Dublin QuarterlyIrish Novel of the Year 2004
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FRANkly Speaking!
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Preamble:
Sometime ago, Hughes & Hughes, in conjunction with
the Sunday Independent, appointed Niall MacMonagle, Bert Wright and Katie Wink to
nominate from a longlist "their favourite novels by an Irish author" to be the final shortlist,
and from which the Irish Novel of the Year 2004 would be chosen. The four novels that made their
shortlist were: Swallowing The Sun by David Park; The Master by Colm Toibin;
Havoc, in It's Third Year by Ronan Bennett; and Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey.
Thereafter, Olive Braiden, the Art Council Chairwoman; Gilliam
Bowler, chairperson of Failte Ireland; and Trevor White, the Editor of The Dubliner
were appointed as the final judges to choose, from the shortlist, the Irish novel of the year.
On 2nd March 2004, in a glamorous award ceremony at Mansion House, Dublin, Ireland, Bennett's
Havoc, in It's Third Year emerged the overall winner. Bennett received a crystal vase and
Ten Thousand Euros cash prize.
An Alternative Focus:
Now, let's pretend to prevarication, going on with this, focusing
on the four Hughes & Hughes shortlists, deconstructing these novels, as if there had not
been a winner. Our vital aesthetic marker is the principle of the Centre; defined by many
Aesthetes as the point where all the various narrative elements in a novel submerge. Well, to
divest it of its abstractness, to objectify this principle with a narrative element that
approximates it as closely as possible, let's just call it the central theme. It is the closest
to it.
It is our assumption that there are strong and weak
centres in a novel. A weak centre is differentiated from a strong centre by the
novel's technical resources: narrative forms, narrative techniques and language. Stylistically,
the plot must be thick and dense, the language beautiful and the characters human, and
all these artistic elements must be effectively combined to strengthen the centre and engender
aesthetic delight.
It is our further assumption that a novel is either Great
or Good or Bad. A Great novel is that with a strong centre. A Good
novel will also have a Strong Centre, but its centre would not be as strong.
A Bad novel has a Weak Centre. And a novel with no centre at all is--well, naturally--an
Ugly novel.
Hughes & Hughes shortlists will be judged using the above
technical markers. At the end of each review, the particular novel will be rated, as either Great,
or Good, or Bad--or Ugly. We may agree with Hughes & Hughes's; we may not--it does not
matter. Our specific objective is to rescue art from wild fancy, to give these novels an
alternative focus; an impersonal, honest, in-depth, audacious and combative (if need be) critique,
completely different from those cut-and-nail reviews that you might have read elsewhere...
Now, let's get on with it, bearing in mind that no novel is
perfect!
The Master by Colm Toibin: Picador, London/2004
Available at: Amazon.co.uk
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Colm Toibin’s The Master
is the portrait of Henry James, the master of high art of fiction, and, like James’ fiction, dramatises life in
all its realities and possibilities. It penetrates the core of man’s sense of the tragic, the insufferable universe
and his longings for eternal freedom and happiness.
The novel opens with the failure of Henry’s play Guy Domville on
January 1895 at St James’s Theatre London and ends with William’s (his older brother) re-union visit with
his family to Lamb house, Rye on May 1899. But in-between, are Henry’s several social
encounters in London, Dublin, Rome, Venice, Paris and Rye and the series of flashbacks that relive incidents
and events in Henry’s earlier years.
In The Master, Toibin portrays Henry as, though gifted and
talented, lacking in definitive sexuality. Henry’s own sexuality remains as mysterious as his personality.
The closest Henry gets to intimacy is with Constance Fenimore Woolson, but this, in Henry’s confession
to Henrik Andersen is “tentative.” Homosexuality is a salient theme, cleverly disguised in some pages of
The Master. It touches briefly on Oscar Wilde’s homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas
and the mid-night encounter between Henry and Oliver Wendell Holmes in North Conway is very
suggestive.
