland in the late 1950s. The contemporary novelist and critic Thomas Kilroy notes that “there is the widely accepted view nowadays among the historians that contemporary Ireland derives from the late fifties, that from that period one can trace the economic, social and cultural changes by which the country … moved from being an essentially rural-based, tradition-bound society to something resembling a modern, urbanized, technological state. … Something important appeared to happen in the arts, too, in that decade.” … Censorship eased. People in Ireland became more interested in the rest of the world and in economic development. The conservative Éamon de Valera was replaced as head of state by the progressive Seán Lemass. Evaluating Lemass's administration between 1958 and 1963, Terence Brown asserts that “Irishmen and women believe now, as they believed then, that those five years represented a major turning point in Irish fortunes.”. … Ireland experienced an economic boom during the 1960s, it joined the European Economic Community in 1973, and even though recession arrived in the late 1970s, Ireland remains in many ways a much more modernized country than it had been before 1960. State patronage of the arts improved the situation and status of the writer, and Irish publishing grew to the point where today there is a monthly magazine, Books-Ireland, whose purpose is to keep readers abreast of developments in the Irish book industry. Dublin's bookstores today are well stocked with a striking variety of new Irish novels.
While upper-class Catholic and rural Catholic novelists continue to emerge, the middle class is much more prominent today in both the authorship and the readership of the Irish novel. In general, the Irish readership today resembles the English readership of a century ago much more than the Ascendancy-dominated Irish readership of the nineteenth century. Yet it is striking how many of the earlier subgenres have continued to be prominent in the contemporary Irish novel. Historical novels have been particularly popular, appealing to the growing number of contemporary middle-class readers with both the time and the sense of detachment necessary to cultivate an interest in history. … Love stories are similarly profitable. The Big House form has been borrowed by writers such as Aidan Higgins, John Banville, and Jennifer Johnston. The bildungsroman remained a common fictional testing ground. The countryside and small towns have remained common settings at the same time that the city has become increasingly popular. More novels in Irish are being published than ever before, and there has emerged a strong group of women novelists. As one might expect, the influence of Joyce has been discernible. Relatively traditional realist novels have been much more common than experimental ones in the Joycean mode, almost as if in backlash. The middle class hankers mostly for realism, and Irish novelists frequently stay home and enjoy a relative prosperity that seemed virtually impossible in previous periods. Interestingly, the best novelists of the period, the ones with the most staying power throughout this period—including Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore, and John McGahern—tended to start out as realists but then later to experiment with more fabulist approaches. This chapter will begin with an examination of these novelists and then consider in turn novelists in Irish, women novelists, traditional realists, and novelists emergent within the last few years.
A DURABLE NORTHERN VOICE: BENEDICT KIELY
More widely noticed than any of the positive developments in Ireland during the last thirty years, of course, has been the violent strife in Northern Ireland since 1969, with guerrilla warfare waged among the British army, the Irish Republican Army and all of its splinter groups, and their Protestant equivalents. Not surprisingly, “the Troubles” have provoked quite a number of popular novels—novels such as Eugene McCabe's Victims (1976) and lesser works, which have been examined in several critical articles (Cronin 1969b; Deutsch 1976; McMinn 1980; Titley 1980). Brian Moore has commented, “If there is anything more depressing than Ulster fact it must be Ulster fiction …”—a remark to which John Wilson Foster (1974) might well take exception. Ulster produced the two most prolific and persistent novelists under consideration in this chapter, Benedict Kiely and Moore himself. Kiely has produced ten novels and a great many short stories and critical writings dating from the mid-1940s to the present day, while Moore has published fifteen novels since 1955. Among contemporary Irish novelists, Kiely and Moore are surpassed in the scope of their work only by Francis Stuart, who … is also originally from the North and has responded to its violence in his fiction. Like Stuart, Kiely and Moore evolved from early realism into later strains of fantasy. Their works and those of a few of the other best novelists during this period suggest that an eclectic response to the divergent fictional models established by earlier Irish realists and fabulists—or by the early naturalistic Joyce and the later fantasist Joyce—has been the most fruitful one available to contemporary Irish novelists.
Eclectic is exactly the word to describe Benedict Kiely (b. 1919), described by his friend John Montague as “almost overcome by the variety of life.” … Kiely published an insightful survey (1950) of the Irish novel between 1920 and 1950 in the midst of a ten-year period (1945-55) when he himself produced six novels and three other books. His first book (1945) was a Republican essay attacking the British partition of Northern Ireland, while his two most recent book-length fictions are direct attacks on the guerrilla movements in the North, both Catholic and Protestant. His early book on William Carleton, Poor Scholar (1948), is still the best single book on his fellow County Tyrone native. Kiely's career has followed Carleton's in several significant respects: both abandoned Tyrone and an early vocation for the priesthood in favor of Dublin and a literary career; both eschewed classical, controlled fictional forms, preferring the blustering style of the barroom balladeer; and both have been known as wide-ranging, contentious, impressive personalities.
Kiely's earliest novels were realist and autobiographical. Both Land Without Stars (1946) and In a Harbour Green (1949) are set in a Northern town in the days leading up to World War II and tell the story of a bookish man who wins a woman after his rival falls prey to violence (a policeman's bullet in the first novel and World War II in the second one). Like Kiely, Peter Quinn, protagonist of Land Without Stars, leaves the seminary and the North and sets off for a worldly life in Dublin. Like Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965) and James Plunkett's Farewell Companions (1977) later on, In a Harbour Green is a meditation upon life and death in Ireland during World War II, when the country was technically neutral but darkened by the shadows of wartime England.
The Cards of the Gambler (1953) was a new departure—a tour de force making more deliberate use of a folktale than any other Irish novel within a fictional tradition marked, as we have seen in previous chapters, by a pervasive oral influence. Kiely alternates brief “interludes” recounting segments of the gambler's story in its original fireside form with chapters transforming the story into a novel. He begins by describing an old man in his thatched cottage and tells us that he heard the folktale “from the man you're watching, and you, if you wait, will hear it from me. When I come to tell it, I will also add, subtract, divide, and multiply.” Such are the makings of an Irish novel, Kiely suggests. In the folktale, the gambler gains from God the power to keep people from stealing his apples, stalls off Death but eventually goes to hell, from which he gets thrown out and, tossing aside his cards, finally enters heaven. In the novelistic chapters, the apples become a car, hell a mock-Gothic scene, heaven an airport, and both God and Death clerics. The Captain with the Whiskers (1960) also genuflects to the oral tradition: it is dedicated “to the memory of my father, Tom Kiely, who talked with the wizard Doran on the Cornavara Mountain in the County Tyrone,” and the wizard lurks as one of several emblematic figures haunting the boyhood of Owen Rodgers, who grows from innocence to experience. This novel continues its author's stylistic playfulness, with Kiely continually blending first-person and third-person narratives.
In Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968), Kiely completely merges the world of fantasy and romance that always lurks around the edges of his earlier realist novels with the real world of twentieth-century Ireland. As with most of Kiely's earlier realist protagonists, Peter Lane has to undergo a sexual initiation as a crucial part of growing up—but this hero does so in the imaginary town of Cosmona, a strange place located somewhere in Ireland not too far from Dublin and populated by medieval pagans as well as by twentieth-century folk such as Peter. Always experimenting, and busy as a creative-writing teacher in the United States and as a Dublin journalist during this period, Kiely abandoned the form of the novel altogether for a time, as if finding it too confining for his garrulous narrative voice. Today he is as much or more celebrated for his short stories. Proxopera (1977) is a novella exposing and attacking an IRA bombing. Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985) is a novel marked by Kiely's characteristic, ballad-like style: “Her hair it was the raven, her breath was honeydew. The words she whispered in my ear I will not tell to you.” This novel also reflects a return to the earliest roots of the Irish novel in its basic structure. Like Edgeworth and many another early Irish novelist, in Carmincross Kiely sends to Ireland an interested outsider, the Irish-American academic Mervyn Kavanagh, who traverses the countryside northward to witness both his mother's death and another brutal IRA bombing, flying back to New York at the end with a drink in his hand, a sadder if not wiser man. Kiely omits the suggested solutions of an Edgeworth or a Banim, for indeed in his view “Nothing Happens in Carmincross.”
FROM THE OLD WORLD TO THE NEW; FROM REALISM TO FABULISM: BRIAN MOORE
Brian Moore (b. 1921) is the most talented and certainly the most prolific novelist to be considered in this chapter. Accordingly, he has received the most critical attention, with several studies (Foster 1974, 117-30 and 151-84; McSweeney 1976; Henry 1974) seeking to examine all of his novels. Moore left his native Belfast in 1948 for Canada, living in Montreal until 1959, when he moved to New York and subsequently to Malibu, California. The first of his fifteen novels to date appeared in 1955, and more of them are set in the New World than in Ireland. Here I shall limit myself to Moore's six Irish novels. They divide evenly into two distinct groups: three early naturalistic Belfast novels and three more recent and nostalgic novels—two of them dabbling in fantasy and fable—set in Ireland both north and south. Like Kiely and some of the other best contemporary Irish novelists, Moore has tended to move from realism and naturalism into fabulism, but one finds hints of the latter interest in his early works and a continued attention to social realities among his later works. Like Kiely and others, he is an eclectic sort.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) was immediately and widely hailed as an impressive first novel and remains Moore's most consistently praised work. Focused on her desperate consciousness, it tells the story of how a middle-aged piano teacher fails in her attempt to match herself with a returned Yank (the blowhard brother of her landlady), is discovered to be an alcoholic, dismissed by her landlady and dropped by her clients, treated with indifference by the local priest, and finally committed to a nursing home, having been virtually destroyed by societal forces. Moore has commented that “failure is a more interesting condition than success” (quoted in Prosky 1971, 109) and that “both Protestantism and Catholicism in Northern Ireland are the most desperate tragedies that can happen to people. … I feel there should be a pox on both their houses” (quoted in Foster 1974, 129). He called Joyce a “tremendous influence” and noted that “when I came to think about writing a novel, one thing I didn't want to do was an autobiographical novel because I thought ‘Who can compete with Portrait? … Joyce and other people [had] written about loss of faith in intellectuals: no one [had] written about loss of faith in a very ordinary person” (quoted in McSweeney 1976, 55-56). In an act of what Keats had called “negative capability” or what Robert Green terms “authorial displacement” (1980, 29), Moore deliberately set out in Judith Hearne to write about a character in most ways opposite to himself. This novel artfully shifts its point of view among Judith, her intended beau Madden, the brother of her landlady, and the landlady's son Bernard, a rather Gothic lecher, literatus, and momma's boy. Responding to the “anxiety of influence,” Moore avoided Portrait as a model, but nonetheless responded quite clearly to Joyce's influence in this novel. Not only does he adopt for his point of view a modified stream of consciousness and vividly describe a repressive Irish Catholic urban society, but Judith Hearne recalls no one so much as she does Maria, the protagonist of Joyce's story “Clay.” Like Maria, Judith is ambivalently received as a weekly Sunday dinner guest of her more prosperous friends and their children in the suburbs, sitting home the rest of the time telling herself that all is well as she “moved her thin legs together and peered for comfort at her long, pointed shoes with the little buttons on them, winking up at her like wise little friendly eyes. Little shoe eyes, always there.” And like the other Moore, George, Brian Moore distinguished himself as a male novelist with a devotion to sympathetically understanding and focusing on female protagonists—in Judith Hearne as well as in several of his subsequent novels. His most recent Irish novel, The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981), presents three female narrators and a protagonist whose story offers a counterpoint to Judith Hearne's.
