CANADA REVIEWS

“A remarkable achievement ... vastly entertaining and gripping ... this big, magnificent novel.”   Globe & Mail

“A troubling, touching, often hilarious journey. O’Neill’s ear for dialogue is superb, his mastery of style and structure uncanny ... To put it the Irish way, ‘He’s got the gift.’”  Montreal Gazette, Feb 9, 2002.

“A book of glorious ambition, a thoroughly entertaining historical love story, the Great Irish Gay Novel to date, an engagement with much of 20th century Irish writing, a linguistic feast ... It’s a memorable plunge.”  Books in Canada

“With only this work O’Neill can take his rightful place among the great Irish writers. Read this novel, and then begin the wait for O’Neill’s second.”  Kitchener Record

“Jamie O’Neill has done nothing less than change the course of gay literature. This book, gentlemen, this book – you must read this book.”  Fab magazine

“A tale of two boys ...”   Edmonton Journal

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Saturday, November 10, 2001. Toronto, Canada.
“The Great Irish (Gay) Novel” – reviewed by John Doyle

A few years ago a certain Canadian writer – who shall remain nameless for his foolishness – suggested to me that if he’d been born in Dublin, he’d never have become a writer. He felt that living in streets and neighbourhoods that were already celebrated in the greatest of writing would simply be too intimidating for a young, young writer. Better to be born somewhere that’s obscure in literature, he said, and try to create great writing from the fringes.

Of course, the opposite is true – to live in places that are already important in the works of great writers is an inspiration. No person, place or event is considered unworthy as a subject for writing. What seems mundane has already been noted as major. The streets, shops and people of Dublin form the basis for the greatest novels, plays and poety of the last century. There’s tradition to sustain the individual talent. So along comes Jamie O’Neill, of whom no one has heard, and he takes Joyce’s Ulysses as the starting point for this big, magnificent novel. He also makes the most important event in recent Irish history, the Easter Rising of 1916, the core of his story. To add to the audacity, he uses a pun on the second-greatest Irish novel of the last century, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, as the title for his own novel. The point of the pun is to signal that At Swim, Two Boys is the great Irish gay novel.

It is that, and more. The novel opens in Glasthule, a suburb of Dublin, in 1915. (Glasthule, by the way, is a stone’s throw from the Martello tower that is the setting of the opening scene of Ulysses.) We meet Mister Mack, “a hell of a gent. With a tip of his hat here and a top of the morn there, tip-top everything’s dandy. He’d bare his head to a lamppost.” We follow Mister Mack through the streets, hear his disjointed thoughts as, Bloom-like, he ambles, put-upon and benign in his anxiety about being liked and respected.

Mack is a shopkeeper, a veteran of the Boer war and inordinately proud of his service for King and Country. He’s a nice man, presented to us with great craft and in a cunning pastiche of Joyce’s style – the peculiar order of words and the fussy questions appearing at the end of half-thoughts. “Must remember to mark that down in the book. Impossible to keep tabs else. I wonder if I might just ...”

This is brilliant technical work by Jamie O’Neill, but it would eventually become tiresome if it didn’t mature into something orginal. Mr. Mack’s son, Jim, soon emerges, and it is his friendship with the working-class Doyler that is at the novel’s core. Doyler, son of Mr. Mack’s old army pal, is a teenager, a socialist, a schoolboy and a worker at the bottom of the ladder – he is a “night-soil man,” carrying away excrement from the toilets of the middle class. He is also a homosexual and deeply attracted to Jim Mack.

He begins teaching Jim how to swim, and they meet regularly at the Forty Foot, a bathing spot for men to swim nude. He encourages Jim to practise, and they make a pact to swim together to a nearby island on Easter Sunday, 1916. Any reader familiar with Irish history knows what will happen on that day – a ragtag coalition of nationalists, poets, dreamers and socialists will attempt a rebellion and to establish the provisional government of a newly created Irish republic. It is when Yeats’s “terrible beauty” is born.

Meanwhile, Doyler is exploring his sexuality with a gentleman named MacMurrough, a roué newly returned to his upper-class Irish relatives after two years in an English jail for being caught having relations with a chauffeur-mechanic. MacMurrough is the nephew of Eveline, a fierce nationalist (based on the real Eva Gore-Booth, a friend of Yeats) who conspires with the nationalists to organize the armed rebellion against British rule. At first amused by the tide of Irish nationalism, MacMurrough is eventually in awe of it and recognizes a sweeping change in Ireland that it is impossible to stop. He is also in awe of Doyler and the gentleness of the boy’s passion for Jim Mack; admiration for that relationship gradually changes his own predatory attitude toward sex with other men.

