Crazy John and the Bishop By Terry Eagleton

Crazy John and the Bishop

By Terry Eagleton

(University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day, No Price Given)

Ever since he burst on to the scene some thirty years ago with Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton, now Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been both prolific and polemical, his mixture of literary scholarship, critical acuity, and social concern having the incendiary force of a hand grenade tossed into the stuffy, fuddy-duddy sherry party milieu of English academia back then, some of whose staid attributes and attitudes remain entrenched even today. Crazy John and the Bishop, following on from 1996’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, and his play Saint Oscar, continues Eagleton’s interest and inquiry into Irish cultural history, often confronting the vexed relationship between the Irish and the English.

Crazy John and the Bishop is made up of ten essays which stretch from the eighteenth century to the present day. Topics range from Augustan satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth century Cork to the philosophy of John Toland and Bishop Berkeley. Eagleton also moves between well-known, even celebrated writers to less familiar, even neglected ones.  

The opening essay aims for a close critical dissection of the little remembered eighteenth-century poet William Dunkin, calling him ‘at least as fine a poet as many of his English counterparts who have found their assured niche in the eighteenth-century canon’. There are also studies of Thomas Moore, W B Yeats and Samuel Beckett, the latter piece brilliantly illuminating some of the darker paradoxes that lie at the heart of Beckett’s work, and dealing with the problems it presents for traditional liberal humanist criticism. The title essay focuses on John Toland and Bishop Berkeley, and examines Irish eighteenth-century history of ideas in general. ‘The Good-Natured Gael’ explores concepts of ‘benevolence’ and ‘sensibility’, and includes a long segment on Oliver Goldsmith, as well as some wonderful insights on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, one of this reviewer’s favourite novels. ‘Cork and the Carnivalesque’ looks at notions of parody, comedy and plagiarism in relation to Irish writing, with particular reference to Frances Mahony (‘Father Prout’) and William McGinn. The theme of the Irish ‘internal émigré’ is featured in ‘Home and Away’, and discusses the work of a broad span of novelists including Maria Edgeworth, Kate O’Brien and Francis Stuart. The cultural and political stance of the book emerges most clearly in the pieces on the largely forgotten Irish socialist Frederick Ryan, ‘The Ryan Line’, and the concluding examination of the revisionist controversy, ‘Revisionism Revisited’. In this essay, full of ingenious juxtapositions, he argues that the debate between traditionalists and revisionists, or conservatives and liberals, is redundant, since what is being proposed is as good or as bad as what went before, and the impasse can only be solved by a radical alternative. ‘There seems little point in replacing the myth of the Celt with the myth of Europe’ he writes, while acknowledging that, ‘There is not much point in trying to convince a Dublin advertising executive that modernity can be every bit as emotionally devastating and spiritually mutilating as lounging unemployed and sexually guilt-ridden at the country crossroads’.

If there is a criticism to be made of this bravura performance, it is that perhaps Eagleton writes too fast. He is rich in ideas, but these are sometimes thrown out at the expense of style. But then again, he would probably have his own rather jaundiced view of essayists who have a reputation for fine writing, and find themselves dubbed stylists, the noun often preceded by the qualifying adjective ‘mere’.

This book is another fine contribution to ‘Critical Conditions’, the Field Day series of books of essays and monographs, whose general editor is Seamus Deane. It adds to Field Day’s reputation as one of the most worthwhile ventures in modern Irish intellectual life.

First published in The World of Hibernia

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi By Geoff Dyer

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

By Geoff Dyer

(Canongate, £12.99stg p/b)

Geoff Dyer’s new work is very much a book of two halves. Indeed, he was going to subtitle it ‘a diptych’, until his inner editor prevailed in its judgment of such a move as pretentious. Still, the structure of the new novel may prove disconcerting to some, reading more like two novellas than one novel.

The first ‘Jeff in Venice’ half is familiar Dyer territory: it features a third-person male narrator, Jeff, who is much the same age and height as Geoff, and works as a freelance arts journalist just like Geoff. ‘Junket Jeff’ goes to Venice for the 2003 Biennale, gets wasted on bellinis, grass and cocaine, and clicks with a very attractive, younger Californian gallery worker, Laura, with who he has an intensely carnal, hedonistic fling.

So, for the second ‘Death in Varanasi’ sequence, you are set up to expect some kind of continuation of Jeff and Laura's relationship elsewhere. Instead, you get a first-person narrative from an unnamed narrator, who may or may not be Jeff (it’s never made explicit, though you tend to assume they are one and the same) who accepts a travel writing gig to the holy city of Varanasi at the mouth of the Ganges in India. It’s not even clear whether the second half chronologically follows the first. By the time you realise that ‘love interest’ Laura isn't going to reappear, that she’s been abandoned mid-book, it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed. 

Dyer has explicated his methodology, rather fancifully, thus: ‘Just as everyone is an avatar of someone else in Hindu myth, so the characters are different incarnations of each other.’ Whatever; what is certainly clear is that what we have here is an attempt to write prose fiction that is not narrative-driven, that favours the byways of digression over a well-planned, or well-plotted, journey.