As Michael Toolan points out, the protagonists of all three of Moore's early Belfast novels depend heavily on psychological “fetishes.” … Whenever she moves somewhere new, Judith Hearne immediately hangs her pictures of her aunt and the Sacred Heart near her bed. This is her last act in the nursing home at the end: “Funny about those two. When they're with me, watching over me, a new place becomes home.” … Just before young Una Clarke tries unsuccessfully to seduce him in The Feast of Lupercal (1958), Diarmuid Devine—the male version of Judith Hearne—takes down the presumably disapproving picture of his father, but to no avail. In The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965), the autobiographical bildungsroman that Moore had earlier sought to avoid writing, Gavin Burke depends upon the image of the Infant of Prague on his dresser. We learn from Moore's first three novels that such ikons do not provide enough help to allow one to satisfactorily survive; only leaving Belfast can do that, and that is what Moore did, seeking to rediscover Joyce's and Beckett's Paris in Montreal, New York, and Malibu.
The critical reception of The Feast of Lupercal has been more uneven than that of Judith Hearne, but it is also a compelling novel. Like Judith, Diarmuid Devine is defeated by the narrow-minded Catholic society that controls him. A thirty-seven-year-old Catholic schoolteacher and virgin who is nicknamed “Dev” (like the puritan head of state, de Valera) and who overhears another teacher refer to him as an “old woman” …, Diarmuid attempts a new departure by taking an interest in Una Clarke, a nineteen-year-old Protestant from Dublin, but he has to endure both his failure to consummate any affair with her and the public humiliation of having her uncle, his superior, cane him like a schoolboy after he hears of Una's overnight stay in Diarmuid's flat. The story is specific to the world of Catholic Belfast in the 1950s, but the title and central conceit, as recounted by Diarmuid to his disloyal pupils, are ancient and look ahead to Moore's later fables: “The Feast of Lupercal was a feast of expiation celebrated on the fifteenth of February in honor of Lupercus, the god of fertility. … Barren women placed themselves in the path of the flogging priests, believing that by means of the strokes, the reproach of barrenness would be taken away from them.” … However, Diarmuid's caning and its aftermath achieve neither expiation nor cure, but only confirm his isolation from life's feast. He must go on and do his job and keep his mouth shut. Fantasy intrudes more frequently upon the world of Gavin Burke in The Emperor of Ice-Cream, for Gavin likes to read the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, MacNeice, and Stevens; like many readers, he fails to fully understand Stevens's poem “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” but he takes it as his motto. This novel, written after Moore had already published two novels set in America, recounts a variety of episodes united under the theme of Gavin's maturation during World War II. It is if “Moore, with two American-based novels behind him … were retracing his steps to pick up anything important he may have overlooked on his post-haste trek out of Northern Ireland en route to New York City.” … Included are Moore's glimpses of 1930s socialists in Belfast, Gavin's unresolved relationship with his girlfriend and his rebellion against his narrow-minded Catholic father, and his adventures with an army air-raid unit, culminating in his heroic and cathartic work among the victims of the German bombing of Belfast. Like a similar bildungsroman published in the same year, John McGahern's The Dark, this one ends with the protagonist's reconciliation with his father.
The conflict between Old and New World values has continued to provide Moore with his central allegory, often recast in fabulist form. Compared to his earlier Irish novels, Moore's later ones seem almost unrecognizable, but they do in fact represent a natural evolution out of the experimental American novels that he had been writing during the intervening years, in which characteristically an Irish-American protagonist contends with the freedom offered by the New World but increasingly looks back nostalgically to the traditional values and sense of community left behind in Ireland. Catholics (1972), a short novel whose CBS television adaptation did much to increase Moore's fame, is set on an island off the County Kerry coastline in the near future, at Muck Abbey, where the Latin Mass and private confession are still practiced despite the contrary edicts of an increasingly secularized Church. Its abbot, Tómas O'Malley, is visited by an Irish-American priest, James Kinsella, a slick intellectual sent by Rome to bring reform to Muck Abbey. Clearly Catholics is an allegory enabling Moore to look longingly to Ireland from America, like many an Irish-American, and he makes the reader root for O'Malley, who finally rediscovers his own faith, rather than for the Americanized, secularized Kinsella. Raymond J. Porter (1975) and J. H. Dorenkamp (1978) celebrated Moore's supposed newfound Catholicism, whereas John Wilson Foster (1974) argues more persuasively that it is primitive community that Moore longs for rather than Catholic piety.
Similarly touched by nostalgia and fantasy, The Mangan Inheritance (1979) recounts an Irish-American's journey to the south of Ireland. Would-be poet and sometime journalist Jamie Mangan, having discovered a striking resemblance between himself and the nineteenth-century poet James Clarence Mangan, travels to his ancestral place. There, surrounded by other Mangans (one of whom he makes love to), he feels even more strongly that he is the poet and old Ireland reincarnated. Unable to stay, though, he returns to America: like Kiely in Nothing Happens in Carmincross, Moore borrows the old conceit of the foreign protagonist and visitor to Ireland, emphasizing that “You can't go home again,” especially when you were not really from there to begin with.
The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981) is even more clearly an attempt to return full circle to his original place, almost as if to atone for Judith Hearne. Eileen, a Belfast shopgirl, is a younger version of Judith who succeeds where Judith failed: she escapes the clutches of Bernard McAuley, her wealthy employer who is insanely infatuated with her, and the machinations of Mona, Bernard's nymphomaniac, grasping wife, who tries to buy off Eileen. Significantly aided by an encounter with an American public relations man, Eileen finally declares her independence from the McAuleys, taking another job and going home to live with her kind-hearted mother. Here Moore continues his attention to Irishwomen of varying socioeconomic backgrounds: this novel is narrated through the contrasting streams of consciousness of Eileen, her mother, and Mona. It remains to be seen whether or not the impressively versatile Moore, having apparently reconciled himself with Ireland in these recent fictions, will write further Irish novels.
THE CONSCIENCE OF THE MIDLANDS: JOHN MCGAHERN
Like Moore, John McGahern (b. 1934) made an auspicious début with a penetrating portrait of an Irishwoman, The Barracks (1963), and has published an impressive series of novels marked by increasing experimentalism. Among critics he competes closely with Moore for first prize among contemporary Irish novelists; Coilin Owens is confident enough to pronounce that “McGahern's reputation as the leading Irish novelist is sure.” … He has published only four novels to date as compared with Moore's fifteen, but each of them has won generally high praise. McGahern's artistic vision is rich enough to attract praise both from those who see him as a despairing existentialist (Garfitt 1975; Molloy 1977) and from those who view him as ultimately affirmative. … Like Moore—and perhaps inevitably like any Irish novelist who shows promise—McGahern has been compared frequently to Joyce. The parallels spring readily to mind, especially since McGahern's second novel, The Dark (1965), is like Portrait, a graphic bildungsroman about a sensitive young Irish boy, and its banning cost its author his teaching job, causing him to go into exile. McGahern shares with Joyce and several of the best contemporary novelists—Kiely, Moore, Francis Stuart, Aidan Higgins—a frank determination to include a focus on sex as part of their characters' experiences and a willingness to continually experiment with style and form. Richard Kearney (1979) correctly places McGahern in the “critical tradition” of Joyce, Beckett, and Flann O'Brien.
Born in Dublin, raised in County Roscommon, a student and teacher in Dublin and then resident in England, Spain, and the United States before resettling in County Leitrim, McGahern also reflects an increasing internationalism among Irish writers, although like Joyce he has chosen to set all of his novels in Ireland rather than shift his settings like Moore, Higgins, and John Banville or neutralize them like Beckett. His novels are linked by a set of common character types drawn from his own experience: a long-suffering mother (or aunt, in The Pornographer) who dies from cancer; a bullheaded, often violent, but nonetheless ultimately loving father; a sensitive, literary boy/man who tries to survive his parents and make his way in the world; and the female objects of his love or lust. Like Moore, McGahern first sought to avoid the self-centered bildungsroman in the mold of Portrait by focusing on a victimized, middle-aged woman, in The Barracks. Elizabeth Reegan lives with her policeman husband and his children by his first marriage. Life with a husband is not much easier than Judith Hearne's life without one, and cancer is even worse than alcoholism:
She was Elizabeth Reegan: a woman in her forties: sitting in a chair with a book from the council library in her hand that she hadn't opened: watching certain things like the sewing-machine and the vase of daffodils and a circle still white with frost under the shade of the sycamore tree between the house and the river: alive in this barrack kitchen … with a little time to herself before she'd have to get another meal ready: with a life on her hands that was losing the last vestiges of its purpose and meaning: with hard cysts within her breast she feared were cancer … Reegan was at court, the children were at school, she was in the kitchen, and did all these things mean anything?