While the trio of gay young men – Doyler, Jim and MacMurrough – form the centre of the novel, At Swim, Two Boys eventually becomes a sweeping story of revolution. The major figures of the 1916 Rising pass through its pages – Patrick Pearse, James Connolly – but also other key figures from that momentous time in Ireland and England. Edward Carson, prosecutor of Oscar Wilde and father figure of the Protestant state of Northern Ireland, is saved from drowning by MacMurrough, who cheekily plants a kiss on the mouth of Wilde’s tormentor. There’s nothing idle or casual about O’Neill’s emphasis on homosexuality. It has long been speculated that Patrick Pearse was gay, and there is something emphatically homoerotic about his stirring speeches on the subject of male sacrifice and bloodlust – speeches that fired the Easter Rising into being. It’s just that these were untouchable topics in Ireland before now. At the same time, the author’s sympathy is clearly with Doyler and the socialist Irish Citizen Army, whose discipline and courage gave the Rising what success it achieved.

The last third of the novel is superb – the Joycean touches are left far behind as O’Neill brings the shock and chaos of the Rising into focus. Some of the same ground was covered in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry, but O’Neill’s sweep is superior and the clarity of his writing is startling. Like Roddy Doyle, Jamie O’Neill is taking part in a revisionist revolution in Irish writing. In O’Neill’s case, he is not only rewriting the history of the birth of the Irish Republic, but he’s confidently borrowing from Joyce and others to do it. That is a remarkable achievement and the result is vastly entertaining and gripping. It’s also an achievement that would be denied a writer who tried only to create greatness from the fringes, away from the intimidating predecessors.

Apart entirely from the Irish context, however, At Swim, Two Boys is simply a superbly written love story filled with prose to savour – “Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen, spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.”

John Doyle is the television critic for The Globe and Mail. Irish-born, he regularly reviews fiction for the Books section.

BOOKS IN CANADA
The Canadian Review of Books. 2002.
Reviewed by Stan Persky

Irish writer Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys is a book of glorious ambition. It is, at once, a thoroughly entertaining historical love story set in the time of the Irish uprising of 1916, the Great Irish Gay Novel to date, an engagement with much of 20th century Irish writing, a linguistic feast, and a presentation of transgressive sex that some Canadian parliamentarians would probably want banned.

The story behind the book also reads like a rags to riches literary fairytale. The 30-something-year-old O’Neill was working as a night porter in a psychiatric hospital in London, a job that allowed him to labour away in obscurity at a manuscript he’d been honing for almost ten years. Although At Swim, Two Boys is billed as a literary debut, in fact O’Neill had published two not particularly well-received earlier novels about a decade before, works which both publisher and author, for marketing and artistic reasons, are willing to regard as forgettable. The manuscript finished and having been passed on to an editor friend, O’Neill was on the job one night when a phone call came from across the ocean. It’s the phone call every author is waiting for. At the other end was a literary agent informing O’Neill that a major New York publisher was offering something in the neighbourhood of a quarter-million dollars for the rights to publish the unknown writer’s untested blockbuster. As one of the title characters in At Swim, Two Boys frequently exclaims, “What cheer, eh?” And the rest, as they say, is a history of press releases, blurbs, and enthusiastic reviews.

At its simplest level, At Swim is the story of two 16-year-old boys, Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle, who vow to swim, on Easter Sunday 1916, from Forty Foot, a gentleman’s bathing spot on the Sandycove coastal outskirts of Dublin, to the Muglins, a rocky island in the Irish sea a couple of miles offshore and, once there, to plant the flag in the name of Irish independence. In the several month course of trysting and training for the big swim, it’s not only the romance of Ireland that develops, but a schoolboy romance as well. The raising of the flag is not the only affair of the heart that will be consummated on the rocky outcrop. And since Easter Monday 1916 turns out to be the moment of an ill-fated political uprising in Dublin, the adventures in the perilous waters will be followed by a bloody denouement in the even more perilous streets of Dublin.