But the controlling interest in The Master is Henry’s “psychological
sensitivity.” In his treatment of his central character, Toibin focuses intensely on Henry’s consciousness.
Henry is an enigma. Henry is a man of high art, but sees in the cemetery “a place of comfort, of great warm
peace.” He is not even interested in just any cemetery, but in a particular one: the protestant cemetery in
Rome that shelters the “sad names of the English who died in Rome.” Henry visits this graveyard regularly
and in every visit, he follows a particular pattern that takes him through the graves of Keat and Shelley, to
that of Wetmore Storys and Addington Symonds and ends at the very spot Constance is buried. Henry sees
in the dead, in their “state of not-knowing and not-feeling” a profound happiness, which has eluded him.
The Master is a sad and brooding book, full of haunted dreams
and metaphysical anguish; suicide and solitude; death and dying. Toibin suffuses the pages of The
Master with frightening horrors: The image of the cemetery; the symbolism of the painting of a
deserted landscape hanging in the front room at Lamb House; the chaos against the 54th Massachusetts
Regiments at Fort Wagner, the tragedy of Constance suicide; the pain and waste of Alice James, Henry’s
younger sister; the existential temperament of Henrik Andersen’s sculptures that are lacking a “living face”;
and the horror that is the dying years of Minny Temple, Henry’s cousin. This gathering fear, this horror,
this shocking image of the inevitability of death, all makes The Master a terrifying book.
Still, it is this collective consciousness that is the source material for Henry
James’s own narratives: Minny Temple is the heroine of Poor Richard, Daisy Miller, Travelling Companions
and The Portrait of a Lady. The actual struggle between Henry and Miss Loring over the
dying Alice provides the dramatic impetus of The Bostonians and Alice James is Henry’s
muse in Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassina.
Even though his art draws its raw materials from people whose lives
appear tragic, as evident in Toibin’s portrayal, Henry's fiction is not dominated by violent events, but
by characters consciousness. Henry James writes in the Preface to The Princess Casamassima:
“I confess I never see the leading interest of any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the
part of the moved and moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement." In
other words, James is not just concerned with actual people, but in their condition.
He is interested in them as "subjects of fate."
This is what Toibin's The Master is all about. Though it is
lacking in the conventional sense of plot pattern that propels actions and events forward towards a
climax, though its Action is concentrated on a single incident, which is the troubled life of Henry
James, The Master is primarily about Henry's condition, and as a concrete universal
for the condition of man: his tragic fate, his tragic sense of this insufferable world, this jungle.
Life, Henry James insists elsewhere, is a “thick jungle.” For those of us who resent the conventional
notion of plot and accept character's consciousness as central to the aesthetic beauty of art, The
Master ends on the high.
Our Rating ... A Good Novel: In The Master, Toibin has
not only made Henry the central, dominant subject, but also the touchstone for his art. It is evident that
in his treatment of his central character, Toibin allows Henry some freedom, a lot of freedom even. It even
appears that Toibin seems to be taking instructions from James himself on how he should be treated.
It comes to me as a surprise that in his acknowledgements, Toibin is silent on the Theory of Fiction,
Henry James most famous work on the art of fiction, which obviously appears to have influenced the
aesthetic construction of The Master.
Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey:
New Island, Dublin/2004
Available at: Amazon.co.uk
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Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Tatty is
a disturbing book. It portrays the anguish and horror of children caught in a complex
web of a disintegrating middle class Irish family; of a mother and wife challenged by the
maternal demand of a mentally challenged child; and of a father and husband
burden by the everyday responsibility to ensure a healthy stability in a gigantic institution
that is the family. Tatty opens like a derailed speed train, spiralling out of control, but,
somehow, ends with a stability that is nothing short of the miraculous.
