The Blue Tango By Eoin McNamee

The Blue Tango

By Eoin McNamee

(Faber & Faber, £10.99)

For his second full-length novel, after the harrowing achievement of Resurrection Man in 1994 (and not forgetting his two earlier novellas, Love in History and The Last of Deeds), Eoin McNamee ventures even further into the realm of faction. As documented by Shirley Kelly in her interview with McNamee in the last issue, The Blue Tango revisits a notoriously murky murder, and its subsequent investigation and the conviction that followed, which took place in and around Belfast nearly fifty years ago.

    In the early hours of November 13th, 1952, 19-year-old Patricia Curran, daughter of Judge Lancelot Curran, Northern Ireland’s Attorney-General and later Lord Chief Justice, was found dead in the grounds of her home, The Glen, outside Whiteabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast. The body was discovered by her father and her brother Desmond, a solicitor and Moral Rearmament activist. She had been stabbed 37 times.  Her mother Doris waited in the house.

    The ensuing investigation was led by RUC Inspector Albert McConnell, but Chief Inspector Richard Pim, in his efforts to protect the family, made things difficult for McConnell from the start, denying him permission to interview any of the surviving Currans, or to search the house. Pim pointed McConnell in the direction of a maniac, and one was sure to be found, hopefully among one of the Polish Free Army units that were stationed nearby. Come January, with no firm leads established, Pim drafted in Chief Inspector John Capstick of Scotland Yard and his assistant Detective Sergeant Denis Hawkins. McNamee renders the briefing exchange between Pim and the adulterous Essex policeman thus:    

              ‘I rather thought that a foreigner might be involved.  Stabbing is

          rather a foreign modus operandi, is it not, Chief Superintendent?’

              ‘It’s a useful thought, sir. Plenty of stabbings in London during the

          war. Spaniards, Arabs and the like. Stab you soon as look at you,

          some of them.’

              ‘What about Poles?’

              ‘The temperament is there, sir, no shadow of a doubt about it.’

        

A Scottish RAF serviceman, Iain Hay Gordon, was eventually charged with the crime. A shy, nervous outsider, and acquaintance of Desmond’s who had been to dinner in The Glen, he was a vulnerable target to pin it on. He signed a confession on the understanding that Capstick would withhold from his schoolteacher mother the suspicion that her son was homosexual. The confession itself was extracted by the novel technique of Capstick putting each alleged event to Gordon as a hypothesis, and when the suspect answered ‘Yes’, writing it down as fact.

    Gordon pleaded guilty but insane, spent seven years in a mental hospital where he received no treatment because the Superintendent thought he was perfectly healthy, and was then released and given a job for life in Glasgow, with the proviso that he change his name and never talk about the case. When he took voluntary redundancy in 1993, he began a campaign to clear his name. Last year, the verdict against him was quashed.

    All the above personages appear as characters in McNamee’s narrative, along with various other figures like journalist Harry Fergusson and Catholic bookmaker Hughes, from whom Lancelot Curran borrowed money to pay gambling debts.

    As with Resurrection Man, some will complain that the characters are cardboard cut-outs, but as with that novel, depths are revealed through surfaces. Others will cavil at the indeterminate mix of fact and invention, particularly as Desmond is still alive and working as a Catholic priest in South Africa, but there are literary precedents, in Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. It is a historical novel, as distance is needed for recollection and reconciliation.

    Again, as with his previous book, the prose style is reminiscent of the lapidary Puritan discourse of a morality play, a kind of latter-day Northern Catholic John Bunyan, which is ideally suited to the Manichean societal structures up there. Also striking is McNamee’s sensitivity to language register and its betrayal of social standing, as when some of the statements in the police records by soldiers read more like the product of a well-educated, middle-class professional hand. Like all true artists, McNamee takes nothing for granted at face value, and the nuances of the social pecking order are perfectly rendered. ‘Authority’ is one of the most frequently recurring words in the text.

