IRISH REVIEWS

“A moving, often beautiful, tale ... At Swim, Two Boys is that rare enough thing – a novel of epic ambition which does not fail to live.”  Irish Times

“An enormously impressive book, skilful, intricate and polished ... Tantalising.”  Sunday Business Post

“Bloomin’ brilliant.”  Sunday Tribune

“At Swim, Two Boys is not a letter too long. It promises insight into the fathoms of the human heart, the complexities of the mind, and the nurturing of the soul – and delivers on all three.”   Belfast Telegraph

“Humour, compassion, tenderness and an innate understanding of human nature ... what emerges is a tour-de-force of astonishing intensity.”  Bookview Ireland

“Its parallel stories of insurrection and sexual awakening are meticulously crafted, sometimes making it near impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.”  Evening Herald

IRISH TIMES
Saturday, 8 September, 2001. Dublin, Ireland.
Dip in Dangerous Waters, by Declan Kiberd

This is a moving, often beautiful, tale of the friendship between two boys of different social backgrounds in the year before the Easter Rising of 1916. Jim is the scholarly and religious son of Mr Mack, a shopkeeper on the rise after a period with the “Colours” in India; Doyler is the extrovert Larkinite son of Mr Mack’s old dipsomaniacal army comrade.

The boys meet at the all-male bathing place known as the Forty Foot. Their attraction becomes physical, cutting across the class calibrations of a Glasthule which divides even its churchgoers according to the number of pennies which they subscribe at the door. They make a kind of Faustian pact to train daily in preparation for a swim to the Muglins planned for Easter 1916. It is a literary conceit, of course, but one which works rather well.

Less convincing is the portrayal of characters from the sub-plots. The local Anglo-Irish grande dame, Eveline McMurrough, appears to be modelled on Eva Gore-Booth, but the real Eva would hardly thank Jamie O’Neill for this portrait of a female hysteric. Her brother, who is infatuated by the boys and has just done two years at Wandsworth, is a cardboard Wilde, who is made to speak in the sort of clichés which Oscar himself might have considered actionable. The treatment of some of the extreme Irish Irelanders also verges on the unbelievable – there is a Father Amen O’Toiler (Éamonn Ó Táilliúir, geddit?) straight out of Revisionist Central Casting.

That said, however, there are also very deft, understated portrayals-in-passing of Pearse and Connolly, of Tom Kettle and Constance Markievicz, each imagined not with the force of hindsight but as he or she might have appeared at the time. Pearse, for instance, comes over as at once spellbinding and a little foolish (something he observed cannily in himself).

The opening chapters seem too “literary” in a knowing Irish way. The interior monologues through which Mr Mack is rendered are filled with the verbal mannerisms of Leopold Bloom – so much so that it is hard for the reader who knows Ulysses to form a clear sense of Mr Mack’s own inner acoustic. There are too many echoes also of O’Casey’s alliterating autobiographies (“the flicker of a flame”) and the language seems overladen with flavoursome phrases. The reader may fear that this is a plot which will develop more as an occasion for notching up Hibernicisms than from the pressure of a felt, fully realised experience.

Yet that fear is soon dispelled. As the story unfolds, O’Neill rescues most of the characters from the straitjacket of the caricatural, allowing them to grow in psychological complexity. One of the finest aspects of his technique is his determination, by the use of interior monologues, to see most of the protagonists as they would ideally see themselves. That openness of spirit extends even to the sceptical reader, who can forgive the imperfections as a price worth paying for a work of such panoramic sweep, one which offers a range of social types as comprehensive as that to be found in Jim Plunkett’s Strumpet City.

Quietly but effectively, all the historical threads which shaped modern Ireland are drawn together – the imperial experience of soldiers in the colonies and in the Great War, the nationalist counter-movements of Gaelic League, Sinn Fein and Citizen Army. The living characters converse with the spirits of dead loved ones, as if this is an unremarkable daily occurrence (which for many people in those days it surely was). The decline of social deference sees Doyler at one point pushing the Anglo-Irish gent into a hedge in Stephen’s Green. All of these social changes are observed without undue moralising.

The frank (sometimes brutal) accounts of gay sex may shock some readers, but are hardly gratuitous, being part of a developing narrative which explores the ways in which the Irish Question was implicated in the official English mindset with “the love that dare not speak its name”, from Wilde to Casement. The classical theories of male friendship which formed a major backdrop to the experience of soldiers in the period are well explored. O’Neill is well aware that many men felt that they were dying less for their country than for one another.