Set in Dublin from 1964 to 1974, Tatty is told from the
point of view of Tatty, the third of six children, and who, when the book opens, is nearly five
years old. But Tatty is not her real name; her name is Caroline. Tatty is a name fashioned out of
her childish attempt to pronounce "tell-tale-tattler." On the surface, her family life appears normal,
but as the narrative opens up properly there are noticeable strain within the family structure:
Deirdre, the eldest child is mentally challenged; Jeannie, the second child is asthmatic; Tatty’s
Mam and Dad are having frequent “rows “ that leaves her Mam “screaming” and her Dad
“slamming doors.” It is evident that the family is an accident waiting to happen.
Soon the little rows degenerate into big fights. The first big fight
“rips through the house in the middle of the night, huge like a train.” Screeches. Screams. Curses.
Roars. Smash. Wallops. Cracks. Slams. These are adjectives that Tatty piles up to evoke the image
of extreme terror and violence in the mind of the reader. And in the rendering of this big fight,
Hickey projects herself into Tatty’s consciousness by the use of internal monologue and
the result is a picture of a child lost in a world that is at once beautiful and at once strange,
violent and ugly.
There is an obvious pressure and mental strain on the woman,
which finds release on the children: “She’ll bloody well smack who she likes, wherever” asserts
Tatty. Mam does not only beat the children at the slightest provocation; she has completely
abandoned her maternal responsibility, as evident in Tatty's description of the state of their bedroom:
“There’s a right pong in the bedroom: poo all over the cot; mashed into his hair; streaked over his
legs, arms; there’s even flicks of it under his fingernails.” The faecal imagery is symbolic of the waste
and putrefaction in her parents' marriage and their family structure, and the psychological devastation
on the children.
As the story progresses, the children suddenly retreat into a world
within themselves, teetering at the edge of the psychological abyss: Jeannie stays in bed, playing
with her dolls; Deirdre prefers to blabb her little eee-eee, rocking “on her horse”; Lukey sits
all day staring at the wall or pulling himself slowly up and down on his knees; Brian, though bold
enough to venture out to play, is “always breaking things and getting mam into trouble with the
neighbours.” The summation of the children's psychology and devastation is appropriately captured
in Tatty's helpless declamation: “Lonely and lonely. Fed up, fed up, fed up.”
So also are their parents: now living apart within the same house,
getting drunk frequently and restricting communication to either exchanges of notes or verbal
abuses. But it is obvious that the devastation has a more profound effect on Tatty’s mum because
she eventually attempts suicide by drug overdose. It is the final act in the plot that brings a rude
awakening on all the parties concern, thus their tacit agreement to restore order: “A whole new
start.” Announces Dad. “No more drinking from mam. No more rows.” The derailed train that is
Tatty suddenly finds a happy ending
The language of Tatty is simple and descriptive. It is
appropriately used to convey the thought of a child, her perceptive innocence on the intricacies
of the adult life and her limited understanding of the world. However, on too many occasions
Hickey's language drifts into childish banters that will leave an adult reader wondering,
"What am I doing here?" Tatty's description of life in school is typical of this: "The room where
you eat your dinner is called a refectory ... Like the room where you sleep is called a dormitory."
Please! We know what a refectory or a dormitory is; we do not need Hickey to teach us this.
Hickey's characters are types. E. M. Foster in his Aspects of
the Novel would have dismissed them as "flat". They are predictable and their actions and
reactions are fixed. A man under pressure at the home front would not necessarily take solace in alcohol
neither must a wife caught in the throes of a brutalised marriage resort to drug overdose; these
are societal stereotypes, which Hickey panders to in her characterization.
Also in plotting, Tatty is lacking in complexity and
appears predictable. There is also no suspense and Hickey makes little or no attempt to surprise
the reader. Incidents are demonstrated through telling rather than dramatic action or character
conflict. If the novel is seen to have appeared contrive to a sensitive reader, as it is obvious, it
is because the emotional side of the plot, which Hickey seems to favour here, is sacrificed at the
altar of melodrama.