    The atmosphere builds with the mounting weight of suppressed evidence against the family itself. Why were Patricia’s hat and bag found neatly stacked some distance from her remains? Why, after a wet night, were they perfectly dry? Why, if the hat was pinned and difficult to take off, did she remove it? Why did Lancelot Curran phone around her friends to find out where she was three-quarters of an hour after the body had been found? Why did Pim suppress records of these conversations? When the house was sold four years later, and a huge bloodstain discovered in an upstairs bedroom after a carpet was lifted, why did the police do nothing when they were called? There is also Gordon’s part in his own accusation and prosecution, through looking for an alibi before he was even under suspicion, and getting a fellow serviceman to lie for him. Patricia herself haunts the narrative in a ghostly fashion, a 1950’s version of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, another instance of the good girl/bad girl archetype. Some say she was promiscuous, married men and the like, and got no more than she deserved, while this is balanced by Hughes’ recounting of her voluntary charity work in the area, recipients of which included his own widowed mother.

    This reads like an x-rayed tabloid, a record of gossip, innuendo and scapegoating. It is a reminder of the bad old days when sex was dirty, and married and missionary was the only game in town, and you could be blackmailed and destroyed for doing anything else, and all was ‘family values’, and men spoke about ‘the ride’. Maybe some men can’t enjoy sex unless it is ‘dirty’: that’s why they invented sexual morality. But, as we’ve discovered, morality need not apply solely to sexuality, and this tale of ex-public schoolboy men-in-suits rallying around to cover-up for and protect one of their own is something that still goes on, and perhaps always will.         

    At the time of writing The Blue Tango is on the Booker long list. A book of this poetic intensity and precision would be a worthy contender on the short list, and it secures McNamee’s position among the most talented younger novelists on this island.

First published in Books Ireland

A White Merc With Fins By James Hawes

A White Merc With Fins

By James Hawes

(Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

James Hawes’ debut novel, A White Merc With Fins, is a hilarious account of the planning and execution of a bank robbery, set in contemporary London. The unnamed hero, pushing 30 and living in a shed in Big Sis’s back garden, is terrified of becoming A Bald Man in a Bedsit (with those horrible orange curtains bedsits always have), and so concocts The Plan to rob Michael Winner’s Private Bank of one million pounds. The other members of The Gang are Suzy the Black Widow, Brady and Chicho, and along the way we met an assortment of other deviant and eccentric characters.

Hawes is great on England’s rigid class structure. You can be underclass (UC), working class (WC), lower middle class (LMC), middle class (MC) or upper class (UC).  (Is the fact that the underclass and the upper class have the same initials a suggestion that they have more in common with each other than anyone caught in between?) The protagonist is LMC with a college education, desperate to escape to MC Heaven. He tells us: ‘There are really only three super-tribes in London: the ones who will never be able to get mortgages, the ones who live and die by the mortgage rate, and the ones who do not need mortgages. Those are the ranks of slavery and freedom, the rest is all just questions of degree.’ The book presents a vivid picture of what a hole London really is.

There’s more than a hint of the smart-arsedness of the early Martin Amis (before he got good), but Hawes is less vicious, aiming more for the belly-laugh. The novel contains the most reasonable attitudes to heroin and to the IRA I have come across in fiction. It also has a couple of really good dirty, happy sex scenes.

It’s not exactly ‘deep’, but it is a laugh a page, and well worth a read. 

First published in The Big Issues

One Day As A Tiger By Anne Haverty

One Day As A Tiger

By Anne Haverty 

(Chatto & Windus, No Price Given)

Anne Haverty’s debut novel concerns a man living in the shadow of his more kindly and well-adjusted brother, his romantic attachment to that brother’s wife, and the feelings, which he shares with this woman, for a mutant sheep, a mutual interest which helps to bring them together and cement their relationship.

Clever young historian Martin Hawkins throws over his promising career at Trinity College and returns to the family sheep farm in Tipperary to brood instead on his own past, most notably the deaths of his parents and his failed romances. At odds with his conscientious brother Pierce, and with the country folk who are more worldly-wise than he is, and perceive him as a shiftless soul with his head in the clouds who has deserted his own calling, he is also furtively in love with Pierce’s restive wife, Etti, and harbours strange convictions about the genetically engineered lamb he calls Missy.

Missy is one of a flock that has been ‘improved’ with human genes. Pitiful, infinitely touching, surely unsheep-like, maybe even half-human, Missy figures significantly in Martin’s imagination. When Etti too comes to regard Missy with the same tenderness and empathy, she and Martin embark on a reckless and terrible adventure, which involves a doomed attempt to deliver Missy to Brigitte Bardot’s animal sanctuary in Provence, where they think she will be properly looked after. But will the adulterated animal that is Missy find a place in the affections of the former sex-kitten, given her jaundiced view of humanity?