If it sounds something like a tale from Boy’s Adventure magazine, with the spicy addition of what many of us readers of that long-ago adolescent periodical always hoped for – namely, teenaged sex between the male heroes – well, at times, that’s what At Swim is. But O’Neill’s book is far more than a charming gay pornographic fantasy designed to raise the hackles of the prudish (although I should report that the sexual descriptions, while hardly sensational, are anatomically accurate and emotionally hot). At Swim is also a believable, engrossing portrait of Irish political history, the social classes of Dublin from slum-dwellers to aristocrats of the manor, the topography of sea and city, and the ideas of the times – ideas about religion, the independence of Ireland and, more arguably, homosexuality.

In addition to Doyler and his “pal o’ my heart” Jim, the book is undergirded by a more complex cast of characters. First among them is Anthony MacMurrough, heir to an Irish revolutionary tradition and former Oscar Wilde-like inmate of an English prison (having served time for the same miscreance as Wilde), who, recently returned to the manse, soon beds, on a monetary basis, young Doyler. O’Neill’s daring move here, the one that raises hackles, is to suggest that Doyler is not merely pragmatic about the rent-boy arrangement, but a willing participant.

There’s also MacMurrough’s grande dame Aunt Eva, an aristocratic gun-runner whose old-maiden heart pines for the homosexual Irish revolutionary, Roger Casement. Finally, there are the boys’ fathers, former mates in a Dublin Regiment-Arthur Mack, a snobbishly aspiring shopkeeper, and Mick Doyle, down-on-his-luck and dying of tuberculosis. Various priests, servants, and odd relations fill in the gaps, making for a solid social panorama.

At Swim begins with the perambulations of Arthur Mack in the Dublin outskirt of Glasthule, “homy old parish, on the lip of Dublin Bay,” noodling along on his daily errands one spring day in 1915. From the very start, the sub-textual engagement with the landmarks of Irish literature is apparent. The title of O’Neill’s book is a play on Flann O’Brien’s renowned At Swim-Two-Birds. More obviously, readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses will immediately hear echoes of the interior monologues of Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s protagonist, on his walks through Dublin. Since much of the book is set at Forty Foot, in sight of the Martello tower and the water, where Joyce’s Buck Mulligan took his morning swim in the “snotgreen ... scrotumtightening sea,” there’s no avoiding the shadow of the master.

As O’Neill has remarked in interviews, “Joyce stands muttering over the shoulder of all Irish writers, I fear.” As for the Joycean landscape at Forty Foot, O’Neill wryly concedes, “It’s asking for trouble, really.” The triumph of the subtext is that O’Neill’s engagement with Joyce and much else in Irish literature comes off not as mere pastiche, but as a genuine echo of a way of securing the detailed reality of the period. Although critics of O’Neill have complained of his “stage Oirish,” the book’s lush language is vivid, breathless as the lads plunging into that “freezer of a sea,” and true to the tumbling rhythm of the doomed events it chronicles. If the texture of the prose is a test of this heady novel, it passes with flying rainbow colours. In the end, the appropriate literary comparison is not so much with Joyce and company, but with compatriot Roddy Doyle’s recent novel, A Star Called Henry, which takes on many of the same issues and settings as O’Neill’s At Swim. Suffice to say, as a measure of his accomplishment here, it’s O’Neill that comes off best.

All historical novels raise the problem of the versimilitude of their relation to actual history – in this case, a matter of both political and sexual history. O’Neill’s Doyler is a Red Hand-badge wearing young socialist; his counterpart Jim is a liberal in love. Around them are characters standing in for the various shades of Irish nationalism: Volunteers, Citizens’ Army, and Gaelic revivers. For those who want to be reassured that O’Neill’s got it pretty much right, the definitive historical text is R.F. Foster’s Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (1988). Whether gay Irish young men articulated their desires as they do in At Swim, Two Boys is, of course, more problematic. Here, I think the test is simply plausibility. Given the actual existence of Wilde, Casement, and the homosexual practices between classes and among young men marching off to the slaughter of World War I, O’Neill has enough to go on to make a brave, romantic run of it. “Gray morning dulled the bay,” O’Neill writes in a signature passage. “Banks of clouds... Swollen spumeless tides. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.” It’s a memorable plunge.

KITCHENER-WATERLOO RECORD
December 1, ‘01. Kitchener, Ontario.
Reviewed by Terry Pender.

James Joyce has written a most amazing first novel called At Swim, Two Boys.

No, no, no. Not Joyce, but Jamie O’Neill.

But I could not help but think of Joyce many many times though while reading this large, poetic work. For the past 10 years O’Neill took his laptop to his job as a hospital night porter so he could work and re-work his novel. Let us hope his next book comes along much sooner.

Even if it does not, the wait will have been more than worth it if the second is even a shadow of this first work of art. This will be an enduring work of literature.

