AUSTRALIA / NZ
reviews

“At Swim, Two Boys is a masterpiece which manages to combine accessibility and readability with erudition and verbal pyrotechnics. It is a beautiful treatment of human friendship and may well become the classic it deserves to be.”  Canberra Times

“O’Neill’s characters are subtle and deeply satisfying. He is in the blood line of centuries of Irish storytellers. From inside the characters’ minds and lives we participate in the revolutionary moment, in the tenderest of adolescent loves and the discovery of eroticism.”  The Australian

“At Swim, Two Boys is not simply a historical saga using a convenient dramatic backdrop. It offers a serious meditation on the role desire plays in the movements of politics and history.”  Melbourne Age

“Definitely one of the most ambitious and fully realised gay-themed novels of recent times. It is highly recommended.”  Melbourne Community Voice

“This book is full of love. Love for Irish literary tradition. Love for language. Love for the poor, the oppressed and the alcoholic. Love for the young and innocent. Love for history. And a huge, sprawling, anguished love for Ireland. This book’s got soul, no doubt about it.”   New Zealand Herald

“Jamie O’Neill’s novel holds the attention and touches the heart. Its imaginative and emotional grip does not slacken after the last page is read.”  New Zealand Press, Canterbury, Feb 26, 2002.

“Mesmerising, sophisticated, intense, unexpectedly funny, heartachingly beautiful, a work of great originality, a fine and involving achievement, exhilarating, beautifully vigilant writing, a highly accomplished and memorable novel, historical and lyrical, remarkable, tender, moving, honest, utterly believable, a literary tour de force, an enthralling and brilliant debut, achingly beautiful, moving, an epic, skilful, intricate, polished, tantalising, brilliant, grandiose, sure-footed, genuinely affecting, truly, truly amazing, polished, energetic, elegiac, playful, powerful, eloquent, articulate, ambitious, accomplished, romantic, poetic and tragic, gorgeous ...” Leo Schofield writing in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, 9.6.02. (Forgive me, Leo ...)

CANBERRA TIMES
13 October, 2001. Canberra, Australia.
“A beautiful treatment of human friendship” – reviewed by Frank 0’Shea

I STARTED this book with a number of reservations. The title, for a start, is stolen from one of my all-time favourites, Flann O’Brien’s 1939 classic At Swim-Two-Birds. To add to such cheek, here is an author who after two unsuccessful early novels goes straight to the kind of literary work that in scope and size would frighten the most experienced writer. And finally is the news that a publisher was so determined the book should not go to auction that they were prepared to pay the equivalent of almost a million dollars for the UK rights alone.

The central characters are two boys from different social classes in early twentieth century Dublin. Not vastly different, mind you, but one of the charms of the book is the way the author can so effortlessly depict the various strands of Irish society of the time. Jim is studious, religious and proper: his friend Doyler is a streetwise larrikin, a free-thinker who works as a night-soil man and wears the Red Hand badge of Jim Larkin’s much-villified trade union.

Their fathers served together and fought (or in one case, didn’t fight) in the Boer War and came home, one to a meagre existence as a corner grocer and the other to a drunken life in the lanes. The third member of the group is a young man named Anthony MacMurrough from an upper-class family who has returned to Ireland after serving two years in Wandsworth for “gross indecency with a chauffeur-mechanic.”

The three meet at a well-known male (and usually nude) bathing place known as the Forty Foot, some kilometres south of Dublin. As one who often swam there, I can attest that it promotes the kind of shrivelling masculinity which turns quick modesty into more of a survival skill than an ethical decision. When they first meet, Jim is unable to swim, but Doyler coaches him and they promise each other that the following Easter Sunday 1916 they will swim to an isolated rock on the other side of the harbour.

Not surprisingly, their plans are thwarted by preparations for the Easter Rising after Doyler joins James Connolly’s aggressive and well-trained Citizen Army.

It might all seem a little slight for almost 650 pages, but that would be to miss the careful way in which O’Neill reveals his characters and the times in which they live. It would also be to miss the debt to Joyce, O’Casey, Yeats, and of course Flann O’Brien.

“On what account was he ultimately dissatisfied? On account of his remembering that Scrotes was no longer with him. To what may be attributed Scrotes’s absence? His being dead. Was this a sad fact? Without the least shadow of a doubt. What logical implicative was employed by MacMurrough, the unforeseen consequence of which was his realisation of Scrotes’s unbeing? If ... then.”