In the end, even ridiculous, would-be-respectable Mr Mack emerges not just as the sort of clown who gets arrested for defacing military posters he is actually trying to restore, but as a dignified figure worthy of the novelist’s interest and of the reader’s love. He is in fact a sort of Fluther Good of the Southside, who helps destitute children and bumbles through the streets of Rising Dublin unaware of risk, indifferent now to his time in the “Colours”, concerned only for the safety of his sole surviving son. He is a real comic creation, who stands for the live and the living, even when surrounded by death.

At Swim, Two Boys survives its mannered opening to become something rich and strange in Irish literature. Readers who are put off in the early stages should persist, for this is that rare enough thing – a novel of epic ambition which does not fail to live.

Declan Kiberd is head of the English Department at UCD and author of Irish Classics.

IRISH TIMES Paperback Review
Saturday, 21 September, 2002. Dublin, Ireland.
by Arminta Wallace

History is not made in a moment, but in a series of moments which build and intensify until they reach critical mass. Then, and only then, comes the explosion. Such is the concept which underpins Jamie O’Neill’s lengthy, leisurely study of the year before 1916, and its impact on the lives of two boys: Jim, naive younger son of the pompous shopkeeper Mr Mack; and Doyler, the tough offspring of Mr Mack’s old army buddy. At the Forty Foot, the boys make a pact: that Doyler will teach Jim to swim and that in a year’s time they will swim out to claim the Muglins rock for Ireland, and for themselves. A year, of course, can be a very long time in emotions as well as in politics, and O’Neill charts every heartbeat of this one in what is a jaw-droppingly ambitious novel with a retrospective coolness which betrays a very 21st-century sensibility. No wonder At Swim, Two Boys took ten years to write. Its rattling pace, however, ensures that it takes no time at all to read.

SUNDAY BUSINESS POST
16 September, 2001. Dublin, Ireland.
Behind the hype, a novel that deserves respect, by Niall Stanage

Expectations can weigh heavily on an author. Many people will have read reams about Jamie O’Neill before they have read a word by him – the massive advance; the ‘new Joyce’ tag; the six-hundred-page debut novel, ten years in the writing. At Swim, Two Birds will, as a result, be judged by a single, fearsome yardstick: is it great?

It isn’t. It’s an enormously impressive book, skilful, intricate and polished. But it is not a mould-breaking masterpiece, nor does it deliver a stunning emotional punch. It elicits admiration rather than awe, respect rather than rapture.

The central plot is fairly straightforward. The two boys of the title are Jim Mack and ‘Doyler’ Doyle, united by their nascent awareness of their homosexuality and by a shared ambition – to swim from Kingstown to the distant Muglins. The narrative follows their relationship as it develops from awkward friendship to intimate love.

Politics provides the backdrop. The action takes place in 1915 and 1916, with the news dominated first by reports of losses in the Great War, later by rumours of preparations for the Easter Rising, and, ultimately, by the Rising itself.

The deftness with which O’Neill weaves the political threads into the main plot is one of the book’s strongest points. Historical figures like Connolly and Pearse make brief, well-rendered and casual appearances in much the same way as they did in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry. The fictional characters also articulate chaotic, contemporaneous views of the grand historical events that impinge upon their lives.

When word of the Rising reaches the Anglo-Irish gent Anthony MacMurrough, he tries to make his way into the centre of Dublin. It is only when he reaches Ballsbridge that he hears gunfire for the first time. “It’s happening, MacMurrough told himself. I walk towards it. And yet, it was not happening. The Royal Spring Show was on. Tweedy hats, prize bulls, hobbled madams waited by the entrance. God damn this country, would it never make up its mind?” he laments in confusion.

O’Neill’s portrayal of second-string characters like Jim Mack’s father and MacMurrough is, if anything, more powerful and nuanced than his depiction of the principals. This is also, appealingly, a novel without villains. MacMurrough initially appears to be a somewhat hackneyed creation – an ageing, sexually predatory toff – but as the narrative progresses his self-loathing and magnanimity both come to the fore with affecting results. Likewise, Mr Mack’s conceits about his British army past and his hopes for social advancement initially make him seem like a buffoon. The reader soon sees a quite different man, however – one who struggles daily to cope with the early death of his wife and, later, with the loss of his soldier son, Gordie.