Her husband is at first simply “Reegan” to her, just as the father in The Dark is initially “Mahoney,” but the isolation of each character's closest family member is eventually overcome. As Suzanne Fournier stresses, Elizabeth's “passage from restlessness and confusion to acceptance of mystery” is “a development within The Barracks too often overlooked by critics who focus exclusively upon the bleakness of tone and setting in McGahern's fiction.” The depth and complexity of McGahern's portrait of Elizabeth's marriage and her own consciousness can be measured in contrast to a truly negative, cynical presentation of an Irish marriage such as that found in an Irish novel published a few years later, Kevin Casey's The Sinner's Bell (1968). Casey echoes the empty inability to communicate that had been captured in Eliot's The Wasteland—“Ah I'm thinking. Can't you see that I'm thinking?”—and describes a marriage so bleak as to be boring and flat in its misogyny. Elizabeth Reegan has her own thoughts, too, providing the narrative focus of The Barracks, and she must put up with an often self-centered husband, frequently indifferent stepchildren, and terminal cancer, but nonetheless she moves toward acceptance of her family and her condition. A former nurse, she had loved a doctor years ago in London but found him to be a self-destructive nihilist; at least Reegan is determined to build a world for himself. Illness and death are revealed as humanizing forces. Elizabeth gives Reegan her secret savings, they enjoy a Christmas at home, and Reegan shows some love for his wife before she dies. Elizabeth's death is consoled by love but existential—she is consoled by no belief in an afterlife, and her survivors simply go on, with Reegan's children asking him “is it time to light the lamp yet?” at the end of the novel just as they had asked Elizabeth at the beginning.
Within the borders of a realistic novel, McGahern experimented with style and stream of consciousness in The Dark much as he had in The Barracks (as witnessed in the unusually punctuated sentence quoted above). The protagonist of The Dark, who is assigned no first name, is variously “I,” “he,” and even “you,” with McGahern continually shifting among all available singular points of view and forcing the reader to examine his protagonist with as much objectivity and variety as possible. The book proceeds episodically, like a series of interwoven stories, true to the tradition of the Irish novel—which provoked one critic … into an ill advised attempt to impose from the outside a classical, four part “structure” on the novel.
This novel's graphic descriptions of the boy's masturbatory fantasies and suggestions of homosexuality (latent in the boy's widowed father and perhaps active in his relative the priest), were plenty to invoke banning even by an Irish Censorship Board somewhat less rigid than it had been in the 1930s. The Dark is more graphic than Portrait, with which the novel has been frequently compared, but in terms of the larger theme of the novel it seems truer that McGahern may have sought to undo rather than outdo Joyce at his own game. Like Stephen Dedalus, McGahern's rural protagonist is a bright student, initially attracted to the priesthood, struggling to escape the clutches of his father and make his way to the university. But the ending of The Dark could not more deliberately invert, subvert, and deflate the dénouement of Portrait: with the consent of his father, McGahern's young man opts to withdraw from University College, Dublin, and enter the civil service in Dublin, and the final words of the novel are “Good night so, Daddy” and “Good night, my son. God bless you” (142). This ending is probably more ironic than pious (of course, so may have been Joyce's); in any event, it has disappointed many readers. As Eileen Kennedy notes, “Stephen Dedalus is an urban hero who can leave Ireland boldly; but young Mahoney is a farmboy whose sights are set no higher than the city.” …
The protagonist of The Leavetaking (1974) tries to reconcile himself with his mother much as his younger counterpart in The Dark had struggled with his father. He must do so, however, within the confines of memory and a single day, for The Leavetaking, which McGahern revised in a superior second edition (1975), concerns a teacher's last day at a Dublin school before leaving for England after being dismissed because his civil-law marriage to an American divorcée is not recognized by the Irish state or school system. Patrick's mind runs freely over his entire previous life—his earlier romances, his father, and especially his mother, who died of cancer. He finally resolves that his present love and his imagination can overcome past depressing reality: “The boat has slipped its moorings and is leaving harbour to trust to the open sea: and no boat needs so much trust to put to sea as it does for one body to go human and naked and vulnerable into the arms of another.” Because this ending obviously reflected McGahern's departure into exile after the banning of The Dark and his firing, many critics again linked this novel to Joyce and to Stephen's supposedly triumphant departure at the end of Portrait. But Elizabeth Reegan had already rejected permanent life abroad in The Barracks, and so did McGahern.
Critics were startled by The Pornographer (1979), which tells the ribald, frequently comic tale of a Dublin writer of pornography who survives his beloved aunt's death and his guilt-ridden affair with a woman who moves to London and has his child there. The protagonist finally decides to move back home to the countryside and marry a nurse with whom he has fallen in love. In its intertextual blending of the protagonist's pornographic writings with his own story, The Pornographer recalls the American Nathaniel West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts or John Gardner's October Light. Autobiographically, The Leavetaking and The Pornographer can be viewed as alternate responses to McGahern's victimization after the publication of The Dark. It is as if in The Leavetaking McGahern was in part saying to the Irish censors and school officials, “Here's the real me whom you banned and fired”; and in The Pornographer, “Here's what real pornography looks like as opposed to what you confused with it in The Dark, and here's how even a real pornographer can be redeemed.” In The Pornographer, the sexual encounters of the extratextual characters Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael are held up for inspection, comic titillation, and finally rejection. Critics have been somewhat divided about how to read these parts of the novel, however. Michael Toolan (1981) views McGahern as wavering between the distinct roles of sympathetic historian and unsympathetic pornographer, while Kennedy (1983) and Fournier (1987) adopt a flatly affirmative view of the novel. The truth, as with so many things, may lie somewhere in the middle. McGahern is neither simply a positive, affirmative writer nor a negative, critical one, but both—a complex novelist with diverse and ambivalent responses to life.
REALISM AND FABULISM IN AIDAN HIGGINS, JOHN BANVILLE, WILLIAM TREVOR, AND JAMES PLUNKETT
It is striking that three of the most international-minded and experimental contemporary Irish novelists—Aidan Higgins (b. 1927), John Banville (b. 1945), and William Trevor (b. 1928)—turned to the venerable tradition of the Big House novel as a frame within which to hang their fictions. In the previous chapter we saw how a Big House novel was disguised within the fabulist contours of Beckett's Watt; in their experiments Higgins, Banville, and Trevor make no attempt to hide their status as Big House novelists, returning to the roots of Irish fiction in the spirit of John Barth's Literature of Exhaustion. Higgins's Langrishe, Go Down (1966), Banville's Birchwood (1973), and Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983) all present a misbegotten male romantic quest. The best novel among the three is Higgins's Langrishe, Go Down, which is more clearly influenced by Faulkner (Go Down, Moses) than by Beckett or Joyce, even though as a stream-of-consciousness writer who attended Clongowes Wood College and wandered Europe reading Joyce, Higgins more obviously invites the Joycean link. Faulkner's vision of a decadent Southern aristocracy is clearly very accessible to Higgins and other Irish Ascendancy novelists.
Langrishe, Go Down is a penetrating, brilliantly written examination of the inhabitants of a decayed Anglo-Irish estate in north Kildare during the 1930s—the sisters Imogen and Helen Langrishe—and their intellectual and cynically ruthless visitor, the German student Otto Beck. Like many an Irish novel, this one grew out of a story—“Killachter Meadow” in Higgins's collection of stories Felo de Se (1960). As Maurice Harmon notes, Higgins's “sisters in the Big House are in reality himself and his brothers” (1973, 15), who grew up in a Georgian house on a seventy-two-acre farm in Celbridge, County Kildare. The theme that dominates all of Higgins's work, even more than the loss of the Irish Ascendancy world, is the complex encounter of his Irish characters with the wider world of Europe. Subsequently he published a travel diary, Images of Africa (1971), a novel focused on an Irish painter's life abroad, Balcony of Europe (1972), an uneven autobiographical novel, Scenes from a Receding Past (1977), and an epistolary novel about an Irish writer's affair with a Danish poet, Boenholm Night-Ferry (1983).
Langrishe, Go Down remains the chief source of Higgins's acclaim. It can be read as a political allegory concerning Ireland's difficulty in lifting itself out of its past and successfully confronting a powerful Europe. Higgins follows the old convention of sending a foreigner to Ireland as narrative lens, but with a new variation: Otto Beck is a German rather than the usual Englishman or American, and he does not treat the natives kindly but ultimately cruelly, entering an affair with Imogen Langrishe with self-serving, cynical motives. Sam Beneham views their relationship as “a kind of extended metaphor for Anglo-German relations in the Era of Appeasement, when sections of the conservative establishment viewed the rise of a strong Fascist State as a possible ally against the spread of Communism and seemed to have lost the will to play a leading role in the European politics of the day.” … In view of more recent incursions of German capitalists and their companies into Ireland, Otto's frank use of Imogen may function as a contemporary as well as historical allegory. Helen Langrishe, whose stream of consciousness begins the novel but then evaporates, eventually dies, unable to move beyond the past, but Imogen finally shoots a gun in the direction of the fleeing Otto, angry that her trust of him has been betrayed. Imogen is a survivor, both of the demise of the Ascendancy as reflected in her sister's death and the threat of Europe as embodied in Otto. As another version of the story of a victimized Irishwoman, Langrishe, Go Down is initially bleaker but finally and surprisingly more hopeful than Moore's Judith Hearne or McGahern's The Barracks.