Our Rating ... An Ugly Novel: Christine Dwyer Hickey's
Tatty, like its central character and narrator, is a "tell-tale-tattler." Hickey infuses all the pages with
the mundane, the superficial and the childish pastime. But I think the major problem with Tatty
is its pretence. It is actually a children’s book that pretends to be mainstream and so, judged by its
own terms, Tatty fails woefully. As an adult you will gain nothing by reading this book, well,
except if you were Irish, the sense of nostalgia.
Havoc, in It's Third Year by Ronan Bennett:
Bloomsbury, London/2004
Available at: Amazon.co.uk
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The historical backdrop to Ranon Bennett’s
Havoc, in Its Third Year is the seventeenth century England. It was during the reign of King
Charles 1 when there were a lot of religious compromises. Then the Puritans, on the conviction
that the basis of the human existence is the strict obedience to the biblical instructions, were
very disenchanted and felt the urgent need to rescue and purify the local churches, eliminate
Catholic influences and sought the kingdom of God and its righteousness.
Havoc, in Its Third Year is set in Northern England at the
beginning of the 1630s. A few years back, Nathaniel Challoner, also know as The Master,
had lead a group of twelve Puritan reformers to overthrow the corrupt and despotic Lord
Savile government with the promise to “build a city on the hill”: a metaphor for an ideal
world where “sin and idleness would be rooted out.” When Havoc, in Its Third Year
opens Challoner is in his third year of government and his promise has gone up in smoke.
Northern England is not the dream City on the Hill, but one buried deep in a burning pyre, with
growing disorders and general state of disenchantment and disillusionment. Now, Challoner
is desperate to regain control, clutching on the straw of Moses’ law, dealing mercilessly with
fornicators, adulterers, thieves, papists, vagrants and many other minor misdemeanours.
It is a “bitter” time that demands the loyalty of men like John
Brigge, a coroner, one of the governors and a lifelong friend of Challoner. Brigge is leading
an inquisition into a major case of fratricide. Katherine Shay, an Irishwoman, a vagrant and a
Catholic, is accused of killing her illegitimate child, and Moses’ law is very clear on such
matters. But Brigge is of the old faith; he believes in signs and saints, and reads meanings to
dreams and real-life occurrences. To him, it is portentous that the inquisition has coincided
with the time his wife, Elizabeth, is in labour with their first child. And even the haste a
faction of the puritan reformers seek Shay’s immediate execution heightens Brigge’s terror and
propels his desire for fairness and justice. It is Brigge’s dilemma, his search for justice and
quest for beatification that propels the plot of Havoc, in Its Third Year.
Puritanism is the moral force that invigorates Havoc, in Its
Third Year, but it is in the main a political satire. It interrogates the principles of
Puritanism, mocks the deceptively moral postures of the puritan reformers and satirises the
inhuman and petty society in the seventeenth century religious England. The moral canvas of
Havoc, in Its Third Year is a water colour painting of conditions that seriously assault
the reader’s moral sensibilities at every turn. The corpse of Moore, the Highwayman from
Mirfield, inside an iron cage, suspended from a tree, at the very spot he had committed his
crime, is a poetic image of barbarism, terror and inhuman oppression. But much more than that,
it demonstrates man’s spiritual putrefaction. Bennett artistic concern is the human condition
and the need for a messiah. This is the crux of that brief, but very dramatic encounter between
Brigge and Goody, Moore's aged mother. Goody has requested from Brigge a key to unlock the cage
and take whatever is left of her son’s decomposed body for burial.
The key motif is the most symbolic and technical tool of
Havoc, in Its Third Year and, therefore, its narrative centre. It operates on a spiritual
level of meaning, as a metaphor for liberation and eternal freedom. In Havoc, in Its Third Year,
there are eight key situations and each is intended to draw the reader’s attention to Brigge’s
messianic role. The practical demonstration of this is when Brigge unlocks the doors in the
House of Correction and set the prisoners free during the inferno that engulfs the entire city.