The scene in which he receives a telegram informing him that Gordie is missing in action is one of the most poignant in the entire novel. Jim asks him what it means.

”Mr Mack fixed his face, then turned from the mantelshelf. ‘Why, it means there’s hope yet. Isn’t that the best news? Missing in action only. That’s easy done. The muddle of war, ‘tis surprising there isn’t more goes missing. Where there’s hope there’s, where there’s hope there’s – ‘ But he could not rightly recall what there was.”

The weaknesses that mar At Swim, Two Boys are of a very different kind. O’Neill’s language is sometimes fresh and vital, sometimes nicely understated. But there are several occasions when the writing becomes leaden under the weight of the author’s influences.

The horrendous punning title should have been excised. So, too, should some of the novel’s early passages, along with a later episode dealing with Jim’s feverish sexual guilt – both are mannered and as redolent of Joyce as Bloomsday.

The plot, involving and pacey though it is, also leans lazily on contrivances. A few scenes where the characters’ paths intersect may have been believable, and thus excusable. But the same device is used repeatedly. By the closing stages, when Mr Mack walks into the middle of the street, thus causing MacMurrough’s gun-running aunt to crash her car, O’Neill has stretched his readers’ credulity past breaking point.

Most damagingly of all, there is a peculiar hollowness at the centre of At Swim, Two Boys. The graphic sex scenes between Jim and Doyler are imbued with urgency and intensity, but these qualities are often missing in the articulation of the emotional bond between them. O’Neill’s writing sometimes seems too carefully considered, too neat and well-ordered to give effective voice to the lovers’ ungovernable passions. Even the novel’s climax, though moving, is predictable and slightly flat.

At Swim, Two Boys is a supremely accomplished first novel. It holds the interest for most of its epic duration, and is, at times, wonderful. Next time, more heart and less self-consciousness would serve Jamie O’Neill well. Tantalising.

SUNDAY TRIBUNE
Sunday, 16 September 2001. Dublin, Ireland.
Bloomin’ brilliant, by Tom Widger.

Thumb-your-nose – cheek of the fella. Raw bloody impertinence. Sheer gall of the mickey dazzler. Nothing will do him but to open his novel like Bloom ‘n’ Shem. Brings it off too. Godrot’im. Yes. Wish I could see the face on yer man. Interior monologue. Yes. Traces of O’Casey here. Myles too. Yes. Ten years in the making he claims. We must wait another ten? Hope not. Humungous size of a monster tome. Oh this is no twig-thin thing this. All right? You get the picture?

O’Neill is quoted in newspaper interviews as saying that he is terrified waiting to read what critics will make of the book. The Joyce comparison “is disastrous”, he wails. But didn’t he invite comparison with that opening? What did he expect? Sheer Leopold ‘Popper’ Bloom. Personally I thought it was wonderful. Loved the entire book, in fact. I hear I’m not the only one. You would wonder, then, what O’Neill was worried about.

It’s easy to believe the claim that it took 10 years to write. You won’t flick through this one in one evening and you would be ill-advised to. Take breaks. String out the comedy as much as possible. It’s more like farce, really. But equally funny. You will need also a good dictionary. O’Neill comes up with contemporary words (the setting is posh Glasthule in 1915) like ‘blatherumskite’ and ‘flapdoodlers’, and the dictionary should be kept close to hand for words like ‘chamaillerie’ and ‘eclaircissement’. Good luck in finding them.

Amid the fun, there is a moving story of two boys from opposite social poles.The almost lumpen but lovable Doyler, whose old man is an ex-soldier and alcoholic, and Jim, the sensitive and scholarly son of Mack, who runs a hucksters shop and is also an ex-soldier. There is a good sense of army camaraderie between these two fathers and others throughout the book. The boys, for their part, meet at the Forty Foot and soon their friendship turns physical. The homosexual sex scenes, particularly with the introduction of Anthony MacMurrough who likes rough trade, has an in-your-face frankness.

There is great ease in the narrative for a first-time novelist – has he others unpublished? – while the especially good dialogue drives the story along at a fair lick. After the piece of Joycean fun at the opening, next telling scene is between the lunatic Christian Brother, Brother Polycarp, and the new priest in the parish. In Flann O’Brien’s, The Poor Mouth, a pig is awarded for speaking Erse. “The new curate,” announces the Christian Brother, “is talking through his Erse.” The lads call Polycarp Ponycart. Pony Crap would be better.