John Banville, perhaps the most accomplished among younger Irish novelists at the moment, published in Birchwood the first fully fabulist Big House novel (unless Watt is admitted as such). He demonstrates an increased eclecticism and internationalism of influences and perspectives. Like Beckett, John Fowles, and Vladimir Nabokov—whom Seamus Deane … cites as an influence—Banville delights in reminding us in this novel of his artifice: “I began to write … and thought that at last I had discovered a form which would contain and order all my losses. I was wrong. There is no form, no order, only echoes and coincidences, sleight of hand, dark laughter.” His narrator, like Beckett's, regards narration as an act of necessary futility: “Forgetting all I know, I try to describe these things, and only then do I realize, yet again, that the past is incommunicable” (29). Banville's is “another version of that brand of self-consciousness which has been such a distinctive feature of one tradition (and that the major one) of Irish fiction which includes Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Beckett.” …
The Big House novels of Higgins, Banville, and Trevor also contain a strong Gothic strain that hearkens back to the nineteenth century; these are novelists “whose imaginations are closer to Sheridan Le Fanu than to Maria Edgeworth.” … Banville combines Gothicism and fabulism. For example, we learn that the narrator's grandmother mysteriously exploded, providing an odd emblem for the demise of the Big House: “She may just … burst, but I cannot rid myself of the notion that the house itself had something to do with it.” Birchwood focuses on the narrator's attempt to sort out his family history, which is continually thwarted by Banville's deliberate subversion of chronology, on his search for his supposed twin sister, and on his picaresque adventures with the circus, directed by one Prospero. Finally it is admitted that the entire quest has been fabricated: “There is no girl. There never was … no Prospero either, there never is. … And so I became my own Prospero, and yours.” Interestingly, Banville's feeling that he had painted himself into a narrative corner by the end of Birchwood did not subsequently lead him, like Beckett, to increasingly shorter fictions, but rather to a retreat into more conventional work—a series of long novels of ideas focused on imaginative scientists, Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1980), The Newton Letter (1982), and Mefisto (1986). Like Flann O'Brien, Banville has responded to his own early experimentalism by becoming more conservative as a novelist. He “has indicated that his attitude towards fabulism ‘has altered from at first a high enthusiasm, to, lately, a deep suspicion’,” and he now “regards himself as an international writer looking to world fiction for ideas and inspiration rather than to Irish predecessors.”
Somewhat in contrast to the increasingly international Banville, William Trevor is an Anglo-Irish novelist born in Cork but now living in Devon who, while setting most of his ten novels in England, has more recently reasserted his Irishness with his story collection The News from Ireland and his novel Fools of Fortune (1983). Like Higgins's Langrishe, Go Down, Trevor's early Irish novel Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969) focuses on a foreign character, a British woman who married a German, as an object of scorn. Mrs. Eckdorf is an idiotic, sentimental outsider whose misguided attempt to beautify a Dublin flophouse ultimately lands her in an insane asylum. In his Big House novel, Fools of Fortune, Trevor like Higgins shows the influence of Faulkner, specifically that of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Here the family surname is Quinton and one of the crucial stream-of-consciousness narrators is Imelda, the deranged young offspring of the ruined Ascendancy match of Willie Quinton and his English cousin Marianne. Like Birchwood, this novel is marked by neo-Gothicism and a frustrated romantic quest. Cutting through the shifting streams of consciousness, we learn that after one of the Quintons' workers was found hanging from a tree with his tongue cut out for informing to the British during the Anglo-Irish War, Willie's Ascendancy but nationalist father was shot by the British, and Willie has spent most of his life in exile after revenging this shooting and fathering Imelda. The players in this history are cast by Trevor in the image advanced by Willie's father and recounted by Marianne: “Fools of fortune, as his father would have said; ghosts we become.” As in Moore's Judith Hearne, McGahern's The Barracks, and Higgins's Langrishe, Go Down, it is the women who are most victimized, and as in the case of Mrs. Eckdorf's misbegotten journey to Dublin, the estrangement of Anglo-Irish Willie and English Marianne may reflect the situation of their Anglo-Irish creator resident in Devon.
Another novelist who published his first Irish novel in 1969 and whose work has shown an increasing interest in experiment is James Plunkett (b. 1920). Plunkett's development from working-class Dublin origins, a clerkship in the gas company, and a position as Jim Larkin's assistant in the Workers' Union of Ireland into a leading Irish novelist and television producer is a fascinating story. … Francis MacManus, Sean O'Faolain, and Frank O'Connor were important early mentors and helpers. Plunkett's first novel, Strumpet City (1969), is an impressive, panoramic historical novel drawing on the experiences of his father and other relatives and friends during the big Dublin transport labor lockout of 1913, on Plunkett's own later acquaintance with Larkin, its leader, and on his own earlier radio and stage plays about Larkin and the lockout (Cahalan 1978a). This novel is distinguished by an unforgettable cast of characters balanced among the Dublin working class, the wealthy employers, and the clergy in such a way as to invite the kind of dialectical, Marxist analysis of the variety advanced by George Lukács in his book The Historical Novel. … It contains vivid descriptions and characterizations of working-class Dublin life rivalled among contemporary novels only by Christy Brown's Down All the Days (1971). Strumpet City was an immediate best-seller in Ireland and received further fame through its 1980 Irish television adaptation starring Peter O'Toole as Larkin, Peter Ustinov as King Edward VII, and Cyril Cusack as Father Giffley.
Plunkett's second novel, Farewell Companions (1977), was even more expansive historically, encompassing the world of its author's own youth from the 1920s until the 1950s, and reflects not only the contours of the Joycean bildungsroman but also an increasing narrative playfulness, especially in the character of O'Sheehan, who believes himself to be the mythical Oisín reincarnated and indulges himself in entertaining fantasies. In this novel Plunkett pushes public history into the background in order to focus on the private, complex development of his characters, especially that of his protagonist, Tim MacDonagh (Cahalan 1978b).
Along with Jennifer Johnston, the novelists surveyed thus far in this chapter—Kiely, Moore, McGahern, Higgins, Banville, Trevor, and Plunkett—are perhaps the most accomplished and promising in the contemporary period. It is striking that with the partial exception of Banville—and perhaps it is not at all fair to describe as conservative his imaginative meditations upon Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton—all of their careers have been marked by an increasing willingness to experiment, to move from early realist novels into works engaged to a greater or lesser extent in fabulism. Thus perhaps are best bridged the dominant earlier modes of the Irish novel in this century, as traced in my previous chapters.
CONTEMPORARY NOVELS IN IRISH: EOGHAN Ó TUAIRISC, DIARMAID Ó SúILLEABHáIN, AND BREANDáN Ó HEITHIR
Contemporary novels in Irish similarly reflect this kind of modulation between realism and fabulism. Irish-speaking areas have continued to shrink during the last thirty years, so that “the Gaelic novelist or short-story writer must create not only a new literary work but also an audience for it” (O'Leary 1986b, 18). It is therefore ironic that “as the language revival and the condition of the Gaeltacht entered a deep crisis during the past thirty years, modern Irish writing has experienced something of a renaissance, with a number of writers of the very first rank.” … This is not an entirely mysterious phenomenon, for support mechanisms for writers in Irish increased at the same time that the spoken language endured various threats: the language organization Gael-Linn was founded in 1953, the publisher Sáirséal agus Dill in 1945, and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 1972. In 1955 David Marcus was able to celebrate “an eager and widening awareness among the reading public and an atmosphere of excitement in the writing itself—two factors which, in supplementing each other, have generated continuous growth; and among the new writers which this activity has produced are many whose freshness and modernity might be said to have given Irish literature in Gaelic something it never had at any previous stage of its long development—an avant garde movement.” …
These writers were motivated by political as well as literary concerns. During the 1966 observances of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, for example, “a group of radical revivalists named ‘Misneach’ (Courage) … felt compelled to mount a week-long hunger strike in Belfast and Dublin to remind Irishmen and women of past idealism”; this group's founders included Máirtín Ó Cadhain and two of his best contemporary successors as novelists, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc and Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin. … Ó Cadhain linked Ó Tuairisc and Ó Súilleabháin as “evidently influenced by the modern French School of Malraux and Camus, and both deal with la condition humaine, with an awareness and a sophistication never before displayed in Irish writing.” … A more obvious direct influence was Ó Cadhain himself, whose career as a fiction writer towers over subsequent writing in Irish much like Joyce's in English. As a native speaker from Inis Mór, the novelist and critic Breandán Ó hEithir is close to Ó Cadhain in background and published an article (1977) in homage of Cré na Cille. Ó Tuairisc published The Road to Brightcity (1981), a translation of nine stories by Ó Cadhain. Following Ó Cadhain's lead, these novelists were determined to write about Ireland, including the life of the city as well as the countryside, in a distinctly modern way. Their versatility is also impressive—Ó Tuairisc and Ó Súilleabháin (who were schoolteachers as well as writers) both wrote a number of plays and other works, and Ó hEithir is perhaps best known as a regular contributor to the Irish Times.