If this all sounds ridiculously far-fetched, it is, but such is Haverty’s skill that she manages to make the strangest and most surreal of situations seem almost normal and quotidian. (A few years ago this modus operandi was termed ‘magic realism’, and was much favoured by Eastern European and South American writers.) Despite the apparently whimsical storyline, all the big themes are present here: love, hate, betrayal; death, bereavement, grief. The nature/culture opposition that is united in Missy is a metamorphosis as worthy of Ovid as it is of Kafka, with a dash of science fiction (or, indeed, science fact) thrown in for good measure. Haverty is also to be congratulated on pulling off the difficult imaginative feat of writing this first-person narrative in the voice of a male character, making it believable, and exploring the motivations towards misogyny without being judgmental or prescriptive. The evocation of rural life, both Irish and French, is brilliant, with moments of great beauty and passages of deep despair, and there is a subtle humour that cuts through the tragic pull of the story, placing it in the best Irish tragicomic tradition. The only other young Irish writer I can think of capable of such inventive accomplishments is Mike McCormick, whose first collection of short stories, Getting It In The Head, published last year, should be on everybody’s reading list.   

                  

In a world of fakes, Anne Haverty is the real thing: a writer who can write, with a faultless style that matches a thought-provoking story. Her next move will be watched, by me at least, with the keenest attention.

First published in The World of Hibernia

The Dancers Dancing By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

The Dancers Dancing

By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

The new novel from Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, which follows 1997’s excellent collection of short stories, The Inland Ice, concerns a group of girls from Dublin and Derry who go to the Donegal Gaeltacht in the summer of 1972. Their parents have sent them there, ostensibly to learn Irish, but also to ‘knock the corners off them’, and because it will give them an educational advantage over children whose parents have not bothered to send them. Also, presumably, it gives the parents a rest during the long school holidays.

Ní Dhuibhne once again displays her great gift for observing social nuances, and commenting obliquely but sardonically on the power structures which underwrite them. She also has a wonderful empathy for the manifold confusions and insecurities of early adolescence. Most of these perceptions are filtered through the mind of the central character, Orla, whose working class origins in a middle class milieu have sensitised her to the contradictions and injustices imposed through difference and division, such as those between adults and children, boys and girls, urban and rural, North and South, Irish and English. It is only in the final chapter, which looks back from the present day, that Orla writes in the first person, but it is still her point of view which informs most of the narrative.

Orla, thirteen and two months, is overweight, and in awe of her friend Aisling, twelve and a half, who has more presentable parents, whose clothes are better, who has more savior-faire. The other students in the house they are staying in are Jacqueline and Pauline, two Derry girls. This is a world of petty jealousies, casual hypocrisies and fumbling romances. The girls’ time is divided between Irish classes, ceilis and midnight feasts. The playful chapter titles include ‘What does your father do?’ and ‘The girls discuss the North of Ireland question’. The former contains the passage: ‘...somehow occupation is the defining feature as far as fathers are concerned. Nobody asks, ‘Is your father nice?’ (yes), What age is he? (don’t know), What colour are his eyes? (blue), Can he sing? (yes, and play the mouth organ), Can he tell jokes? (not really). Occasionally someone will ask, ‘Where does he come from?’ meaning what county in Ireland. The one question everyone asks is, What does your father do? What your father does is what defines your father, as far as other people are concerned. More significant, it is what defines you, if you happen to be a child. So it seems to Orla. Her father is a bricklayer. That is what he is. But Orla says, ‘He is a building contractor.’ ’ The latter subtly demonstrates how, for the young southern Irish, even in 1972, the north, with its problems, is an almost incomprehensible other country. But, most of all, this is a world where, in contrast to our more child-centred times, ‘Orla has no right to be a child. Nobody has or ever had; this is the thinking. Children are there to carry out adults’ orders, first and foremost. Their feelings, and adults do not believe they have any, simply don’t matter.’

The local detail is enviable in its exactitude: for the southern girls, Northern Ireland means Mars bars and Marathons; showbands and singers like Big Tom and The Mainliners and Roly Daniels appear at country dances.     