Another piece of flim Flann gets a hilarious run when the curate visits the home of Eva MacMurrough ‘La Grande Dame Irlandaise’. Things are growing apace, the Fenian priest assures La Grande Dame “It is my fear that we in the parish of the Stream of O’Toole are lagging behind.” “The Stream of O’Toole, father?” “It is the translation of Glasthule from the Gaelic.” “How inspiriting. You cannot conceive how proud...ancient tongue in my fathers house.”

What Glasthule lags behind is strong Shinner sentiment. The seemingly sole concerns of most Glasthule people during Easter 1916 is not the fighting in the city centre, but the trams running late. What a bother! When we are introduced to the Risen Dublin it is done very effectively and poignantly. Old Mack blundering, stumbling, looking for Jim his son, ferocious street fighting, the central characters of Pearse and Connolly put in appearances, like celebrities at soirees who always take their leave early. There are these and other memorable scenes and characters, overall, though, what we are witnessing here is the emergence of a writer who has even more belief in his talent than even the young Joyce had in his.

BELFAST TELEGRAPH
31 August 2001. Belfast, NI.
by Richard Canning

It is Easter 1915. Mr Mack meanders, Leopold Bloom-like, through the Dublin suburb that is home. There is much to be certain of, and much to celebrate. Elder son Gordie is training with the British army. He will fight against tyranny, as his father did against the Boers. Surely Gordie will be looked after; surely he’ll come home.

His brother Jim, 15, prospers at school. Though there’s talk of scholarships, even a priestly calling, Mack is confident Jim will stick with the family corner shop, which thrives through the war: “One Shilling Per Guinea Spent Here Will Comfort Our Troops in France.”

As the turbulence which preceded the “terrible beauty” of the Easter Rising emerges, Mack’s fantasies and distortions of reality are thrown into painful relief. He has kept Jim in short trousers too long, distancing him from the dangers his brother has taken on – and will succumb to at Gallipoli. The Boer campaign, it transpires, Mack walked away from expeditiously, though not before abusing his promotion to humiliate his erstwhile friend and comrade-in-arms, Doyle.

The slum-bound, alcoholic Doyle finds his pride and rebelliousness live on in his son, Doyler. Doyler is Jim’s best friend. Crucially, he is both a zealous Home Ruler and a socialist. Mack remains blind to the significance of the boys’ closeness, which flowers, cautiously, into romance at the nudist bathing spot Forty Foot.

But then who, there and then, would have imagined the sinful longings of the adolescents? Only the shamed MacMurrough, an Irish aristocrat who did time in England for gross indecency. He first spots the destitute Doyler as a potentially promising renter; he unwittingly tutors the boy in the possibilities, and practicalities, of intimacy – even love – between men. MacMurrough must then acknowledge the strength of the youths’ devotion, and construct a new role for himself among them, one both fitting and moral.

Jim and Doyler carve one certainty out between swims: a year hence they will make it to distant Muglins lighthouse, raise a flag for Ireland and simultaneously proclaim the freedom of their love. At Swim, Two Boys brilliantly relates how, in these 12 short months, the personal and political circumstances of Jim, Doyler, of all Ireland and the Union, must clash, come to compromise, and finally co-exist.

O’Neill’s handling of this material manages something marvellous. The sure-plotted canvas of the 19th-century novel of causalities is borrowed, rent and frustrated, yet never fully disposed of. Meanwhile, the more ambiguous relationship that modernists like Joyce teased out between will, expression and action is persuasively superimposed.

O’Neill smartly packs in period detail: the shame of Parnell and, later, Casement; Pearse pronouncing from the Post Office building. For MacMurrough, especially, who comes closest to articulating the novel’s spirit, there looms always the shadow of Wilde: the hypocrisy of English law; the treachery of Wilde’s prosecutor, his former schoolmate Carson; the humility of public disgrace – and the release from duty this may bring. A pivotal moment sees MacMurrough reproached for sexual candour: “Are you an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?” He winningly sallies: “Irish? Yes.”

At Swim, Two Boys is as thoroughly embedded in Irish literary lore. The title’s overt pointer to Flann O’Brien’s classic novel strikes this reader as unduly knowing in such an original work. And the many nods to James Joyce are, on occasion, superfluous, as when Jim wakes to find his father shaving – conjuring up the opening of Ulysses.