Ó Tuairisc and Ó Súilleabháin were both bilingual writers whose first language was English. Like several others of their generation, they reflect the increase of bilingualism in Ireland; we begin to see more writers publishing in both English and Irish. Richard Power, for example, whose chief achievement was a novel in English treated a bit later in this chapter, The Hungry Grass, also published a novel in Irish set in Galway and the Aran Islands, Úll i mBárr an Ghéagáin (Apple on the Treetop) (1958). Ó Tuairisc (1919-82), whose given name was Eugene Watters, published three novels in Irish—interestingly, they were his more serious works—and two rather more lightweight efforts in English. Like two novelists who had written novels about Northern Ireland, Tarlach Ó hUid … in An Dá Thrá (The two strands) (1952) and Séamas Ó Néill in Máire Nic Artáin (1959), Ó Tuairisc demonstrated an interest in politics and history. His first novel, L'Attaque (1962), was perhaps his best; tightly written and focused on the impact upon the Irish peasantry brought to bear by the French soldiers and Anglo-Irish republicans who joined them in the May rising of 1798, this novel rivals Plunkett's Strumpet City as the best historical novel of the period. Its chief focus is the consciousness of the reluctant peasant rebel Máirtín Caomhánach and it shows the influence of the ancient Irish epic the Táin and Tolstoy's War and Peace. … Like several of the novelists in English already considered, Ó Tuairisc demonstrated an increasing interest in experiment. His second novel, Dé Luain (Monday) (1966), employs several interwoven streams of consciousness “designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of 1916, and deals with the opening hours of the Revolution in Dublin, minute by minute, from midnight Easter Sunday to noon on Monday.” … Toward the end of his life Ó Tuairisc reflected that “though it won the Butler Prize, it has never been as popular with readers as L'Attaque; it is too complex, having dozens of perception centres in the weave of it” (1981). We have repeatedly noted such an interwoven quality to be typical of the Irish novel. Máirín Nic Eoin adds concerning the history in Dé Luain that “it is interesting in particular the emphasis Ó Tuairisc places on the role of the Citizen Army, a group whose part in the Rising, in contrast to that of the Volunteers, had been underestimated by historians and largely ignored” (1985). Ó Tuairisc's last novel, An Lomnochtán (The naked person) (1977), an autobiographical bildungsroman focused on his childhood in the 1920s, was originally begun in English around 1962 and then completed in Irish after 1974, in an experimental style influenced by both Ó Cadhain and Joyce. …
Ó Suilleabháin (1932-85) also moved from realism to experimentalism. Cathal Ó Háinle notes that “his first novel, Dianmhuilte Dé (The zealous mills of God) (1964), is traditional enough in diction and in subject matter. His second, Caoin Tú Féin (Keen for yourself) (1967), is a new beginning, for it and his third novel, An Uain Bheo (The moment of decision) (1968), rely heavily on the stream-of-consciousness technique and consequently make much use of a fragmented diction which is full of incomplete sentences and verbal echoes.” … Ó Súilleabháin's typical protagonist is modern existential man, alone. Ian Ó Murchú in Caoin Tú Féin, for example, is a hung-over schoolteacher who wonders why his wife has just left and what his whole life means; Louis Stein in An Uain Bheo is a Jew who experiences the isolation of a Leopold Bloom and loses the woman he loves in a car accident. Ó Súilleabháin's style, like his themes, is bold but uneven, since “while the interior monologue technique enables him to portray admirably the fragmentariness of life, his stylistic tricks—hyperbole, individualized syntax, use of capitals and parentheses—tend to distract the reader.” … Most prolific among novelists in Irish, Ó Súilleabháin left behind five unpublished novels at the time of his death in 1985 that his publishers, Coiscéim, are as of this date in the process of bringing out. At this writing Ciontach [Guilty] (1983a), Aistear [Journey] (1983b), and Saighdiúir gan Chlaíomh [Soldier without a sword] (1985) have appeared. Ciontach was written in the form of a jail journal and dedicated to its model, the author's republican uncle, Diarmaid Ó Drisceoil. Aistear focuses on the experiences of several ordinary people in the moments surrounding death. Saighdiúir gan Chlaíomh is a fictionalized biography of the Irish religious leader Edmund Ignatius Rice. Ó Súilleabháin's reputation as a novelist is growing, … while “for a more profound exploration of the questions that dominated Ó Súilleabháin's creative life we must await the publication of the other novels he left behind.” … His career illustrates both the challenges of trying to write in Irish but also his steadfast determination to do so. …
Ó hEithir (b. 1930), a nephew of Liam O'Flaherty, published in 1976 a novel that received perhaps more attention than any other novel in Irish since Ó Cadhain: Lig Sinn i gCathú (Lead Us Into Temptation). A bildungsroman in the tradition of Portrait, this novel deliberately confounds Irish Catholic morality in a manner summed up by its title. The protagonist, Martin Melody, a university student in “Ballycastle” (Galway), has to steer a middle course between his mother and his grasping, puritanical brother the priest, on the one hand, and the forces of complete dissolution embodied in his drinking companion Billy O'Grady, on the other hand. After making love to an uninhibited barmaid, Stella Walsh—Lig Sinn i gCathú is one of the few novels in Irish to treat sex so graphically and so positively—Martin flees Galway for Dublin and America in the company of Larry de Lacy, the rebel, following in the footsteps of George Moore's Oliver Gogarty and Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. The names of Ó hEithir's characters reflect his frank acceptance of bilingualism, involving the incursion of English into spoken and written Irish. Proinsias MacCana feels that “he has succeeded better than any other—including Máirtín Ó Cadhain—in adapting the idiom and thythm of traditional Irish speech to the tempo of modern urban and industrial society” (1980, 61). Since 1976 Ó hEithir, like Flann O'Brien/Myles na Gopaleen earlier, has mostly devoted himself to his columns in the Irish Times.
While the production of novels in Irish runs far behind that of Irish novels in English—or, for that matter, behind that of poetry in Irish—the appearance in recent years of several other novels by other writers provides some indication that the novel in Irish may be experiencing a modest renaissance (Nic Eoin 1984). Like Ó hEithir an author of an article on Cré na Cille, Breandán Ó Doibhlin focused An Branar Gan Cur (The untilled field) (1979) on a train journey from Dublin to Derry by a young university lecturer whose despairing thoughts about Ireland provide us with “more a dissertation than a novel.” … Similarly, Deoraithe (Exiles) (1986) by Dónal MacAmhlaigh, already well known among Gaelic readers as the “Irish navvy in London” author of Dialann Deoraí (Diary of an exile) (1960), examines the lives of three people waiting in a Galway pub for their train to Dublin. This basic conceit had been put forth many years earlier by Frank O'Connor in his play In the Train (1937). Fabulist, futurist novels in Irish have been published by Mícheál Ó Brolacháin in Pax Dei (1985), an Orwellian vision of a bleak postindustrial future, and by Annraoi de Paor in Buan ar Buairt (Forever vexed) (1985), a quirky study of an Irish academic. Indeed, “there has been a marked increase in the number and diversity of Gaelic novels over the past few years.”
WOMEN NOVELISTS: EDNA O'BRIEN, JANET MCNEILL, IRIS MURDOCH, EILíS DILLON, JULIA O'FAOLAIN, AND JENNIFER JOHNSTON
Also on the rise in recent years have been Irish novels by women, in part encouraged by the example of earlier women novelists, by feminist presses such as Arlen House in Dublin and Virago in London, and by the women's movement. The series of notable women novelists has expanded beyond the traditional Ascendancy background to include a writer like Edna O'Brien, a pioneer among contemporary women novelists, who comes from a small farm in County Clare. Irish women novelists continue to focus their work in realist modes, although O'Brien has attempted more experimental points of view in her more recent novels. They have sought to answer the question of what life is like in Ireland for women; indeed, the novels of O'Brien, Julia O'Faolain, Jennifer Johnston, and other contemporary women writers invite discussion together here because of their novels' common attention to the experiences of women. It should be noted that further critical comparison is needed between their novels and those of their female predecessors from Edgeworth to Lavin as well as those of male writers, from George Moore to John McGahern, who have devoted special attention to female protagonists.
Edna O'Brien (b. 1930) is the first and best known female novelist of the period—rivalled in the scope of her international fame perhaps only by Brian Moore, among Irish novelists of either gender. The appearance of her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), and its sequels, The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), created quite a stir because of their frank treatment of female sexual experience. The subject of these novels was located in previously uncharted fictional territory: the struggles, sexual and otherwise, of two typical young girls from County Clare, the earnest Kate and the racy Baba, who make their way together from a rural Catholic boarding school to jobs and flats in Dublin, and then, as young women, into unsuccessful marriages in London. O'Brien herself had followed the way of the James Joyces and the Brian Moores, beginning The Country Girls shortly after moving abroad in 1959.
Among Irish women novelists, O'Brien was preceded only by Molly Keane in her attention to the sexual experiences of young women, and only by Maura Laverty in her vivid portraits of a lower-middle-class girlhood in rural and small-town Ireland; O'Brien's graphic combination of these features met with a 1960s paperback readership in such a way as to guarantee that O'Brien would not suffer the obscurity that was the fate of Keane and Laverty, at least until very recently. O'Brien “survived not only the literary spite and backbiting of Dublin but an unhappy marriage, childbearing, motherhood and uprootedness as well to become, by her thirty-fourth year, that rare thing, a writer earning a living by her craft,” presenting us with “the paradox of the strong, independent woman writing [about] women as victims.” … As an Irish bildungsroman, The Country Girls reveals secrets found nowhere in Portrait or other such novels. In O'Brien's beloved elm grove “Baba and I sat there and shared secrets, and once we took off our knickers in there and tickled one another. The greatest secret of all.” At the same time, this novel cites Kate's love for Joyce's Dubliners and contains a passage modelled on the end of “The Dead.” … Similarly, we learn in The Lonely Girl that Kate, now assailed by wolf-like older men in Dublin, appropriately enough reads James Stephens's The Charwoman's Daughter with sympathetic understanding.
