At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill
Page Count: 562/562
Like my literary partner in crime, I finished my January novel just after the close of the month – more specifically, when my Newark-bound flight from Shanghai was hovering somewhere over the western seaboard of North America. Even though I am still recovering from post-travel exertions, which include a fairly nasty cold, I wanted to put up this post as quickly as possible while the impressions left from this book – and they are many – are still fresh in my mind. Also, I’m going to have to beg exemption from the “three posts per month” rule since I was surrounded by the Great Firewall of China while reading At Swim, Two Boys, but I’m sure Katherine will find it in her heart to forgive me!
Even when one accounts for the fact that I began this novel while severely jetlagged, At Swim, Two Boys was rather difficult to get into. It is afflicted by what I will call the David Foster Wallace Problem, though, really, you could name this phenomenon after any number of authors (I just happen to be thinking of my experience of reading Infinite Jest last summer): all writers have a style of their own, but there are exceptional cases in which that style is so distinctive, for better or for worse, that acclimatising to it can be as tricky as navigating the intricacies of a John le Carré plot. Reading Jamie O’Neill was much easier than reading DFW in this respect, but I would say that it still took me about a hundred pages or so before I felt fully at ease with his manner of language and storytelling.
There’s the stream of consciousness thing, as well as an undeniable flair for rich and expansive (but never gratuitous) prose, but neither of those really presented much trouble. No, the problem for me was O’Neill’s deployment of early 20th-century Irish English: essential to and inseparable from the novel’s evocation of a dingy, seaside parish in Dublin, of course, but off-kilter enough to these modern-day American eyes to make for some maddening patches of dialogue in the novel’s opening chapters. (Mostly related aside: Wuthering Heights was one of only two assigned books in high school I refused to read, and the primary reason for that was the strain associated with deciphering Emily Brontë’s evocation of the Yorkshire brogue.)
The payoffs of climbing this linguistic learning curve, however, were immense, as, after the initial slog, I found myself irrevocably drawn into the novel’s universe. As I mentioned in my introduction to At Swim, Two Boys, the book is set during the one-year lead up to the Easter Rising, and one of the things that O’Neill does very well is the immersing of the reader in the the heady atmosphere of the times. This is the grand drama of the novel: the concretion of an over-arching Gaelic identity, the growing consciousness of that identity among the population, and the organisation and mobilisation of armed groups to fight for an Irish Ireland. It’s all securely embedded in the political context of the time – the author references a lot of individuals and bills in Parliament throughout – and, although close familiarity with the Easter Rising and the whole Irish Home Rule gambit that preceded it is not essential to enjoying the novel, I do think that said enjoyment would be enhanced by it (says she with a rather abysmal knowledge of that period).
The struggle for Irish Ireland is not for truth against untruth. It is not for the good against the bad, for the beautiful against the beautiful. These things will take care of themselves. The struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and case a shadow its own in the sun.
This struggle is never reduced to a simple “Ireland good, England bad” dichotomy, for At Swim, Two Boys, while anchored upon one of the most formative events of modern Irish history, is not primarily a story about national liberation. Rather, it gives us oppression in Dublin circa 1915-6, as experienced by the novel’s cast of characters, in any number of forms: imperialism, yes, but also poverty, misogyny, the Catholic Church, and homophobia. The latter affects the novel’s central trio of characters – Jim and Doyler, the titular two boys, and their older mentor figure MacMurrough – most personally, and it is Jim and Doyler’s burgeoning friendship and exploration of homosexuality in a society that cannot acknowledge such a thing as anything but a perversion (never mind that buggery was still ubiquitously practised on the sly) that forms the intimate drama of the book. One of the story’s most wrenching scenes – and there are quite a few to choose from him – involves Jim trying to confess this particular sin to a priest and the holy father cannot even recognise, at a fundamental level, what he is trying to say.
Here is a snippet from the part in which Doyler says he will teach Jim how to swim and the two pledge to swim to a place called Muglins Rock some ways off the coast:
“Are we straight?”
“We’re straight as a rush.”
Doyler spat on his hand and Jim did likewise and their palms rubbed in the smear.
“The crawl it is,” said Doyler as he slipped from the raft. Before he joined him and the sea would wash it away, Jim sniffed his wetting palm. A private smell. Like leather, bodily, raw.
All I can say that, if you are not moved by Jim and Doyler’s relationship, you have no heart whatsoever. It’s notable that O’Neill never speaks of them as anything other than friends, even when they are operating outside of a strictly platonic framework, to put it euphemistically. Both characters are corrupted, in a fall-from-grace kind of way, over the course of the novel – I’m leaving this observation purposefully vague so as to avoid spoiling anyone whom I may have persuaded to pick up this book – but, every time Jim and Doyler share the same page, one cannot help but be struck by their wonderment. It is the wide-eyed innocence of the schoolboy crush crossed with the unshakeable conviction of soulmates.
As readers with the benefit of actual history, we know that the Easter Rising is but the stillborn opening act to the internecine violence that will ultimately pave the way to an independent Republic of Ireland, which would itself prove to be an unsatisfactory solution to more radical partisans and give way to further conflict. Jim and Doyler do not need such accurate hindsight to realise that they are on the edge of an old world careering into the new. It gives their quest to swim to the Muglins an undercurrent of desperation. To quote from an exchange of theirs near the end of the book:
“It’ll be the two of us together, out there in the sea. We have to go, because in a way, you see, we’ll always be there.”
“We will?”
“No one will take it from us. Even you can’t nor I can’t. That’s why we’ll swim.”
It is as if they are saying: The centre might not hold, but to hell with that: you and I, we will live forever.
(As an unrelated postscript, I might add that Ken Roach’s 2006 film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which is about the War of Independence and the subsequent civil war, makes an excellent companion to At Swim, Two Boys. His portrayal of these events is unflinching and unsentimental, highlighting the steep price of political idealism. Plus, it stars Cillian Murphy and his lovely blue eyes, and you can never, ever go wrong with him. The title from this post is taken from W.B. Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” because I might as well just keep on pilfering from his work.)
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