At Swim, Two Boys tells the story of two 16-year-olds, Jim and Doyler, during the year leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin. In the terrible beauty that was Ireland’s 20th century, the Easter Rising figures most large. With the English busy fighting the Germans the Irish nationalists moved to force England to deliver on its long-delayed promise of home rule.

The Irish volunteers took over the post office and other key locations in the ancient port city. They hoisted the Irish Tri-colour, read a proclamation of independence and waited for the bloody English attack that soon folowed. These rebels held the British off for several days, but a withering artillery assault levelled parts of the Irish capital and crushed the Rising.

O’Neill’s work is evocative of time and place, and weaves the events leading up to the Rising into the lives of his characters with a seamlessness that has a reader laughing out loud at the top of the page, and falling silent with deep sadness by the bottom.

The plot: Doyler promises to teach Jim to swim well enough so the two will crawl through the water in a year’s time, and claim a tiny island off the coast for Ireland. They promise to meet every morning, and practise swimming in the cold sea. The date for the big swim: Easter 1916.

This is a love story, and a tale of sexual awakening. There is a lot of gay sex: the love that dared not speak its name in 1915 stirs throughout these pages like Irish nationalism at the beginning of the 20th century. Like Joyce with his great novel of Dublin, Ulysses, O’Neill has pushed the bounds with his frank sexuality. The narrow-minded and bigoted may well call for the banning of At Swim, Two Boys from schools and public libraries. That would be a huge mistake.

This novel is much more than the sex on some of its pages. It is a transcendental story of love and loyalty, rejection and redemption. O’Neill uses the literary technique of the interior monologue perfected by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. Perspectives shift throughout O’Neill’s novel. Readers view the world through the internal and fragmented thoughts and emotions of several characters.

Jim’s father, Mr. Mack, is one of the main characters. A foolish man who’s internalized the English oppression of his country. He fought in the Dublin Fusiliers for the English during the late 1800s, and gladly sent his older son Gordie into the same regiment for the First World War. Before Gordie embarks for Gallipoli his girlfriend Nancy becomes pregnant. Gordie is killed, along with thousands of Irish and New Zealand troops in the sheer folly that was England’s ill-fated campaign to knock Turkey out of the War.

Nancy presents herself at the Mack household seeking a place for herself and her soon-to-be-born child. At first Mack strongly resists the idea, but memories of his own deprived childhood flood into the present:

”On the ditch he sat till he saw them go by, the other boys no different from him, save they went by the middle of the road, and he waited on the ditch and watched the smoke in the sky from the houses. Then the red-coats came by with a rubbadub-dub, and when all the other boys had left off chasing, he carried on in the trail of the soldiers. That night they gave him biscuit that was hard as stone and bade him dance to the fifer. The cheery thin faces laughed in the firelight. The friendly fire with the hands about it in the homely camp of the red-coats.”

With this one paragraph Mack becomes a much more sympathetic character. Some readers may not like him any better, but all have a better understanding of him now.

At Swim, Two Boys is a profoundly sad story, as was Ireland in the last 100 years. Mack loses Gordie. Jim loses Doyler. And in the final paragraphs that read like a prose poem of reunion in the afterlife, Jim sees Doyler waving his cap in the air to greet him.

”What cheer, eh?” he called.

There are many points in this novel where I am reminded of Joyce’s wordplay, and the prose poetry of Elizabeth Smart. Try this paragraph, from which the author took the title.

”Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.”

With only this work O’Neill can take his rightful place among the great Irish writers beginning with Joyce and ending with Roddy Doyle. Read this novel, and then begin the wait for O’Neill’s second.

Terry Pender is a Record reporter.

FAB magazine
March, 2002. Toronto, Canada.
“Pal o’ Me Heart” – reviewed by Richard Costello

Jamie O’Neill has done nothing less than change the course of gay literature with his debut novel, At Swim, Two Boys (Simon and Schuster). The work can be read on so many levels – love story, historical narrative, symbolic rite of passage for both protagonists and country – that it almost defies description. Fundamentally, O’Neill seeks to create a unity between the love of country and the love of another – patria and eros – and he succeeds brilliantly.

Set against the impressionistic canvas of the Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin, Ireland, At Swim is the story of two 16 year old boys whose love sweeps all before them. They swim the waters of the Forty Foot – a landing place of Dublin Bay – and there make a pact to be true to each other. Doyler, the young revolutionary, has dedicated himself to the cause of a free Ireland. Jim, the scholarship student, has dedicated himself to Doyler no matter what the cost. “It’s silly, I know. But that’s how I feel. I know Doyler will be out, and where would I be but out beside him? I don’t hate the English, and I don’t know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I’m sure of that now. And he’s my country.”