Here, Bennett has to rely on the technique of Deus ex Machina, but this time a god has
not come down personally to save a hopeless situation, as it is normally the case. It is Adam,
Brigge’s former clerk now his successor to governorship and coronership, who delivers the key.
Key is also an important tool in the novel’s characterisation.
Bennett assembles some very interesting characters that the reader can identify and empathies
with: Shay's temperament and mystery; Elizabeth’s devotion; Doliffe’s cunning; Favour’s
“indefatigable” Christianity; Adam’s youthful zeal; Dorcas’ deligence; and Starman’s humanity.
But these are background characters who are there to establish the socio-moral setting in which
Brigge should conflict and grow. As the protagonist, he is supposed to be “breathing”; able to
transform from one state to the other, either from good to bad or from bad to good and by his
transformation moves the reader towards tears or sympathetic laughter. But Brigge does not
transform. He is a good man all through; kind-hearted, God-fearing and pious--his adulterous
relation with his maid, Dorcas, is Brigge’s past life that exists outside the novel creation,
long before we are brought into the fictional world of the novel.
Even as the novel closes Brigge neither becomes the leader nor
attain sainthood; he remains the ever reluctant hero: still very confused about his calling;
still not willing to lead the people in the nascent revolution. Bennett intends Brigge’s
character development and growth to delineate the internal structural and plot patterns of
Havoc, in Its Third Year. The problem is that because Brigge is not fully realised, the
centre of the novel is weakened and Havoc, in Its Third Year appears plotless,
technically. What finally emerges at the end is not a profound statement on art that Bennett
intended, but a didactic, polemic and ideological manifesto. Havoc, in Its Third Year
fails in its own terms.
Our Rating ... A Bad Novel: Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its
Third Year does not achieve a great finish. It is like a distant runner who gathers a lot
of speed, dissipating his energy at the early stage, suffers serious exhaustion and paralysis
towards the end and then crosses the finish line in a terrible wobble. Technically, what actually pulls
Havoc, in Its Third Year down is not Bennett's over-reaches, but a fundamental flaw in
his characterisation of Brigge, his main character. Still, it will make a fine read.
Swallowing the Sun by
David Park: Blooomsbury, London/2004
Available at: Amazon.co.uk
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Swallowing the Sun is
about the trial of Martin Waring. He was brought up in an inhuman and
dehumanising condition of the Loyalist east Belfast, but somehow manages
to escape from it. Now he has a decent job and a strong family structure of
his own: a devoted wife, Alison and two children, Rachel and Tom. It is a
life for which he should be grateful and enjoy with peace of mind. But Martin
is a man on the run; pursued by the fear of the unknown and the unseen; frightened
by the possibility of a return to the inglorious past; and apprehensive of the
immensity of the universe and the insufferable state of man.
Martin works as a security guard in a museum that
is full of relics that reminds him of the dead and their dead dreams. He knows
that life is a mirage, and fears that his new world of stars and good fortune
may be a trick, a sleight of hand. He has escaped from the past, now he has to understand
the present. But lurking around the corner, life constant echo, is death. The senseless
tragic death of his seventeen-year-old daughter, Rachel, by Ecstasy, leads to the
disintegration of the strong family structure. It is this tragedy that propels Swallowing
the Sun towards its inevitable denouement.
Swallowing the Sun is a narrative with multiple
points of view. Park allows each of his four main characters to share with us their
intimate secrets through the stream of consciousness technique. He projects himself
into their fears, pains, rage, terror, anxiety, anguish, sorrow and silences. The
atmosphere of Swallowing the Sun is elegiac. Its mood is bleak. It is a
novel in which there is no single laughter. None of Park’s characters is capable
of even a smile: Martin’s mother is insane, perhaps the aftermath of a brutalised
marriage. Martin’s younger brother, Rob is lost in drugs. Alison is traumatised.
Tom is confused. In Rachel’s world of A-stars there is terror. Her
first time out with the girls in search of laughter ends in tragedy.
Park’s concern is about the state of human existence.