O'Brien's character types—the cruel father, the victimized mother, lustful but ineffectual men—recur throughout her fiction. O'Brien herself has referred to Baba as her “alter-ego … :
Realizing that the earlier [ancient Irish] heroines were bawdy and the later [modern literary] ones lyrical I decided to have two, one who would conform to both my own and my country's view of what an Irish woman should be and one who would undermine every piece of protocol and religion and hypocrisy that there was. … Kate was looking for love. Baba was looking for money. Kate was timid, yearning and elegiac. Baba took up the cudgel against life and married an Irish builder who was as likely to clout her as to do anything else. … Coming back to them I knew that Baba's asperity had to prevail. Heroines don't have to be good anymore, because more women are writing fiction and are eager to express the more volatile part of themselves; equally they are less beholden to men. (Edna O'Brien 1986, 13)
O'Brien wrote her “Country Girls Trilogy,” recently republished (1986) as such, well before the rise of the contemporary women's movement, “and the bravery of the accomplishment ought not to be slighted. …
O'Brien's departure in Girls in Their Married Bliss from the autobiographical Kate as first-person narrator, replacing her with the ribald voice of Baba, marked the beginning of a stylistic experimentalism that has continued in her subsequent novels and links the development of her work to that of Kiely, Moore, McGahern, Trevor, Plunkett, Ó Tuairisc, and Ó Súilleabháin. Night (1972), for example, is the Molly Bloom-like monologue of Mary Hooligan, a middle-aged woman who recalls her life. A Pagan Place (1970) returns to the landscape and period of The Country Girls, but as described by a narrator who tells her own story in the second person—the detached “you” also found in parts of McGahern's The Dark, with which this novel and The Country Girls could be compared on other scores as well. Several of O'Brien's recent novels are set outside of Ireland, in London or on the Riviera. Critics are divided as to the merits of O'Brien's novels after “The Country Girls” trilogy, most of which focus on a woman's inability to find happiness and love either within marriage or outside of it; one of them is married to a man actually named “Herod.” For example, one critic feels that O'Brien's books have become “a tedious sojourn in decadence and despair,” … whereas another believes that “together with an evolving style, her work shows an evolving vision of life.” … While Night has its good moments, when considering O'Brien's more recent novels one has to agree that “none of these has the surefootedness as when she is writing about home.” … A Pagan Place, for example, omits direct dialogue altogether—one of the chief strengths of The Country Girls as contained in some of the unforgettable exchanges of Kate and Baba. Recently other women such as Jennifer Johnston and Julia O'Faolain have been publishing better novels than O'Brien, but she remains a pioneer among them for her work in the early 1960s.
A writer who could not be much more remote in background from O'Brien is Janet McNeill (b. 1907), who grew up and lived in upper-class Protestant Belfast and nearby Lisburn, and wrote about that very different world. Yet McNeill's most notable Irish novel, The Maiden Dinosaur (1964), dealt around the same time with O'Brien's theme of sexual frustration, from the perspective of a woman who was sexually abused by her father and whose later interactions with men are marked by that experience. This protagonist is joined by other pained women characters, including one who thinks concerning her husband that “Justin hadn't had the baby, the long months, the fright of a tightening body, skin stretched and shiny and navel distended like a bubble, the pain or the drugging weakness, like a kitten washed up on the beach. He thought the baby was a parcel you could dump with a stranger until you were ready to collect it, not a piece of you torn away.” The economic world of genteel McNeill's women is very different from that of O'Brien's working-class women, but they also experience oppression by men.
Irish historical novels have in recent years been published by two women who provide female perspectives counter-balancing the traditionally male focus of that subgenre: Iris Murdoch (b. 1919) and Eilís Dillon (b. 1920). Like Elizabeth Bowen, Murdoch has lived most of her life in England and is much better known as an English novelist; Dillon made her name as an author of children's books. The two are very different in background—Murdoch from the Protestant Ascendancy, Dillon of Catholic, nationalist origins—but from Murdoch's The Red and the Green (1965) and Dillon's Across the Bitter Sea (1973) and Blood Relations (1977) we emerge with a very different view of modern Irish history than that found in Irish historical novels written by men. Murdoch's and Dillon's women wait at home, longing for a relationship that men, caught up in politics and rebellion, are unable or unwilling to give them. … Murdoch goes so far as to portray her 1916 rebel, Pat Dumay, as a latent homosexual and misogynist, and in Blood Relations Dillon's Molly Gould is plagued by the knowledge that “she was expected to live through those days as if nothing special were happening, as if it were possible to bear them like a lady … as if she had no more to lose than anyone else, as if her whole life were not in the balance” (25). What good is romantic rebellion to the woman left behind?
Julia O'Faolain (b. 1932) has presented similarly pungent portraits of Irish history and politics from a woman's point of view in No Country for Young Men (1980). She is also author of an irreverent first novel set in Paris, Godded and Codded (1970), the nonfiction study Not in God's Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (1973), and a novel about women living in a convent in ancient Gaul, Women in the Wall (1975). No Country for Young Men (whose title is obviously a biting comment on Yeats's already ironic line about Ireland being “no country for old men”) marvellously merges a present-day story with its 1920s backgrounds. In the latter novel James Duffy, an Irish-American academic, comes to Ireland to make a propaganda film for the IRA front organization “Banned Aid” (Noraid). He falls in love with Grainne O'Malley, but Grainne is already burdened with an alcoholic, impotent husband and a lecherous, interfering cousin whose IRA lackey almost inevitably murders Duffy. As Ann Weeks points out, O'Faolain's plot is a retelling of the old Diarmuid and Gráinne myth—in which Fionn kills Diarmuid after he runs off with Gráinne, with Gráinne consenting to return to live with the Fianna for the sake of her children—but “Grace O'Malley, however, does not capitulate in order to restore the ‘order’ derived from male principles; in this, O'Faolain's novel proves more optimistic than the controlling myth” (1986, 91). Weeks adds that O'Faolain's women characters are linked to the common people of Ireland, whom the male rebels view as “clay” to be molded to their purposes (92). The victimized Judith Clancy's memory is compared to a bog. O'Faolain thus provides a fresh feminist twist to the venerable tradition personifying the land of Ireland as a sean bhean bhocht, a poor old woman.
Also a daughter of a noted literary father (the playwright Denis Johnston), Jennifer Johnston (b. 1930) has published eight novels to date, establishing herself as the most impressive contemporary female Irish novelist. She specializes in short, lucid narratives marked by shifting points of view and a tendency toward continuous narration rather than sharply defined chapter divisions. More persistently than Aidan Higgins and John Banville, Johnston has adapted Big House settings and stories to her own ends, although she has also added to her range the working-class world of Derry in Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and small-town settings in The Old Jest (1979) and The Railway Station Man (1984). Her early novels reveal that surrounded by a violent and cruel society, unconventional male relationships are as doomed as those of women. In The Captains and the Kings (1972), the old Ascendancy widower Charles Prendergast, living alone in the significantly named Kill House, befriends a working-class Catholic boy, Diarmuid Toorish, but the boy's ignorant parents and Prendergast's own gardener conspire to destroy the friendship, and at the end of the novel Diarmuid is sent away to school and Charles dies. Here the Catholic working class appears villainous.
As if to balance this indictment, Johnston points her finger at evil upper-class characters in How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974) while telling an otherwise similar story. Despite the opposition of his hateful Ascendancy mother, Alexander Moore forms a fast friendship with Jerry Crowe, son of nearby peasants, and Alex and Jerry go off to World War I together. There, however, Alex is made an officer and prohibited from fraternizing with Jerry, a private. After Jerry goes AWOL in search of his father, who is missing in action, he is caught and condemned to death, and a maniacal English commanding officer orders Alex to direct Jerry's firing squad the following morning or face it himself. Alex elects a third option of his own—telling Jerry nothing of the choice he faces, Alex gets him pleasantly drunk, shoots him in the head at close range, and then awaits his own execution. Both of these novels are dominated by male characters, but as Shari Benstock points out, “this world is not masculine, not open, accessible, social, a world of action, but rather specifically feminine: closed, suffocated, lonely, and inward-looking.” Benstock adds, “The ‘woman's novel’ predicates itself on the notion that social separateness is an a priori condition of the woman in contemporary society. Johnston's work seems to suggest that such exclusive status is not necessarily peculiar to women” (1982, 216).
Interestingly, all of Johnston's six other novels to date show how society as well as cultural and age differences render male-female love relationships difficult or impossible. In Johnston's second published but first written novel, The Gates (1973), Minnie McMahon lives amicably with her Uncle Prionnsias in their decaying ancestral home, but they get robbed by her boyfriend. Johnston is at her best when writing about an adolescent and an older surrogate father. In The Old Jest, eighteen-year-old Nancy Gulliver befriends a kind, mysterious older man whom she finds in the hut that she has fixed up near her home—and then witnesses his shooting at the end of the novel, the victim of British Black-and-Tan soldiers. In Johnston's most recent novel, Fool's Sanctuary (1987), Miranda Martin loses her IRA lover to IRA gunmen after he tips off Miranda's brother about an IRA plot to kill him. Having examined the older Irish Republican tradition in these two novels, in Shadows on our Skins and The Railway Station Man Johnston castigates the contemporary IRA. In the former novel young Joe Logan falls in love in Derry with Kathleen, an older schoolteacher, but she is engaged to a British soldier, gets beaten by some of the IRA cohorts of Joe's older brother, and leaves Derry for her home back in southern Ireland. Johnston, who was born in Dublin but now lives in Derry, clearly aimed to move beyond her typical southern Big House setting in this novel. In The Railway Station Man, middle-aged, widowed Helen Cuffe falls in love with Roger Hawthorne, a gentle Englishman devoted to restoring the town's railway station, but loses both Roger and her son in an IRA bombing. A painter, Helen is left only with the friendship of Damian, a young man whom she had painted on the beach who, like Roger and herself, rejects the IRA's violence. Less political and even bleaker is The Christmas Tree (1982), focused on the fading consciousness of Constance Keating, who is dying of cancer, thereby recalling both McGahern's The Barracks and O'Brien's Night.
As Brian Donnelly notes, “Johnston portrays the sharp divisions that existed between the Ascendancy and the native Irish stock and, in doing so, she has succeeded in conveying a sense of poignant regret at the mutual loss which this failure of integration involved for the Irish nation as a whole.” She joins Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, and Molly Keane as the most impressive recent descendant of the impressive tradition of women Big House novelists—all of whom have found the Big House to be a particularly powerful and malleable symbol of alienation and isolation, merging the domestic and the psychological realms. …
An interesting Catholic Big House novel has recently been published by Val Mulkerns (b. 1925). The Summerhouse (1984) blends five different narrators to expose the nasty interactions of a genteel family, suggesting that the family itself, not history, is to blame for the failure of this Big House. One of them builds a model summerhouse in their kitchen, and then, appropriately enough, finds that it will not fit through the door and must remain stuck indoors. Like Molly Keane, Mulkerns, who served as an assistant editor on The Bell in the early 1950s, published her first novel decades ago and has only recently reemerged after a long hiatus. Her novel Very Like a Whale (1986) is almost as despairing about middle-class Dublin life as The Summerhouse is about the life of the Catholic gentry, but more convincing and realistic about a world she knows better and tinged in the end by a gentle mood of acceptance.