There have been other writers (Roddy Doyle and Morgan Llywelyn in recent times, for example) who depicted the Irish Volunteers as young men who loved and lusted like any of their age and who took their pleasures where they could from equally willing females. However, this is the first book which ties nationalism with homosexual awakening. The average age of the 1916 rebels was 21 and the story suggests that their willingness to die was based less on a vision of some ideal Ireland than on love for each other like the Theban brotherhood.

In fact, the politics and fighting of the time are incidental and the book is first and foremost about friendship. Even the recidivist MacMurrough attains some dignity when he is forced to contrast his wantonness with the friendship of the two principals. The sometimes graphic descriptions of homosexual acts are in the contexts of those friendships and the book explores same sex attraction in a way that is sympathetic rather than confrontational.

“It’s not the doing, it’s the being that’s my offence,” MacMurrough explains at one stage. (O’Neill has admitted that the character is partly based on his long-time lover, the English broadcaster Russell Harty who died in 1988.) The book has many delights: the comical attempts of people to learn and use the Irish language, the determination of a Presentation Brother that his boys learn Latin, the priest who – when a male homosexual act is confessed – only wants to know whether the woman was married, the wonderful description of a garden fete:

“Family groups knotted about, each with its attendant cleric; magnificent matrons in powder and mink, maidens pale beside ... In equal doses, Home Rule and the BVM. Horrisonant call of somebody’s warpipe.”

Historical characters like Pearse, Connolly, Tom Kettle and Roger Casement are accurately drawn. If the young MacMurrough is a composite of Russell Harty and Oscar Wilde, then his aunt Eveline owes a great deal to the feminist and suffragette Eva Gore-Booth, sister of Countess Markievicz who also has a walk-on part. And in Jim’s father Mister Mack, the bumbling would-be pillar of the community, the author has created an affectionately comical character of universal appeal.

Although it treats of gay relationships, the book is not a gay novel as such; the author presents complex characters sympathetically and with understanding rather than subjects of moral censure or subtle polemic. Similarly, the story does not require a background knowledge of Dublin geography or Irish politics; the exception is the final paragraph in the book, a poignant and touching reminder of the futility of high idealism in the face of obsession and doctrinaire rigidity.

So does the book live up to the audacity of its author and the high-priced confidence of its publisher? It may need time, the fickleness of public taste and the nit-picking of academics to provide an answer. A reviewer, particularly one who starts out so grumpily, has to be sparing of superlatives, but here goes.

At Swim, Two Boys is a masterpiece which manages to combine accessibility and readability with erudition and verbal pyrotechnics. It is a beautiful treatment of human friendship and may well become the classic it deserves to be.

THE AUSTRALIAN
Saturday, 1st December 2001. Sydney, Australia.
“Joycean boyos find love amid Troubles” – reviewed by Judith Elen

Irish writers never begin with a blank page – ghosts perch on their shoulders and shadows fall across their work – the Troubles, the revolutionary heroes, glorious poets and high modernists. In his saga-length novel of a single year, Jamie O’Neill confronts an army of them with two boy lovers at the centre.

It’s Dublin, 1915, as the year works up to the heroic, profoundly disastrous Easter Rising. Ireland is pocked with revolutionary cells – many hopelessly romantic, with divided loyalties and confused leadership. But, in that doomed assertion of nationhood in the streets of Dublin, modern Ireland is born.

O’Neill carves out two parallel stories – of nationhood and also the assertion of sexual identity. Homosexuality in Ireland in this period is personified in the scandalous, brilliant figure of Oscar Wilde, half-revered, half-mocked. Wilde is the ghost O’Neill honours in his character MacMurrough. Like Wilde, MacMurrough has done two years’ hard labour in an English prison for the crime of his sexuality. A proud, embittered survivor of the past, he engineers the future through the two boys. One is his casual rent-boy, the other he is falling in love with. But he is also their mentor. He shows them “their own country”. This is a book about turning points.

As for the literary ghosts, O’Neill lights a candle to them and uses them at the same time. An English reviewer has suggested the novel is “a house entirely built inside a cathedral” – Ulysses. In fact, it is son of Ulysses. It is Bloomish Mr Mack’s 16-year-old son, Jim – with his young “pal o’ me heart” Doyler – who journeys towards self-realisation, political and personal.

Joycean playfulness peppers the novel, but it is anchored in ordinary lives. O’Neill’s characters are subtle and deeply satisfying. He is in the blood line of centuries of Irish storytellers. From inside the characters’ minds and lives we participate in the revolutionary moment, in the tenderest of adolescent loves and the discovery of eroticism.

O’Neill makes a clever gesture towards Flann O’Brien’s hilariously parodic At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) but his book has become a bit of a legend itself. O’Neill spent 10 years writing it while working night shifts in a psychiatric ward. He made a paltry rights sale, bought it back, then landed a $500,000 deal. It’s not his first book but it’s the one he has crafted and researched over time and from the soul.