Consequently, although the slacker laureate, as he has been dubbed (it is surely something of a misnomer, since few ‘slackers’ are as prolific as he) has this time produced a work of what is ostensibly billed as fiction, his fourth to date, don’t be fooled: classification is always tricky with Dyer, as he is as adept at critical essay, reportage and travelogue as he is at fiction (if not more so), but happiest when fashioning them all into something entirely his own. This assertion, coupled with the diversity of his interests, is evidenced across a back catalogue which includes titles which range from: Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger; The Missing of the Somme; Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence; What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney; The Ongoing Moment, an idiosyncratic history of photography; and But Beautiful, an astoundingly wonderful synthesis of fact and fiction, with a penetrating critical essay as a coda, described by Keith Jarrett as, ‘The only book about jazz I have recommended to my friends.’ The downside of this magpie-mindedness, if there is one, is that because non-fiction for him is just another location on the fiction continuum, his fiction proper (forgive the crude categorisation) can feel a bit samey and lightweight. Again, Dyer on Dyer: ‘I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.’

In his defense it might be argued, with reference to writers who are connoisseurs of their own consciousness from Montaigne to Barthes: why bother trying to make stuff up, when your own preoccupations and obsessions, and what you make of them, are so riveting? Besides, no one actually believes in the elaborate fictive worlds created by the likes of Henry James anymore. (Jeff in Venice at one point compares himself ironically to ‘…some sad fuck in a Henry James’ novel.’) Novels are so over: read Geoff (Jeff) Dyer.

What we have here, I suppose, is a superior sort of Bloke Fiction, a male equivalent of the better Chick Lit. Thus, if Jeff is a bit like Geoff, he is also a bit like me. Jeff on freelancing: ‘If it were a proper job, I’d pack it in and do something else, but freelancing is the something else that you do after you’ve packed in your job so my options are kind of limited. It’s that or retirement – from which it is at times pretty much indistinguishable.’ Hey, I can identify with that. This being the Biennale, there is also some fun and penetrating contemporary art criticism. Even in Varanasi, the lack of Laura is compensated for by the excellent travel writing, and the new friends made. Hinduism is ‘the Disney of world religions’, and there follows a disquisition on the superiority of polytheism to monotheism. ‘There is no God but God, says the one place. There are millions of them, says the other.’ By the time our charming narrator starts losing it spectacularly, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for him, whoever he is.

Lots of guys who scribble would give their right arms to be Martin Amis, or some other supposedly serious great mind grappling with the weighty issues of our time.  Me, I wouldn’t mind being Geoff Dyer. With his deft insight and lightness of touch, he makes the self-important overachievers look rather foolishly earnest. What a great travelling companion – if we weren’t all lonesome travellers.

Whatever Happened to Margo? By Margaret Durrell

Whatever Happened to Margo?

By Margaret Durrell

(Warner Books)

Sister of the more famous and, it has to be said, more talented Gerald and Lawrence, Margaret Durrell’s memoir of her career as a landlady in Bournemouth in 1947, discovered by the author’s granddaughter 30 years after it was written, is a light and airy concoction. Margo is probably best known to readers through Gerald’s autobiography, My Family and Other Animals. Returning home after extensive travels in Greece and Africa, she found herself, divorced and with two young sons to support, in need of financial security. So she took the advice of her domineering maiden aunt Patience, and started a boarding house in the respectable seaside town.

But her snobby aunt’s vision of reputable, middle-class boarders was never to be fulfilled. Her first tenant was Edward Feather, a painter of nudes, and his voluptuous model wife. There followed Mrs Williams, a battered wife, and her precocious, over- weight son, Nelson, and a chauvinist bricklayer, Mr Budden, and his long-suffering wife. Then there were Blanche and Judy, student nurses; Gordon, a nervous bachelor who eventually comes into some money; jazz musicians Roger and Andy, the latter of whom Margo embarks on an affair with; and Jane, a prim ex-nurse, lusting after bohemia in revealing black negligees. Add to this mayhem the irregular visits of brother Gerald, who brings a posse of monkeys and a six-foot python into the human menagerie.

The claustrophobic atmosphere of the time, long before Philip Larkin’s annus mirabilis of 1963, is captured well, with two pence looking down on a penny, and nosy neighbours trying to rule people’s lives. Alas for the culture vultures, there is little mention of, and no appearance by, Lawrence. Margo comes across as a generous spirit, free of the pettiness so prevalent then, and with an appreciation of the comic side of life. But one still wonders if the adventures related here really merited a whole book to themselves. Nevertheless, she has produced a not too taxing confection of anecdote and incident, which should pleasurably pass a few hours.