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s background in writing for children is evident, and given its subject matter and style, this book is equally accessible and of interest to adults and adolescents. The cover reprints a quotation of profuse approbation from this very magazine, culled from a review of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s previous volume, although the critic’s name (for it is I) has unaccountably gone missing. However, here’s another recommendation that can be extracted as a blurb: when is the world going to discover Éilís Ní Dhuibhne?

First published in Books Ireland

The Inland Ice And Other Stories By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

The Inland Ice And Other Stories

By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories. There are fourteen of them in all, one of which, the quasi-folktale ‘The search for the lost husband’, provides a thematic touchstone which links the other thirteen together, appearing, as it does, at the beginning, then between each story, and again at the end. All the pieces deal with, in some shape or form, love triangles, lost love, and the impossibility of reconciling Eros and Agape, love and friendship, passionate feelings with domestic, quotidian, day-to-day existence, and are generally told from a woman’s point of view.  

‘Gweedore Girl’ is a deft depiction, in a deadpan, dispassionate, first-person voice, of the sexual awakening of an adolescent who is sent into service with a family in Derry in the 1920s. It ends with a reflection characteristic of the whole book, throughout which it will resonate: ‘I’d even got a new boy...His name is Seamus and he is a good boy, kind, and funnier than Elliot, and earning much more money. I know I can marry him any time I want to. It is amazing that I know that Seamus is good and kind and honest and will never mistreat me; also I will never love him. Or maybe that is not amazing at all. Maybe those two knowings are the same, two different knowings in the same shell, or one and the same knowing, bright as an egg with the sun dancing on it.’  

The heroine of ‘Love, Hate and Friendship’, thinking of her relationship with a married man, asks herself: ‘Why should it be so hard to forget all this romantic stuff, and simply accept his friendship?’ ‘Bill’s New Wife’ is a very funny fantasy of marital role reversal, highlighting real inequalities.  

In ‘Lily Marlene’ a middle-aged woman and a man who were lovers in their teens meet up again many years later, when they are both married to other people, and rekindle their affair, but it doesn’t last. This heroine speculates: ‘What I think is that life is like Doctor Zhivago up to a point – more like it than some would admit. People can have a great, passionate love. I have. Probably you have. But it doesn’t seem to survive. One way or another it gets done in, either because you stay together or you don’t. That’s what I think. If I were more loyal, or brave, or generous, perhaps it would be different. But how do you know if you are brave or just an eejit?’  

‘Hot Earth’, set in Italy, features another middle-aged woman who is, or was, involved in an extra-martial affair, an even more unsatisfactory one than in the previous stories. Still, she leaves her husband anyway, not to be with her lover, but to be by herself, returning to Italy to teach English. There is an apt invocation of the image of a statue of an elderly Etruscan couple in a museum the heroine visits with her husband, a man of whom she thinks, ‘His love was loyal and enduring, if not very passionate. Probably it is loyal and enduring for that reason.’

‘Estonia’ gracefully interweaves the narrative of a librarian-poetess and her affair with a Swedish writer she met at a conference, with that of the Estonia ferry disaster. The story also contains some apposite meditations on literary art and literary politics, like: ‘As a compensation for career mistakes, her choice of pastime was good –  better, probably, than golf or drink. Poetry consoles her in more ways than one, as it has consoled people in hospitals and in labour camps and in death camps. And she is in none of these things, but in a large, rich, gracious library.’; and, ‘You could never tell with writers from other countries. You could not distinguish between the successful and the maybes and the ones who would be very lucky to get a review, the way you could at home, where everyone in the literary community could place everyone else in the pecking order as soon as they heard their name.’  

Oddities in the collection include ‘Summer Pudding’, about a group of Irish people who go to Wales during the famine; ‘Spool of Thread’, an extremely well-written venture into the mind and methodology of your better class of serial killer; and ‘My Pet’, which is questionable in that it features the only character in the book with suicidal tendencies, who also happens to be homosexual.