You can map Edwardian Dublin with remarkable accuracy from Ulysses, but homosexuality is “completely absent from [Joyce’s] ‘complete history’”. O’Neill has redrawn the map.

THE AGE
Sunday, 11 November 2001. Melbourne, Australia.
“A boys’ own adventure” – Reviewed by Simon Casterson

In Ireland, everything is political, including sex. The Irish today can boast that their country has some of the most liberal laws in Europe relating to homosexuality, but at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916 things were very different. At Swim, Two Boys is the story of the love between two Dublin boys set against a backdrop of political and moral rebellion and repression.

Jim and Doyler are lads of 12 [?] whose fathers fought together in the Boer War. They discover they share a bond deeper than friendship, which to begin with they can barely understand. In the spring of 1915, they make a pact: the following Easter they will jump off the Forty Foot and swim across Dublin Bay to the distant beacon on Mulgins rock, there to claim the island for a free Ireland.

In the intervening year their love develops an intensity that coincides with the deepening resolve of a small group of Irish revolutionaries to force the British out of Ireland. Their relationship survives political upheaval and the complications of adulthood. Doyler becomes a socialist activist who works as the hauler of a midden cart, while Jim’s scholarly interests and introverted nature incline him toward the priesthood.

At Swim, Two Boys is not simply a historical saga using a convenient dramatic backdrop. It offers a serious meditation on the role desire plays in the movements of politics and history. One of more daring conceits that Jamie O’Neill explores is the notion that Patrick Pearse, the leader of the Easter 1916 rising, was gay, and that his young followers hero-worshipped him as what might now be regarded as a gay icon. Another revolutionary martyr of the period whose character – and homosexuality – comes to the fore is Sir Roger Casement.

O’Neill’s publisher is quick to invoke Joyce and Beckett in the publicity material for the novel, for which it paid an advance of about $1 million last year. It sounds like a lot of money, but the novel took a decade to write while the author was working as a night porter in a London psychiatric hospital, an occupation one would expect of Beckett’s character Murphy.

O’Neill’s prose style is high and passionate. As he stands at the water’s edge, Jim experiences a yearning not a million miles away from one of Joyce’s epiphanies: “Before him in columned panorama the sea surged, grey with trouble and white with thrill. The same thrill and the same trouble boiled inside him. He felt a bursting to be known, to be born, that would no longer be delayed, but whose labour had come.”

Just as there used to be a tendency in Australia for a first-time novelist to be labelled the new Patrick White, so too are Irish writers obliged to labor, to an even greater extent, under the weight of expectation generated by their illustrious predecessors. The truth is that O’Neill writes about things that Yeats and Joyce would never have written about, and nor, for that matter, could Oscar Wilde.

There is an element of Wilde himself in the character of MacMurrough, the black sheep of a famous Irish family. Once sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor because of “unnatural acts”, he is reduced to spying on the boys as they swim naked and buying the casual favors of Doyler. MacMurrough is part of a gallery of characters that is memorably grotesque or eccentric.

Comparisons between At Swim, Two Boys and Joyce are inevitable, (and if the title echoes Flann O’Brien’s At Swim, Two Birds, the text certainly doesn’t) but a more relevant exemplar would be Dickens. Among O’Neill’s contemporaries, At Swim, Two Boys put me in mind of his Australian namesake Anthony O’Neill’s novel Scherazade in its exuberance, detail, and amplitude. It is certainly a more impressive production than A Star Called Henry, Roddy Doyle’s disappointing recent novel of the Easter Rising, though the events themselves, like the legend of Ned Kelly, occupy a much greater imaginative space than could possibly be encompassed by any fiction.

MELBOURNE COMMUNITY VOICE
December 2001. Melbourne, Australia.
“United We Lay” – reviewed by Crusader Hillis

Jamie O’Neill spent a decade writing this massive, sprawling novel about two boys living in Ireland at the time of the First World War. The effort has paid dividends, for despite the extraordinary length and dense prose, there is hardly a word out of place. O’Neill expertly captures the cadences of Irish English, with its smattering of a resurging Gaelic language, moving through various social strata from the Anglicised rich, the largely conservative Catholic priesthood, through the mercantile classes to the poverty-stricken working classes.