They enter the fray side by side, to meet the fate of their nation and their love. You are right there with them, in their lives and struggles, in their uprisings and republic-building – personal and national both. You’re swept up in a world of the imagination, carried on a sea of finely-drawn characters, tossed about in a time and place far away – but it all becomes your very own.

It has been said that a good writer tells us something about the human condition. It falls to the great writer, though, to take us inside the human condition and touch our very souls. Greatness comes only through an exquisite alchemy of eternal themes and brave new words that ring true on the page. O’Neill has been compared to Joyce and Beckett, and indeed pays homage to his illustrious countrymen, but achieves greatness on his own strengths. The prose is mesmerizing – English, Gaelic, Latin and Dublin slang fuse into the language of love. The sharply drawn supporting characters – oily Brother Polycarp – trying to lure Jim into the priesthood while slipping a hand down the boy’s shirt; dry, powdery Father Taylor, rebel in a roman collar; comic buffoon Mr. Mack, who bumps into the Revolution by mistake – set off the boys in sharp relief.

Warren Dunford, in Soon to be A Major Motion Picture, said that what lies ahead for gay literature is the re-writing of all the great themes, with gay protagonists rather than straight. O’Neill has achieved that with his poignant account of love and friendship, war and nationalism. But he has gone beyond, immeasurably beyond. The story could not have been written with straight characters, but it’s not “about” being gay. Because of this, the book will break free of the gay ghetto and stand as a classic in its own right. At Swim, Two Boys is both an echo of the old and a bold step into the new. This book gentlemen, this book – you must read this book.

EDMONTON JOURNAL
Sunday, January 6, 2002. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
“Love and war in colonial Ireland: Tale of two boys’ love set against big events.” – reviewed by Jerry White

At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill’s third novel, seems to have “heir to James Joyce” written all over it. The novel’s kaleidoscopic tendencies, language games and puns, and Dublin setting all invoke Ulysses; the fact that its title is a play on another masterpiece of Irish modernism, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, only strengthens the link. But I think that O’Neill’s novel is actually closer to a lot of recent Irish fiction, with its attention to intimate detail and its on-and-off relationship to big historical events and their political meaning.

O’Neill integrates the tale of two young boys falling in love with a portrait of Irish culture during the colonial period, dwelling on the First World War and finally on the legendary Easter Rising of 1916. But the meat of the narrative is in the story of Jim and Doyler; Jim is booky and brainy, and Doyler is full of revolutionary idealism. The two become close friends – cara macree, or pals of the heart, they say – and eventually become lovers. One of the book’s central images is the bit of shore at Howth, where men go to swim in the nude; Doyler loves the place, and he teaches Jim to swim there. Here’s how O’Neill describes it:

”Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.”

That passage is an embodiment of the book’s interests: the details of landscape that go unnoticed, the quiet, unthinking intimacy that can develop between boys, and the overcast, melancholy quality of it all. One of the ways that the narrative gives life to this melancholy is through the talk and rumours of death and war, but that melancholy is just as clearly illustrated through the frustrated ambitions of shopkeepers and veterans of the Boer War (Jim’s dad), of pious, nationalist and politically incoherent priests, or the failure of revolutionary idealism.

So while any book that is about Ireland in 1915 and 16 is bound to be overshadowed by the historical events of that period, O’Neill tries to bury them, although they resurface from time to time. The relationship between love and war is ever-present, but it’s clear which one wins out in the characters’ hearts.

Furthermore, O’Neill’s use of violent political struggle and idealism around revolution and socialism has an echo in the way that he uses Irish Gaelic; both were repressed by the British, but are still present in the fabric of everyday life in Ireland. Cara macree is one example; it’s a mistranscription of the Irish Gaelic term cara mo chroí. In another passage the greeting “dia ’s Muire dhuit” becomes “Dee’s mirror git.” Irish readers, all of whom would have had some Irish Gaelic in school, would recognize these language games. And they are there, I would suggest, as a counterpoint to the way that the characters are always talking about but never quite understanding the political changes that just seem to be part of the atmosphere. They show how much is bubbling beneath the streets of Dublin, in the nether-regions between Ireland’s everyday and unconscious.

Jerry White is a freelance reviewer.

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