One criticism of the collection is that towards the end the pace seems to flag, and some of the stories are too close for comfort in their repetition of the themes and tones of previous ones. ‘Greenland’ and ‘How Lovely The Slopes Are’, in particular, read like thinly veiled rewrites of ‘Estonia’. But there is enough here to be going on with, enough to save the suite from becoming too claustrophobic. Ní Dhuibhne does several things well. She is good on employing a folkloric underpin and an historical perspective (‘The search for the lost husband’ ‘Summer Pudding’, ‘Gweedore Girl’). She is good on social satire, putting the mores of contemporary Dublin under her microscope (the attitude of the woman in ‘Swiss Cheese’ to the North, the reference to how easy it is to get development money from the Film Board in ‘My Pet’). She is good in her healthy criticism and mistrust of male feminists (Kevin in ‘Hot Earth’, Paddy in ‘Swiss Cheese’, Michael in ‘The Woman With The Fish’).

‘What matters but the good of the story?’ says the narrator at the end of ‘The search for the lost husband’, which is the end of the book. Most of the stories here deal with well-educated and well-travelled people, although poverty has lurked in the early lives of some of them. Although so many stories about marital infidelity could become a bore, here the treatment is subtle, witty, wry. Ní Dhuibhne has a great way of mixing and merging the realistic with something otherworldly, like crossing an Alice Munro or an Anne Tyler with an Angela Carter or a Jeanette Winterson. As I said, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories.

First published in The World of Hibernia

John Banville: Exploring Fictions By Derek Hand

John Banville: Exploring Fictions

(Contemporary Irish Writers and Filmmakers Series)

By Derek Hand

(The Liffey Press, €16.50)

This is one of the first volumes in what promises to be an ongoing series, with Eugene O'Brien of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, as general editor. As well as the John Banville opus, studies of Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Jim Sheridan, William Trevor and Conor McPherson have already appeared. Further books on Roddy Doyle, Neil Jordan, Jennifer Johnston, Brian Moore, Maeve Binchy, John McGahern and Colm Toibin are in the pipeline.

Derek Hand's doctoral thesis dealt with the image of the Big House in Yeats, Bowen and Banville, and here he sets himself the task of reclaiming Banville for Irish Studies by demonstrating the writer's relevance to Irish themes and concerns, mostly historical and sociological. The two texts he concentrates on as most readily fitting this agenda are Birchwood and The Newton Letter, presumably because they are first and foremost set in Ireland, rather than Greece or medieval Mitteleuropa, and so the given environment would be rather hard to avoid. The task of reclamation is deemed necessary by Hand partly because, 'John Banville himself has repeatedly downplayed the importance of his being Irish to engaging with his work: “I stay in this country but I’m not going to be an Irish writer. I’m not going to do the Irish thing.” ’, partly because, ‘Perhaps Banville has been influenced by one of his foremost critics, Rudiger Imhof, who believes that, ‘the Ireland of his (JB’s) art is merely a convenient backdrop to the more serious and interesting postmodern concerns being dealt with in the foreground.’, and partly because, with reference to Gerry Smyth's The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction as an example, of ‘how difficult it is to categorise Banville's writing with reference to Irish writing/literature in general’.   

What is odd about this introduction is that, rather than setting out to celebrate a great writer, or encouraging more people to read him because of the beauty and profundity of his work, it is already on the defensive, to the extent that it is almost apologising on the writer’s behalf, not only for the much vaunted (and greatly exaggerated) difficulty of said oeuvre, but also for his not being ‘Irish’ enough.