Rachel’s shocking death is a lesson in the state of human existence, that man is condemned
to eternal suffering and inevitable death. In Swallowing the Sun, Park
divests life of all its pretentiousness, revealing a universe without
God (with a capital G), affirming Nietzsche assertion that God is dead, that man
has been abandoned to his own fate in a universe that is very hostile. Inevitably, in the
world of Park’s Swallowing the Sun only dead men play god. Thus
the mummy Takabuti strong fascination for children: “it’s the exhibit they always want to
see, the one they want to touch, the one by which they want to be frightened.”
Historically, on 25th January 1835, the Mummy Takabuti,
one of the many Egyptian gods, was unrolled at Ulster Museum, Belfast. On the lid of
its coffin is the image of Nut, the sky goddess, kneeling with outstretched wings.
She has a vase on her head that symbolically eats up the stars in the morning
and gives birth to them in the evening. The bands of the hieroglyphics on the
coffin’s lid is deciphered as this prayer: “Oh mother Nut, stretch yourself over me
that it might place me among the indestructible stars which are in you and I will
not perish.” It is this museum, with the mummy Takabuti that provides Park the
inspiration for his interrogation of human existence.
The museum, as a place where the past is cared for and
preserved, is therefore a significant metaphor for the forever presence of the past.
But Swallowing the Sun is not about the past; it pretends to it. No, it is not even
about death; it is reactionary to it. Swallowing the Sun is about the
quest for eternal life, about the indestructibility of the metaphysical man. It is what
the museum stands for, the significance of the ritual throwing of coins into water,
the stone axes, the little glass dome or snow-shaker, the mummy Takabuti, the image of Nut
on the coffin’s lid. Nut is not just the protector of the dead. She is the giver of life.
To be sealed inside a coffin is to symbolically be inside the body of Nut, among the stars,
and like the stars imperishable, indestructible and eternal. A reader in search of the
Centre of Swallowing the Sun will find it in no other place except the coffin and
its reaches.
Earlier, we indicated that Martin is a man on the run.
Now with this new insight it is clear that Martin is a man on a mission: that
he is not really running away from life; that he is running to it. The realisation coaxes us
into this race of life. We no longer sympathise or empathise with Martin; we make his pain
our own. While we had earlier abandoned him and stood aside to watch with detachment in his
senseless revenge against drug dealers, we have now joined in his work; clearing Rachel's room,
constructing her Mausoleum in the gallery inside the Museum, after hours. We help
him put Rachel’s bed first, screw the headboard, pin her poster on the wall, carry
her reading desk, unpack her shoes and set them all in line. When the work is done,
we heave a sigh of relief, satisfied that we have helped to immortalise
a life because we too crave for immortality. And like Martin we too can go to sleep
with the firm hope that Rachel's life, and indeed our lives, is now eternal.
Swallowing the Sun begins with pessimism and
is propelled by pain and anxiety, but ends with eternal hope. Now I am not really sure
if this is a novel without laughter, for as I closed the last page of Swallowing
the Sun, stepped away from its fictional world back into reality, I burst into a
loud laughter. This is Catharsis. Aristotelian Catharsis. The very soul of tragedy.
Our Rating ... A Great Novel: Swallowing the Sun is
a beautiful tapestry, with colourful shades and hues. Still it has one flaw. Martin's
obsessive pursuit for revenge spins the plot into dizziness that it begins to spiral
into melodrama. But because life, not Martin, is central to the novel's structural
metaphor, this singular flaw does not weaken the centre nor is able to pull the novel down.
If you are looking for an Irish novel with a keen eye for art and aesthetics and a great
finish go for Swallowing the Sun. This is our Irish Novel of the year 2004.
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© Peter Anny-Nzekwue 2005.
The moral right of the Reviewer of the four books above has been asserted.
The material in the Dublin Quarterly is published with the kind permission of its
author/owner and is for private use only. Under no circumstance should it be put to other uses
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Contents
(#4: June-August 2005).
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