Commissioned for Image magazine

A Star Called Henry By Roddy Doyle

A Star Called Henry                                                

By Roddy Doyle

(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

Well, it’s a long way from Barrytown. Or maybe not as far as you might think, since Henry Smart, the rumbustious hero of Roddy Doyle’s new novel, a man born in 1901 whose life therefore runs concurrently with that of the century, could well be the grandfather of one of those kids in The Commitments. But he is even more disenfranchised than they, and the poverty of his childhood makes the world of Angela’s Ashes look like sheer bloody luxury by comparison. In one particularly memorable scene, the young Henry and his younger brother Victor catch rats by smearing their arms and hands with soup made from boiling baby rats, and then sell them on to betting men. These punters: 

          ... paid me extra to put my hands into the sack. I always did it but

          I wouldn’t let Victor risk his fingers. I loved watching the faces

          of the men around the pit; I read their contempt, pity and admiration.

          I stared at the rich ones, the ones I knew already felt guilty about 

          being there, with the worst of the scum of the slums; I’d stare at 

          them as I sank my hand into the sack and felt the fury in the rats’

          backs and the men would look away. I’d let them see the little boy

          being asked to maim himself for their entertainment.

As you can gather, while the Barrytown trilogy presented a somewhat sentimental view of urban working class life, which in this reviewer’s opinion often seemed little more than an updated version of the ‘rare ol’ times’ codology, here we get the real thing, and any mawkishness is quickly undercut by another kick in the teeth. Not that there aren’t huge swathes of humour running through A Star Called Henry, but the hue is decidedly blacker than before. In effect, what we have here is a judicious blend of light and shade, The Snapper crossed with The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, or The Van with Family, and delivered all in one.

Henry’s father, also Henry, was a doorman at Dolly Oblong’s brothel, and also settled scores for her partner, the mysterious Alfie Gandon. He obligingly bumped off Gandon’s enemies, preferably with a good clout from his wooden leg, and then got rid of the bodies piece by piece in the rivers, streams and canals around Dublin. His mother, Melody, was married at sixteen and had succumbed to consumption and alcoholism by her early twenties. When she became too sick to look after her children, they took to the streets. One day Henry goes back to check on her, but she’s moved on. He never sees her again. Then there’s Granny Nash, an omnivorous reader of female fiction, and repository of family secrets. The depiction of childhood here excels that in Doyle’s best previous novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

But it is in its radical beyond revisionist expose of the shibboleths of the 1916 Rebellion, the War of Independence and the Civil War, that the book stands out.  Henry is present in the GPO on Easter Monday (like all the best people), but as a member of the Irish Citizen Army rather than as a Volunteer.  

          Jesus, I hated the Volunteers. The poets and the farm boys, the 

          fuckin’ shopkeepers. They detested the slummers - the accents

          and the dirt, the Dubliness of them. 

His mentors are Jim Larkin and James Connelly (who teaches him how to read and write). He also manages to lose his virginity in the GPO, with his ex-primary school teacher (he went for two days) and future wife, Cumann Na Ban member Miss O’Shea. This puts a whole new perspective on the Easter, ahem, Rising.

On a serious note, here is a novel that shows how 1916 was, like the French Revolution, ultimately a bourgeois affair, since very little changed for those who had nothing to begin with. Towards the end a former rebel leader presents Henry with his death warrant:

          -Why?

          - Well, he said.  - If you’re not with us you’re against us. That’s the 

          thinking. And there are those who reckon that you’re always going

          to be against us. And they’re probably right. You’ve no stake in the

          country, man. Never had, never will. We needed trouble-makers and

          very soon now we’ll have to be rid of them. And that, Henry, is all you

          are and ever were.         

In this reading of events, and in its acknowledgement of the often forgotten number of Irishmen who joined the British army, A Star Called Henry echoes Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, although perhaps it is with Sean O’Casey’s jaundiced treatments of the time, and his use of the demotic, that Doyle has most in common.

There are a couple of technical quibbles, such as why aren’t we told how old Henry is and where is he when writing the book, and how does he know so much about his parents’ courtship, if he wasn’t there at the time and nobody told him about it? But the best way to cope with these minor irritations is to close one’s eyes and be swept along, since the ride is well worth it.

 This is the work of a man who knows a thing or two about human nature, and also about how the world works, and is using that knowledge as a force for good. With his early books he captured a wide audience, many of whom would not be regular readers. In a sense they have grown up with him, and I sincerely hope he keeps them. The blurb calls this, correctly for once, ‘a vastly more ambitious book than any he has written before’, and at the end of the day it is that very ambition which is what is most  impressive about it. It is, after all, only the first instalment of a projected trilogy, The Last Round Up, and Henry is still only twenty when it concludes, and Liverpool bound. I can’t wait for Volume Two. With its wonderfully well integrated and unshowy use of historical research, and its wealth of detail and marvellous descriptive passages, its anger and exuberance, this is one of the most important novels written by an Irish writer in the past thirty or forty years, a major achievement and an instant classic.

Nice one, Doyler. Or, as they used to say in Barrytown, ‘Deadly’.

First published in Books Ireland