Hand takes Imhof to task for stating that, ‘Irish fiction in the twentieth century has been quite conventional in subject matter and technique, despite Joyce and Beckett and in spite of what has been going on elsewhere in the world.’, by countering that ‘…it is more accurate to say that most writing fails to take up where James Joyce and Samuel Beckett left off. The majority of writing today is “conventional” and traditional, presenting itself in the mould of “cosy realism”. It is as if the vistas opened up by Joyce and Beckett are too terrible to contemplate and writers - everywhere - retreat in the face of such formalistic and thematic experimentation. It is unfair, consequently, to single out Irish writing as having failed to learn the lessons of Joyce and Beckett, when almost everyone else has too.’ What we are encountering here is a specific example of the general vice of over-specialisation, of which the Irish Studies phenomenon is a particularly virulent strain. Hand’s riposte conveniently ignores much of the greatest writing of the second half of the last century, and the beginning of this one, most glaringly that of Americans like Faulkner, Burroughs, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme, Barth, Coover, Gass, De Lillo, Acker, Wallace or Franzen; but also that of French nouveau roman writers like Camus, Sartre, Genet, Celine, Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Sarraute, Duras, Simon or Pinget, whose work rejected the plots, characters, linear chronologies and omniscient narrators of the nineteenth-century tradition, which had expressed that century’s belief in a knowable, representable world of which man was the centre and purpose, and that of the Oulipo writers such as Queneau and Perec who followed them and who, while they did not discover the idea that formal constraints stimulate rather than obstruct creative writing, took it to far greater lengths than before, thus simultaneously reaffirming the capacity of language to create texts from within its own operations and thereby shape our perceptions of reality, and freeing the writer from the obligation to create politically or philosophically committed literature; to say nothing of that of contemporary Scottish writers like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, Ali Smith, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Gordon Legge and Laura Hird, whose work contains much political anger, stylistic experiment and formal trickery; and that of mavericks, who it is even more senseless to classify by nationality, as diverse as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Elias Cannetti, Malcolm Lowry, Vladimir Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Anthony Burgess, B. S. Johnson, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson or Jenni Diski; or the magic realists of Eastern Europe and South America, such as Kundera or Marquez; or discursive, meditative works like those of Claudio Magris, Roberto Callaso or W. G. Sebald. By the standards of many of the aforementioned, the majority of Banville’s work looks decidedly tame and even conventional in comparison. As I argued in my own Irish Literary Supplement review of Imhof's book, John Banville: A Critical Introduction, way back in 1990, ‘In a review of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, written in 1973 for Hibernia magazine, Banville complained about this “broth of a boy” who had written “a fat, bad book”, thus missing entirely the point that Pynchon’s book is concerned with the same chance/necessity conundrum which informs his own work, except that Pynchon accepts chaos, takes it as given, while Banville still struggles valiantly to impose order.’ While I would now acknowledge that Banville is the better stylist, I still submit that Pynchon knows more about the science, and has a firmer grip on the pulse of the zeitgeist. More importantly, nowhere does Hand’s introduction address the issue of Banville’s perceived lack of acceptance in the country of his birth, and explore what underlying reasons may be adduced for it, nor justify why, in the face of such relative indifference on the part of both author and audience, it is then necessary to emphasis his nationality as central to understanding his work. The obvious irony that the first full-length study of Banville to appear was written by a German rather than an Irish person is never highlighted. Also, while Hand may be urging us, a la D. H. Lawrence, to ‘trust the tale, not the teller’, it seems ludicrous to suggest that Banville has been influenced by one of his foremost critics in his own pronouncements on the unimportance of his being Irish to engaging with his work.

Admittedly, following Richard Kearney’s terminology, Hand points to ‘John Banville’s position of being caught between a modern and a postmodern perspective - both he and his characters wavering between desiring order and meaning while simultaneously recognising its absence, both looking forward and backward at the same time’, thus acknowledging that he is a transitional figure who feels the loss of ‘unifying, grand visions, which had the potential to order and give meaning to the world and man’s place in the world’ much more so than more playfully free-falling, fully-fledged postmodern writers and metafictionists. This dilemma is further located between ‘the artistic sure-footedness of high modernism epitomised by Joyce’ and Beckett’s ‘questioning the actual possibility of creating or saying anything.’ But to argue then that this ‘radical “in-betweenness” - his being neither a Joycean modernist nor a Beckettian postmodernist but an amalgamation of both; his desiring a word or words that can grasp the real, yet simultaneously despairing that such a language is possible; his many characters’ relentless search for a true authentic self that always end with the pessimistic conclusion that aching hollowness is perhaps all there is - is best understood within an Irish context’ is far-fetched and ill-founded, amounting to saying nothing more than, ‘Being Irish is central to understanding Banville’s work because to be Irish is to be at an angle to the mainstream and he is at an angle to the mainstream, and to be human is to be at an angle to the mainstream, so to be Irish is to be human, and John Banville is Irish, so he is therefore human.’

‘We’re modern because we’re Irish, and Ireland is like everywhere else’ is undoubtedly a viable argument, but it seems slight of hand (sorry) then to claim that modernity or postmodernity are thrown into sharp relief in the Irish situation, since that would make us ‘not like everywhere else’ all over again. It is also an odd way of claiming Banville for Irish Studies, since as a syllogism it would read: ‘Banville writes about modern universal concerns/Ireland is part of the modern universe/Therefore he is an Irish writer.’ One does not need the mind of Aristotle, schooled in non-contradiction and excluded middles, to spot the flaw in that line of reasoning. It also fails to explain why the Irish Studies crew still have such a problem with accepting Banville’s work, or why the majority of work produced in Ireland is still formally conservative or in the mode of cosy realism.

