Ireland in Print

In honor of, as it were, our trip to Ireland in September, I read (and still plan to read) some contemporary Irish fiction. I started with The Gathering by Anne Enright, which won the Booker Prize in 2007, and nevertheless I couldn't stand it, mainly because the first-person narrator was a person in whose company I didn't want to spend as much time as it took to read the novel. But the book appeared to be a realistic portrayal of modern Irish society - post-Catholic, post-colonial struggle, and relentlessly cold and alienated. Why did it win the Booker Prize? Because the British enjoy nasty people.

Then I read fine collection of short stories by Frank O'Connor, My Oedipus Complex, with an eloquent and appreciative introduction by Julian Barnes. O'Connor, unlike Enright, projects an affable authorial presence. He is a master of description and an insightful portraitist, aware of his characters' weaknesses, not bashful about presenting them, but still very fond of them. Although O'Connor died more than fifty years ago, his fiction isn't dated, though the Ireland he depicts is long in the past.

After that I read a trilogy by Roddy Doyle, The Last Roundup, starring Henry Smart, born in 1900, a child of the Dublin slums, taking him through the revolution against the English, to America, and then back to post-WWII Ireland (improbably, to say the least, to 2010). Doyle writes in the realist tradition. Everything about the settings of the books is realistic, but almost nothing about the action of the characters. Henry was a political assassin as a teenager and remains fairly dishonest and occasionally violent throughout his fictional life, yet he remains sympathetic - perhaps because he is more like a folklore hero than a realistically intended character, and none of his exploits seems real. In truly realistic fiction he would have died at the end of the first volume. Doyle puts historical characters into his books, like Louis Armstrong and John Ford - and I wasn't convinced by that touch either. Nevertheless, the books have a good bit of energy, and I didn't stop reading till I got to the last page of the third volume.

I also bought The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien, which I expected to be a detective novel and turned out to be a wildly surrealistic riff, totally off the wall. My wife only managed to read about a third of it before being so confused that she gave up, but I pushed through the whole book (it's not long, though it feels that way) and, on balance, I'm glad I read it.

The unnamed narrator of the book somehow (we find out how in the end) wanders out of our familiar world into a strange and often beautiful countryside and is detained by two enormous policemen, who mainly talk double-talk: "The finding of the pump is a fortunate clue that may assist us in our mission of private detection and smart policework. Put it in your pocket and hide it because it is possible that we are watched and followed and dogged by a member of the gang."

There are frequent, highly poetical descriptions of the landscape, as well as detailed descriptions of impossible things: 

"He went over then to the dresser and took small articles like dry batteries out of a drawer and also an instrument like a prongs and glass barrels with wires inside them and other cruder articles resembling the hurricane lamps utilized the Country Council."

The two policemen are obsessed with bicycles, which, in this strange world, are animate and half-human (and humans are half-bicycles). This is not the world as we know it, but is realism what we want? Yes, because when a book is so weirdly non-realistic like The Third Policeman, we are fully disoriented.

 "A smell is the most complicated phenomenon in the world," he said, "and it cannot be unravelled by the human snout or understood properly although dogs have a better way with smells than we have." "But dogs are very poor riders on bicycles," MacCruiskeen said, presenting the other side of the comparison.

But if fiction is too realistic, it can be very depressing, because life, as one of O'Brien's characters says, is not always fun: 

"Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain patterns of it in his head, by the hokey he takes to his bed and dies! ... It is a queer contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap. Life?"

We lose ourselves in fiction (of course including films and plays) to get away from life, but also to figure it out. Fiction takes us a couple of steps out of our lives, so we can turn around and view them from a new perspective. The Third Policeman took me a lot farther than I am used to being taken, into a kind of prolonged dream, which was funny at times and often deeply unsettling. (Samuel Beckett is an Irish relative in spirit to Flann O'Brien.)

My next Irish venture is going to be a real detective novel. Let's see how that goes.