The book follows the fortunes of Jim, the scholar son of a foolish shopkeeper, and his friendship with Doyler, an incredibly intelligent young man born on the wrong side of the tracks, and who is destined to continue work collecting the night soil (shit) of his betters. Together they forge a friendship that turns it back on the status-laden relationships of their peers. Doyler has been forced to leave school, despite his superior intellect, and Jim is a scholarship boy. Both are derided by the boys of Presentation College; both are expected to use the servants’ entrance of their betters.

From the beginning of their friendship, an easy physical camaraderie is described. But while their friendship stays on the surface platonic, Doyler is having sex with Anthony MacMurrough, the peripatetic nephew of the fiercely pro-Independence and unconventional Eva, a landowner, suffragist and women’s rights campaigner. MacMurrough is back in Ireland after being imprisoned and disgraced in England for a same-sex relationship. Towards the end of the first half of the book, Jim and Doyler’s friendship becomes more recognisably sexual, and the dawning of their love brings together many of the disparate themes of the book.

At Swim could be seen as a call to arms, linking the burgeoning Irish independence movement with the birth of a consciousness surrounding homosexuality. MacMurrough expresses this connection most fully, having experienced the stigma induced by his inclinations, and having heard of such luminaries as Edward Carpenter and his lover George Merrill. Throughout the novel he watches as Jim and Doyler are forced to hide their relationship, wanting to find for them a nationalist mythology that might support their love. As a member of the ruling class, he is able to fulfil his sexual desires, usually with poor boys, while never finding support from his equals. Doyler, from the lowest social order, seems the least effected by the strict social proscription against homosexuality. Jim, ever the shop boy, is in the middle.

The Irish English and internal monologues of At Swim, Two Boys makes it quite a difficult book to get into. But once you establish your footing, it is smooth sailing and is definitely one of the most ambitious and fully realised gay-themed novels of recent times. It is highly recommended.

NEW ZEALAND HERALD
15 January 2002. Aukland, New Zealand.
Reviewed by Sue Younger

This tender love story between two boys is set in Ireland in the year leading up to the 1916 Easter Uprising.

Jamie Mack is motherless, innocent and sensitive. Every day he goes for an exhilarating swim with his friend Doyler who is bright but poor and has been damaged by the excesses of an alcoholic father. The boys are intensely sensual and struggle to understand their strong feelings for one another.

Their country is in as much turmoil as their 15-year-old hearts. What does it mean to grow up Irish? Doyler’s a confirmed rebel but Jamie is confused as to how he is supposed to view Britain. His father fought for the King in South Africa and his beloved brother is away fighting the Hun.

The book traces two parallel struggles – for freedom for Ireland and for acceptance for those men who, unspeakably, desire other men.

In both cases the most significant battleground is for the hearts and minds of the oppressed. Catholicism, Irish history and small-town conservatism are the forces shaping adolescent Mack and Doyler and filling them with shame and self-hatred, helping to ensure their defeat in both struggles.

Doyler leaves to join the rebellion but he and Jamie promise to meet a year hence, at Easter, 1916 and swim to a small island where they will raise the Irish flag and claim a small piece of the world for their country and their love for one another.

As tensions build and the fractured rebellion staggers into being, Doyler and Mack are caught up in events way beyond their understanding. In Ulysses, Joyce has Dedalus say, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.” This provides a perfect description of the events that befall O’Neill’s two heroes.

Written over 10 years while O’Neill worked at night as a hospital porter, this book is full of love. Love for Irish literary tradition. Love for language. Love for the poor, the oppressed and the alcoholic. Love for the young and innocent. Love for history. And a huge, sprawling, anguished love for Ireland. This book’s got soul, no doubt about it. And its heart is blazoned on its sleeve.

But it has to be said that the writing style will polarise readers. I found it intensely irritating – over-wrought, mannered and undisciplined.

Yet some are hailing O’Neill as the next great Irish writer. Well, maybe, if you like sentences like this: “The boy enraptured him. What joy it was to pray with him, to hear the delicate pant of his soul as heavenward it soared. She reigned, resplendent with miracles, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, but terrible as an army set in array.”

There’s no doubt that Joyce is O’Neill’s literary hero. The relationship this novel has with Ulysses is another problem that will polarise readers.

At what point does building on the tradition of the past, or being “influenced” by the masters, turn into poor imitation? Joyce lovers will either hate O’Neill as a derivative wannabe or they will enjoy playing spot the reference, the location, the character or the scene straight out of Ulysses.

Like Joyce, O’Neill has a deep understanding of his countrymen and of humanity. At Swim, Two Boys does offer new insight, particularly into the emotional and sexual life of gay men. But for me, the purple writing style hampers the whole. Told more simply, it would have had far more power.

Sue Younger is an Auckland documentary-maker (and she doesn’t know much about Catholic liturgy).

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