Of course, from the opposite perspective, while everywhere is like everywhere else, it is also true that nowhere is like anywhere else. Hand wisely recognises, with reference to the character of Victor Maskell in The Untouchable, ‘how complicated and protean a thing is Irish identity. Despite the insistent use of labels such as Protestant and Catholic, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic-Irish, there terms - as in the case of Victor Maskell - conceal as well as reveal.’  But what makes the advocates of Irish Studies think that Irish complexity is any more fascinating than Nigerian, or Cuban, or Japanese complexity, to throw out some random examples? Ireland is an environment, nothing more, nothing less. We may love every flea in our birth mattress as much as the Nigerians, Cubans or Japanese love theirs, but that’s only because it’s our mattress. They think their flea-ridden mattresses are the most loveable in the world too. Even the use of terms like ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ with reference to national identity is unsustainable, since they imply the existence of a level playing field and a strong sense of community, with no internal social inequalities and divisions and power relations. But Hand is smart enough to know this, since he remarks on how Maskell’s easy acceptance into upper class life ‘highlights how fluid and non-essential racial identity actually is.’ This recognition does tend to undermine the argument put forward in the rest of his book, though.

Hand also falls for the romantic distinction between head and heart, mentioning with reference to Nightspawn and in his conclusion that ‘A common criticism consequently levelled at John Banville’s work is that, perhaps because of this perceived lack of interest in storytelling, it is far too intellectual and cleverly playful for its own good…In other words, real emotion is replaced by a cold, calculating desire to engage only with abstract intellectual concerns.’ While he makes an eloquent plea for the real feeling in Banville’s articulation of the postmodern dilemma, he might have taken issue with the currently popular employment of the word ‘clever’ as a term of critical abuse, which employment usually amounts to nothing more than indicating that the writer under review is possessed of a fully functioning, fairly useful mind, or that the critic does not understand the book. For, while intellect can be a bar to understanding, it is interesting to follow the trajectory of how an independent mind works things out, or fails to do so. Cleverness and wisdom are not mutually exclusive. Besides, it is not as though Irish writing (or, given pervasive global dumbing down, writing anywhere), is exactly coming down with cleverness (or, to use a slightly less pejoratively loaded term, intelligence) at the present time.

Hand’s contention that The Newton Letter ‘…is, or as near as it is possible to be, quite perfect and perhaps his best piece of writing’ is one with which I would concur. However, a critic no less than a writer is revealed by his blind spots, and Hand is hard on Athena, the only one of Banville's mature novels he does not deal with in detail, opining that ‘…it is one book too many, stretching whatever interest a reader might have in Freddie as a character almost to breaking point.’ This does not recognise the fact that ‘Freddie as a character’ is perhaps not what we are supposed to be most interested in. And Beckett, one of Banville's greatest artistic mentors, knew more than enough about stretching things almost to breaking point, the quality of excruciation being one of the chief characteristics of his work. In truth, Athena continues The Book of Evidence’s and Ghosts’ thorough investigation of the authenticity, or lack thereof, of the self. Following Bataille, it explores the notion of the extinction of selfhood in extreme erotic experience (another first in ‘Irish’ writing!), a path in many ways as onerous as that of the mystic.

While not as comprehensive (up to The Book of Evidence) as Joseph McMinn’s John Banville: A Critical Introduction, and not as justifiably polemical and illuminating as Imhof’s book, Hand’s volume is worth a read for Banville enthusiasts. But general readers (at whom it is also obviously aimed, given the otioseness of phrases like, ‘James Joyce, in his great novel Ulysses’), should be wary of the amount of special pleading it contains.