The recent appearance of several other popular women novelists suggests that another Edna O'Brien or Jennifer Johnston may soon emerge. Clare Boylan's Holy Pictures (1983), a racy novel of Irish girlhood that recalls O'Brien's The Country Girls, was a success, as have been Maeve Binchy's Light a Penny Candle (1982) and Echoes (1985). The most celebrated recent first novel by an Irishwoman is Mary Leland's The Killeen (1985), focused on the lives of two women during the political turmoil of the 1930s, culminating in one of their children's horrible death and shameful burial in the killeen, a graveyard for unbaptized children. Like Éilis Dillon and Jennifer Johnston, Leland shows how women and children have suffered as victims of the romanticized male Irish political struggles of the past and present.
CONVENTIONAL REALISTS: MICHAEL FARRELL, WALTER MACKEN, SAM HANNA BELL, ANTHONY C. WEST, JOHN BRODERICK, RICHARD POWER, THOMAS KILROY, AND ANTHONY CRONIN
I have traced earlier in this chapter and in my previous chapter the recent fictional experimentalism of Francis Stuart, Sean O'Faolain, Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore, John McGahern, Aidan Higgins, John Banville, Diarmuid Ó Súilleabháin, Edna O'Brien, and a few others. It must be emphasized, though, that a much larger majority of contemporary Irish novelists have continued writing in a more traditional, realist vein—essentially the often socially and politically critical mode of 1920-55—almost as if the later Joyce and Beckett never existed. There is still much that Irish novelists want to say in a realist way about their country and its people, and since 1960 the publishers and readership for this kind of fiction have been more numerous and more encouraging for writers than ever before. Just as the romantic Irish Literary Revival led by Yeats came a century after the English one led by Wordsworth and Coleridge, it is as if realist Irish novelists are determined to enjoy a belated success denied to many of their predecessors in earlier periods. Most of the conventional contemporary realist novelists do not measure up in their fiction to Brian Moore, John McGahern, the other novelists surveyed in the first section of this chapter, or Jennifer Johnston. Nonetheless, the eight novelists surveyed in the next few pages—before I turn at the end of this chapter to four mostly more experimental novelists who have emerged only within the last few years—have published a variety of fine works over the past three decades. There are many other lesser contemporary realists who must be excluded from my survey. I should also remind the reader that with the exception of Edna O'Brien's Night, all of the novels of the women writers surveyed in my last section also fall within the realist mode.
Michael Farrell (1899-1962) well illustrates the persistence of realism. As one critic notes concerning his life's work, the long, posthumously published novel Thy Tears Might Cease (1963), “even though it is marvelously readable and accurate social history, the book owes nothing to modern fiction and could almost have been published not in 1963, but in 1863 by a second cousin of the Brontes.” As a bildungsroman and roman à clef examining the growth from boyhood to manhood of Martin Matthew Reilly during the placid, then turbulent 1910-20 decade, with particular attention to the Easter Rising as a turning point, this novel recalls Eimar O'Duffy's The Wasted Island. It is one of several notable bildungsromans that appeared during the 1960s—including McGahern's The Dark, Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream, O'Brien's trilogy, and Anthony C. West's The Ferret Fancier—all of which, Denis Cotter argues (1982), appear to have been involved in reinventing the fictional wheel rather than fully conscious of writing in a specific subgeneric tradition including O'Duffy, Joyce, and all the other earlier “Irish novels of the developing self.” These novels were quite popular, Thy Tears Might Cease becoming something of a best-seller.
One of the most popular realists, one who published a long string of Macmillan/Pan best-sellers, was Walter Macken (1915-67). Also a playwright, actor, and leader of the Taibhdhearc (the Irish language theatre in Galway), Macken reached perhaps his widest audience with his trilogy of historical novels, Seek the Fair Land (1959), The Silent People (1962), and The Scorching Wind (1964), focused respectively on the adventures of romantic heroes during the Cromwellian reign of terror, the Great Hunger, and the Civil War. Macken knew Irish but chose to write his novels in a “cosmopolitan” English style. His ethos in his historical trilogy is Catholic and nationalist, ultimately championing his heroic protagonists' discovery of peace beyond the violent events of history. … Macken published a total of eleven novels between 1949 and 1971. Perhaps his best are the early Rain on the Wind (1950) and The Bogman (1952), both of which concern the struggles of a young Galwayman (a fisherman, a farmer) to establish an identity and find love despite the worst machinations of his relatives and the surrounding society. The typical Macken hero is initially dispossessed but ultimately redeemed. Readers found his vivid ethnographic details about life around Galway and his happy endings particularly appealing.
Sam Hanna Bell (b. 1909), Anthony C. West (b. 1910), and John Broderick (b. 1927) also focused on the enclosed societal worlds of rural and small-town places even more obscure than Macken's Galway, but have been less optimistic about the availability of clear solutions within those worlds. Difficult sexual relationships are portrayed very graphically by these writers. Sex is as tortured in Bell's Protestant County Down and West's Protestant County Cavan as it is in Broderick's Catholic Athlone, County Westmeath—suggesting that northern Protestant and southern Catholic attitudes towards sex may not be so far apart as public events and opinions in Ireland often suggest. Bell and West have both been critically neglected because they fall outside the “mainstream” of Catholic fiction from Joyce to Brian Moore, but their best novels are very fine indeed and contain many more similarities than differences with those of their Catholic contemporaries. At the same time, their clearest predecessors are northern Protestant novelists from earlier in the century; like Shan Bullock, Bell concerns himself in his best novel with the social and sexual life of the Protestant farmlands, and like Forrest Reid, West develops a bildungsroman focused on the consciousness of a young Protestant boy, one dominated by poetic and sexual fantasies.
Bell's December Bride (1951) tells the story of a ménage-à-trois between Sarah Gomartin and the brothers Hamilton and Frank Echlin. Initially a servant on their farm, Sarah lives with both brothers, has a child, and ends up marrying one of them only to legitimize her daughter's marriage. Such a story appears shocking and aberrant but was in fact modelled on an actual case …, “for in rural Irish areas such naive ménages-à-trois and ad hoc families, such scant regard for the sanctions of city law upon sexual and parental relations, are to be found.” … John Wilson Foster claims that Sarah “creates bad blood between the Echlins and their neighbours and … brings upon the Echlins something akin to a curse or blight” (1974, 54), but this seems an overly harsh verdict concerning her status in the novel and a misreading of Bell's intent. Rather, Sarah Gomartin emerges as a strong, courageous, and certainly persevering woman who lifts herself from servant to leader on the Echlin farm and flouts the will of the hypocritical minister and townspeople; Bell's presentation of the arrangement seems ironic and accepting rather than negative. He has published two other novels—The Hollow Ball (1961), about a Belfast footballer; and A Man Flourishing (1973), a historical novel about the 1798 northern Protestant rebels—but neither is as subtle and rewarding as December Bride.
West is similarly known for one novel, The Ferret Fancier (1963). It focuses on a boy's dual, overlapping pastimes: his husbanding of ferrets that are used to kill rabbits for sport and profit, and his fantasies about sex. He explicitly links the two: “The whole operation became in his mind like a steamy orgy as the hunters expressed their excited satisfaction by way of a running sexual commentary, every hole a female one and every tuft of moss a tuft of pubic hair, the ferret a kind of cock which they shoved into the holes to rape the waiting rabbits: a new kind of winey world, life short cruel and merry as possible.” To our relief, West's youthful protagonist finally withdraws from his dual quest, stumbling on toward some other, unknown destiny.
Sex is even seedier in the novels of John Broderick. His eleven novels are characterized by an ongoing attack on the mores of midland Ireland; they show talent but too often lapse into caricature at the service of overt didacticism. If Bell can be linked to Bullock and West to Reid, then Broderick's fictional father from earlier in the century is Brinsley MacNamara. Broderick is concerned with “the states of unfreedom in a society of squinting windows,” seeing himself as a would-be Irish Balzac, admitting that his early novels are too negative and voicing “his own hope of being able to move from negativity to a novel ‘written with love’.” In a no-holds-barred attempt to plunge beneath the quiet behavioral surface of his hometown of Athlone, Broderick's books are populated by ruthless, whore-like women, by weak, often homosexual men, and by hypocritical priests. The Pilgrimage (1961), for example, is a cynical, vacuous revision of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in which Julia Glynn lives with her crippled husband but pursues affairs first with the family doctor and then with their bizarre young houseservant. Broderick is at his narrative worst when he informs us in its one-sentence final chapter that Julia's crippled, homosexual husband has been cured at Lourdes; here and too frequently elsewhere, his novels take on misogynist and gratuitous airs. As Michael Gallagher writes, whereas in Broderick's early novels “his plots point to a moment when his central character faces the essential emptiness of life with no illusions left, or when the reader is made to experience the ironic fragility of home-made shelters against truth,” in several subsequent novels “these moments are not so marked” and “the pattern of disillusionment continues but not for the central characters.” …
The protagonist of The Waking of Willie Ryan (1965) had a homosexual love affair and was committed to an institution by his sister-in-law and the parish priest, but returns to quietly vanquish his foes in his own way, the novel's title perhaps reflecting (in the manner of Finnegans Wake) his personal reawakening as well as his eventual death. This novel's only predecessor as a portrait of an Irish homosexual is Molly Keane's less sympathetic Devoted Ladies (1934). A fairly positive homosexual relationship is also described in The Trial of Father Dillingham (1982), which contains Broderick's perhaps most hopeful ending: Jim Dillingham learns that he was not expelled from the priesthood as he had thought, and resolves to embark on social service in South America with his friend the retiring bishop. Apparently attempting here the novel “written with love” that he earlier said he longed for, Broderick suggests that some kind of redemption might be available even in the absence of illusion and in the midst of dingy reality.
