On the Other Side of the Irish Sea

Challenge #1: Read a book that has been on your to-read list for an eternity and a half

At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill
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I was either sixteen or seventeen when I signed up for a Barnes & Noble member card.  Flushed with cash from my very lucrative part-time job at Cold Stone Creamery and now endowed with a driver’s license, which meant that I could take myself to the bookstore without having to rely on the generosity of friends and family, I looked forward to taking full advantage of the 10% discount that B&N membership promised.  And exploit it I did: my personal library never expanded so much as it did in the following year, and one of the books I ended up picking up on a recommendation from someone since forgotten was Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys.

For a country with a history that is often modified by words like impoverished and downtrodden – or perhaps because of this history – Ireland has nevertheless produced a great number of writers.  At Swim, Two Boys is very much an Irish Novel.  Set in the year before the Easter Uprising in 1916, it tells the story of two young men who become friends…and perhaps somewhat more than that as well.  O’Neill apparently laboured over the manuscript for a full decade, and his magnum opus was released to great critical acclaim, with the author drawing comparisons to none other than James Joyce.

I’m not sure how how I haven’t gotten around to reading this yet, since the book has been in my possession for a long time now, but the truth is that I’ve never read any Irish literature before, plays by Oscar Wilde notwithstanding (and, honestly, Wilde’s witticisms are so ubiquitous that his work hardly feels attached to any national literary tradition at all).  How I have gotten away with this, I am not sure.  If there is any group of Europeans with whom otherwise nationalistic Americans feel a historical, cultural, and alcoholic affinity, it is the Irish.  You would think that, at some point in my life, somebody would have hounded me to at least read Angela’s Ashes? 

As I ready myself to pick up At Swim, Two Boys at last, I wonder if my disregarding it all of these years has been a by-product of my Angophilia, from which literature is not excluded.  When I think of English novels, my mind goes to genteel/sardonic social commentary, aristocratic families & great estates, Gothic mysteries, and a certain style of writing that is at once deliberate and understated.  One gets the impression that Irish writers – no doubt courtesy of Britain’s involvement in their country – have always had much larger issues with which to grapple.  To quote the poet Richard Wilbur, “It is always a matter, my darling / Of life and death, as I had forgotten.”