Perhaps the solution to the solipsism of ‘Irish Studies’ (and ‘Hispanic Studies’ and ‘Women’s Studies’ and all the other ‘Studies’) is a championing of good old-fashioned Comparative Literature, where material is organised thematically, rather than nationally, so crossing all geographical borders. Of course, most academicians want art to be about society, not about words, images, styles etc, that is, about its own materiality. For my part, I doubt that John Banville devotes many of his waking hours to ruminating on Irish identity and what it means to be Irish. He may think that violence in Northern Ireland is a bad thing, but then so do most of us. Indeed, when asked in the recent Reading The Future interview with Mike Murphy, ‘So people saying that you are an Irish writer doesn’t mean anything to you really, does it?’, he replied, ‘No, no, I don't think it does to anybody. Certain Irish writers beat the Irish drum, but that’s a way of doing things.’ However, the Irish Studies industry, as currently constructed, needs new blood and fresh perspectives, and it does give us all something to talk about and write about and argue about, if and when we cannot stand to stop and listen to the underlying, ever-present silence.

First published in Ropes 11, NUI Galway

Headbanger By Hugo Hamilton

I reviewed Headbanger by Hugo Hamilton, it seems, in 1997 or thereabouts.

Headbanger

By Hugo Hamilton

(Secker & Warburg, £12.99)

What has happened Hugo Hamilton at all, at all? The author of three stylish and individualistic previous novels set in Germany, Surrogate City, The Last Shot and The Love Test, and a collection of short stories, Dublin Where The Palm Trees Grow, has here gone in for a decidedly drastic and devastating change of direction, and produced a crime thriller set in Dublin. His earlier work marked him out as one of Ireland’s most promising literary hopefuls, but this new book is a tersely written tale aimed at the mass market.  

Maverick Garda Pat Coyne is on a Messianic mission to nail top Dublin criminal ‘Drummer’ Cunningham and his gang, while at the same time trying to protect his wife Carmel and their three children from Cunningham’s vengeful attentions. He’d also like to rescue the gangster’s moll, Naomi. He’s the ‘Headbanger’ of the title, ‘Mr Suicide’, ‘the Dublin Dirty Harry’. Along the way we learn of his neuroses and obsessions.

On the plus side, there is much to sympathise with here, for example Coyne’s hatred of golf: ‘Golf is for emotionally disturbed whackoes’, ‘it was for failed psychopaths’; his hatred of art, which his wife Carmel has just taken up: ‘Won’t last.  There’s too many at it. All that self-expression lark. There’s too much expression and too little understanding’; his hatred of DIY: ‘And the amount of DIY dickheads hanging around on Saturday morning was unbelievable. People all over the place couldn’t stop the urge to improve things. Can’t you just leave the world alone, you pack of demented dipsticks? Nothing better to do than to start taking apart your sad little semis. Guys deciding to build shelves every Saturday morning of the year until they had drilled an almighty hole in one of their plasterboard walls.’ All of this Neanderthalism on Coyne’s part is coupled with a near aesthetic ‘interest in the precision of language’, which has him fighting back the urge to go into a certain Dublin pub and tell them that it’s not ‘Embibing Emporium’ as the sign outside their door reads, but ‘Imbibing’. Even though Hamilton is doing a bit of literary slumming, you still can’t hide a good writer, and Coyne has some nice turns of phrase, as for example when he describes Naomi as ‘a social worker’s dream’.

On the minus side, there are some truly awful puns and word plays, like ‘Shag all’ for ‘Chagall’, ‘pick your own asso’ for ‘Picasso’, and ‘Vermicelli’ for ‘Vermeer’. There are cliched scenes not worthy of Hamilton, like the appearance of that best forgotten breed, the sadistic Christian Brother, and an ‘exciting’ car chase. This is Hamilton condescending to the lowest common denominator.

Perhaps Coyne’s anti-art stance is an ironic tongue-in-cheek comment by Hamilton  on how he knows his new work will be received by the more literary of literary critics. Or perhaps he will be like Celine, who kept setting out to write block-busting best-sellers, which the critics kept hailing as great art. But I doubt it. Headbanger is an average to good thriller, but it represents Hamilton indulging in the opportunism of latching on to a hot topic, this time Dublin’s rising crime rate. It is an interesting exercise because it is by someone who was heretofore a ‘serious’ writer, but it is still a sell out by that writer. At least he seems to be having fun selling out. It remains to be seen if he will continue in this vein, or if he will revert to his earlier, more satisfying, mode.

One doesn’t have to notice that a well-known film producer is thanked at the beginning of the book for his generous support and encouragement during its writing, to foresee a film and a TV series. But if there are straight-to-video movies, why aren’t there straight-to-screenplay novels?              

First published in Books Ireland