The Trial of Father Dillingham can be seen as a successor to several better novels about Irish priests that have appeared in recent years, following in their turn in the path of much earlier novels such as John Banim's The Nowlans, George Moore's The Lake, and Gerald O'Donovan's Father Ralph. These novels include James Plunkett's previously mentioned Strumpet City—two of whose best developed characters are the puritanical, troubled Father O'Connor and the visionary, despairing Father Giffley—Richard Power's The Hungry Grass (1969), published in the same year, and Thomas Kilroy's The Big Chapel (1971). Power (1928-70), whose death at the age of forty-two cut short a very promising career, published a novel in English (The Land of Youth, 1964) as well as the aforementioned one in Irish about life on the Aran Islands, but The Hungry Grass is the one by which he will be remembered. It begins by describing the death of Father Tom Conroy, who by all public accounts has led an uneventful, mediocre life—and shows via extended flashbacks that his life was difficult but anything but mediocre. “The ‘hungry grass’ of the title alludes to the féar gortach of oral tradition that causes extreme hunger in whoever treads on it.” We learn that in his last days Conroy sought to reconcile himself with his senile mother, who never really loved him, and with the rest of his family, and that he wished to do something for the suffering small farmers of his parish. He failed in both aims, but his final days, as brilliantly probed by Power's narrative, are filled with a nobility all their own. James MacKillop views The Hungry Grass as “a meditation on a devitalized rural society two generations after republican revolution,” while Terence Brown insists that Power's focus is “familial” rather than public, political, or social. … The depth of the novel is underscored by the fact that it can easily bear both of these contrasting readings. Similarly fusing the personal and public aspects of a priest's career is Kilroy's The Big Chapel, which examines the role of Father William Lannigan during the same ecclesiastic controversies of the 1870s in the town of Callan, County Kilkenny, that had also provided the subject of Francis MacManus's The Greatest of These. Like Power's priest, Kilroy's is troubled by the gap between what he intends to do and what he is actually able to do. In his sole published novel to date, Kilroy (b. 1934) examines “the relation between intention and act, the ironic contrast between man's private aspirations and the public gestures that result from those aspirations” (Cosgrove 1976, 299), suggesting that therefore “the past is a confused and confusing entity, unreliable as memory, as subject to variation as fiction.”
Like Kilroy and Benedict Kiely, Anthony Cronin (b. 1926) is as well known in Ireland as a critic as he is as a novelist. A regular columnist for the Irish Times, Cronin has published a survey of Irish writers (1982) and a gritty memoir of his dissolute days of the 1950s in the company of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, J. P. Donleavy, and John Ryan, Dead as Doornails (1976). Those days are also the subject of his best novel to date, The Life of Riley (1964), a picaresque, rather comic account of one Patrick Riley's downward progression from itinerant jobs in Dublin to total lethargy in England. While serving as associate editor on the Trumpet, Riley is ill advised by its Marxist editor, Prunshios McGonaghy (obviously modelled on Peadar O'Donnell), to visit a doss-house in England in order to fully understand “the dialoctic [sic] process” (110). Riley follows this instruction all too literally. Cronin maintains his picaresque vision in Identity Papers (1979), in which the reputed grandson of the infamous nineteenth-century forger Richard Pigott sets about repeating Pigott's crimes, but then learns that he is not Pigott's descendant after all and resumes his own life more hopefully. Here Cronin appears to be close to the neo-Gothic mode of the recently emergent novelist Patrick McGinley.
RECENT NOVELISTS: BERNARD MACCLAVERTY, NEIL JORDAN, DESMOND HOGAN, AND PATRICK MCGINLEY
The last few years have been marked by the appearance of a number of promising new novelists, including the novelists in Irish and the women novelists mentioned earlier. Finally here I wish to mention four others: Bernard MacLaverty (b. 1942), Neil Jordan (b. 1951), Desmond Hogan (b. 1951), and Patrick McGinley (b. 1937). So far MacLaverty is the best known internationally among them because of the popular success of his novel Cal (1983) in both its book and film versions. Born in Belfast and now living in Scotland, MacLaverty focuses in both of his very readable if uneven novels on complex personal responsibilities for a death. In Lamb (1980), the protagonist is a monk who flees a nasty northern Irish institution for wayward boys accompanied by an epileptic adolescent boy whom he wishes he could adopt. These two sacrificial lambs—the protagonist's name is Michael Lamb and the boy's name is Owen, which we are reminded means “lamb” in Irish—enact a distorted version of the story of Abraham and Isaac, when Michael, named in the press as Owen's kidnapper, treats him to a few days of happiness and then, convinced that he cannot spare him many years of misery and epilepsy either by returning him to the institution or futilely attempting to adopt him, tragically kills him. In Cal (1983) the protagonist is a young northern Catholic who seeks to atone for his role as driver of the car in the IRA shooting of the husband of a beautiful young woman, with whom he ends up in an affair before she learns of his guilt and he is taken away, “grateful at last that someone was going to beat him within an inch of his life” (170).
MacLaverty's plots may strain our credulity, but they are still presented within the realist mode. The narratives of Jordan, Hogan, and McGinley are much more experimental. In their novels Jordan and Hogan inspect past realities through refracted mirrors. Jordan was a co-founder of the Irish Writers' Cooperative in 1974; since the publication of his second novel, The Dream of a Beast, in 1983, he has turned to filmmaking. His novels are themselves rather cinematic. The Past (1980) examines fairly traditional materials—the story of characters living through the days of the Abbey Theatre and the birth of the Irish Republic—but in a thoroughly nontraditional way. The narrator presents his fantasies about the lives of his ancestors, moving from confusion to hypothesis to doubt, finally implying that he can be sure of neither who his father is nor who he himself is. He can look at the photographs and other emblems of the past but never clearly solve them. Like Hogan and McGinley, Jordan constantly plays with style, point of view, identity, and sexual convention. In their novels sex is as likely as not to be homosexual or incestuous. In Hogan's The Ikon Maker (1976), a mother suspects that her son's school friend committed suicide because her son refused to have sex with him. She tracks her son to London where she finds both his female and male lovers, but she never sees him again. In The Leaves on Grey (1980) Hogan's young characters experience everything from a sexual threesome to monasticism. As in Jordan, a central theme in Hogan's novels is the attraction but futility of trying to piece together the fragments of the past. His most recent novel, A Curious Street (1984), spins an interesting variation on the conceit of the indefinitely receding mirror-images: here the novelist presents a narrator who tells us about a novelist writing a strangely romantic, Cromwellian historical novel with a protagonist who tends to overlap with everybody else. Faced with such a nightmare of history and narrative, Hogan seems to suggest, neither novelist nor reader can expect any solutions. The past merges into the present. Robert Tracy suggests that this novel seeks to answer the question, “What if [Joyce's] nightmare gave you a back kick?” and reminds us that “the spirals of Newgrange and the interlaced letters of the Book of Kells suggest this disdain for linearity and chronology pictorially; HCE as Everyman, simultaneously remembering and experiencing the entire human past, is its most ambitious literary representation.” Tracy concludes that “A Curious Street represents a real, though perhaps overambitious attempt by a young writer to measure himself against the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and to realize that painful obsession with the past that is so characteristic of Irish thought.”
Similarly, one strand in Patrick McGinley's The Trick of the Ga Bolga (1985), which is dedicated “To Myles,” is the notion that characters can exchange identities. As Hugh Kenner writes in his review of this novel, “when writer and reader are gathered together in the name of the fictional, what gets ritually dismembered is all sense that character is stable, causation reliable, all straight with the world. Not even at Yale can they deconstruct Irish fictions. The authors saw to it first.” McGinley is perhaps the most entertaining and promising among recently emergent Irish novelists. His novels are absurdist but not so remote from realism as Kenner's comment might suggest. Bogmail (1978) and Foggage (1984) are permeated with the local color, in setting and language, of McGinley's native County Donegal, and each novel includes within its often absurdist form an age-old narrative “hook”: Who done it? Or, who is it? McGinley is an experimental mystery writer. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is the clearest model for his kind of writing. Each of McGinley's novels has its central conceit, captured in its succinct title. In Bogmail it is the mysterious blackmailer rising from the bog to point an accusing finger at the murderous protagonist, in Goosefoot (1982) it is the nickname of a nasty plant and also the nickname of the novel's perverse villain, and in Foggage it is the incestuous protagonist's theory about the advantages of recycling farm grass and sexual partners. Like many another Irish novel, McGinley's most recent, The Red Men (1987), makes use of a motif from folklore—in this case, the Talents, the story of the old man who tests his four sons to determine which one will inherit his estate. Also, through Kenneth Potter in Bogmail and George Coote in The Trick of the Ga Bolga, McGinley incorporates the oldest of Irish novelistic conventions—the visiting Englishman who has a hard time understanding Ireland—while adding new twists all his own. A rather misogynist frame of mind mars some of McGinley's writing, but on the other hand Goosefoot celebrates Patricia Teeling's apparent eventual escape, via the Rosslare Ferry, from the generally evil, self-serving men who have threatened her throughout the novel.
In a promising way, McGinley's novels bridge the gap between realism and fabulism. Conventional realism may have exhausted itself at this point, while Joyce and Beckett have taken the fabulist mode to extremes that may represent a cul de sac for contemporary novelists. In light of the novels of Kiely, Moore, McGahern, and some of the other accomplished novelists examined in this chapter, it seems reasonable to conclude that eclectic experimentalism—freely borrowing from both realism and fabulism—may be the best way for the Irish novel to go in the future.
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Irish Fiction: A Mirror for Specifics
A Crisis of Fiction: Flann O'Brien, Francis Stuart, John Banville