Such moments are untypical. At 200,000 words, At Swim, Two Boys is not a letter too long. It promises insight into the fathoms of the human heart, the complexities of the mind, and the nurturing of the soul – and delivers on all three. Its narrative hook – romance – is older than fiction, and ample. A modern work, it is as sure-footed in its portrayal of the universal elements in gay relationships as it is honest in its explanation of what was – sometimes, has remained – marginal, even unaccountably dissonant in them.

O’Neill is rightly being trumpeted as a great find. The hype will evaporate; At Swim, Two Boys, deservedly, will last. This mesmerising, sophisticated, intense, yet unexpectedly funny book gets nearer to the truth of our lives than most established writers dream of. Already radiating the sense of a “classic”, it confirms that there is no crisis in fiction, except for those who choose not to read it. Don’t miss out.

Bookview Ireland
September 2001. Bookview Ireland.ie

Heralded as the new Joyce and borrowing his title from Flann O’Brien, O’Neill nonetheless is a unique voice in this telling of the burgeoning relationship between two young Dublin boys set against a background of national and international unrest. Scholarship boy Jim Mack and his friend Doyler, equally promising though denied his chance through family poverty, conceive an ambition which will bring together their own hopes with those of their country. At Easter 1916, a year from when the book opens, they plan to swim to Muglins rock from the Forty Foot and plant a flag, claiming the rock as well as their own two selves for their country.

Against this background Jamie O’Neill has woven a compelling novel of the nationalist struggle, a network of diverse relationships and of the gradual development of gay love which is encouraged and monitored, ultimately selflessly, by a member of the aristocracy who has himself spent time in an English prison for indecency. Finally Jim comes to understand that MacMurrough’s tales from ancient Greece were “more than stories, they were patterns of the possible”, opening up to Jim and Doyler what their love for each other could become.

The forerunner of the growing friendship of Jim and Doyler is the army comradeship of their fathers, former sergeant turned grocer Mr Mack and the alcoholic Doyle, both of whom fought in the Boer War. Mr Mack is ambitious for his son and also for his older boy, Gordie, who is caught up in the Gallipoli landings of the First World War, while the young Doyler’s aspirations are cut short by paternal violence and banishment. The boys’ coming together is brought about by the patriotic fervour of the wonderful Eva MacMurrough who is endeavouring to preserve the family name by overlooking her nephew’s homosexuality and finding him a suitable wife.

Place all these characters in the pivotal period leading up to Easter 1916, throw in a number of historical figures such as James Connolly and Edward Carson, treat the whole with humour, compassion, tenderness and an innate understanding of human nature, and what emerges is a tour-de-force of astonishing intensity. It is a mark of the absorbing nature of the story and the intricacy of language and construction that my immediate reaction on finishing “At Swim, Two Boys” was a desire to re-read it immediately.

EVENING HERALD
August 31, 2001. Dublin, Ireland.
The Rising of the Mooners: Jamie O’Neill’s sweeping historical epic manages to put the pink into the green. By Frank Coughlan

THIS is an historical epic that, ironically, isn’t too interested in history at all and instead is much more focused on identity and how that might be defined. Anchored in the Ireland of 1916, it is about the revolution that makes that year sit so uneasily now in the national psyche, but it is about a lot more besides – specifically sexual identity at a time when sex was never even mentioned in the polite drawing rooms of the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie.

And it is when addressing this very question that this mammoth work of 643 pages works best, telling eloquently and with compassion the tale of two 16-year-old boys – one a bit of ruffian; the other a scholar in the making – who fall in love just as Ireland is stumbling into a revolution that it never wanted and has no idea what to do with.

Set in south County Dublin, more particularly Sandycove and the Forty Foot, its parallel stories of insurrection and sexual awakening are meticulously crafted, sometimes making it near impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The often explicit but tender story of young love is the one that stays with you.

Jim, the son of a Redmondite shopkeeper who knows the workings of the greasy till and little else, falls for the wild, young Republican Doyler. Doyler teaches Jim to swim off the Forty Foot and then much more besides.

A supporting cast of vivid characters – the formidable Aunt Eva and the outrageously homosexual MacMurrough – flesh out a plot which takes a lot more time getting where it’s going than it should, but is worthy of your loyalty anyway.

There are traces of Joyce (how could there not be with Sandycove as the back-drop?); Wilde (shades of Victorian arsenic and old lace) and O’Casey (the whiff of revolutionary cordite) in there too. Maybe he’d do better to camouflage his influences next time.

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