UK REVIEWS

“This mesmerising, sophisticated, intense, yet unexpectedly funny book gets nearer to the truth of our lives than most established writers dream of.”  Independent

“Both footnote and foot forward, flexing its muscles within the Irish canon and breaking new emotional ground.”  Guardian

“A triumph ... O’Neill’s historical accuracy is extraordinary, his narrative fast, hilarious and tender.”  Literary Review

“This rich, complex and beautifully written book towers above the hype and publicity, marking out its author as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Irish fiction.”  Observer

“This heartachingly beautiful novel is a work of great originality, strength and sensitivity in which single words are often concentrated poems.”  Independent on Sunday

“This novel is not merely long, it is also large, as large as the talent of its author, a coming writer, with gifts to burn.”  Scotsman

“An intelligent and informative work that will join the greats of the Irish literary canon.”  The Times

“O’Neill is not simply writing about his culture, but deeply from within it ... He reminds us of the dexterity, scope and imaginative energy of which the novel is still capable.”  Daily Express

“Beautifully vigilant writing evokes the sea’s constant shifting presence ... This highly accomplished and memorable novel.”  Sunday Times

“Even though so much of it is concerned with faltering loyalties, forbidden passions and frustrated hopes, this is an exhilarating novel, because superabundant creative energy is always exhilarating.”  Telegraph

THE INDEPENDENT
August 31, 2001. London, UK.
Gay romance and revolution meet in a bold epic of the Easter Rising. Reviewed 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.

THE GUARDIAN
Saturday, September 22, 2001. London, UK.
Rebellions of the heart: Justine Jordan on love and revolt in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys

”It is quite difficult for an Irish writer to have Joyce standing there,” Jamie O’Neill remarked after 10 years of working on At Swim, Two Boys during shifts as a night porter. All the more so, one imagines, when your agent insists on touting you as his natural successor – and Samuel Beckett’s and Flann O’Brien’s into the bargain. But there is no question that O’Neill has stepped boldly and knowingly into the company of the Irish high modernists, from his titular nod at O’Brien’s piece of fierce experimental whimsy, At Swim-two-birds, to his wordily associative Joycean prose.

As the book opens on a shopkeeper making his perambulations around Glasthule, on the lip of Dublin Bay, it seems as though O’Neill is fatally in thrall to a novel published 80 years ago. The mental habits of the Bloomish Mr Mack – shy, aspiring, tender; constantly thinking of titbits to send in to the newspapers – ape the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Ulysses with worrying fidelity. How to find one’s way to a fictional reconstruction of 1915 Dublin past Joyce’s blueprint of 1904? However, as O’Neill circles in on the romantic heart of his story, his own voice begins to ring out. The two boys of the title are Jim, Mr Mack’s bookish scholarship-boy son, and Doyler, son of Mack’s onetime army friend Doyle, long since sunk past respectability into alcoholism. Poverty has destroyed Doyler’s dreams of a scholarship, and now he collects Glasthule’s sewage.

Circumstance and class should separate the boys as their fathers were divided, but a debonair gentleman, arrived under a cloud from England, enables Doyler to rejoin Jim’s band through the price of his pawned flute. MacMurrough had served Oscar Wilde’s sentence of two years’ hard labour before being taken under the wing of his fiercely patriot aunt, who is willing to pass off the homosexuality charge as a typical English plot. Drifting aimlessly on her stipend of £2 a week (“That is four fucks and no fags”), tortured by prison memories, he is happy to shell out for Doyler’s favours. He becomes the fairy godmother of the plot, showing the boys by example what it is that they feel for each other. As they discover the way a friendship can show you the world clearly for the first time, he offers them through classical history a martial tradition of comradely love.

With self-conscious romance on the boys’ part and narrative nous on O’Neill’s, consummation is deferred until Jim has become a strong enough swimmer for the two of them to strike out from the Forty Foot bathing point for the Muglins rock, there to raise the Irish flag and finally make love, claim the country of each other. The date they set upon is Easter 1916. Their self-mythologising act encapsulates the conflation throughout the novel of the birth of a nation and of a gay consciousness, as MacMurrough seeks to “help them make a nation, if not once again, then once for all”. But Easter 1916 is the birth, as well, of Yeats’s “terrible beauty”: the Easter Rising in which poets and idealists made their doomed, self-mythologising stand in the Dublin post office, and into which Jim, Doyler and MacMurrough are swept through political and erotic passion and the search for belonging.

The reality of revolt, of course, mocks the high words. Cabbages are hurled and ridiculous rumours abound (“And the poor Pope has committed suicide...”). The Rising is a cinematic blur of action and confusion; indeed, with its unashamed, affirmative sentimentality and masterly jump-cutting, At Swim, Two Boys will film very well. O’Neill’s fierce love for his major characters and forgiving eye for his minor ones shines throughout, while his historical players – James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army, Padraig Pearse and his troop of boys – are introduced with gleeful flair. When MacMurrough saves Sir Edward Carson, who cross-examined Wilde, from drowning, and plants a smacker on his lips, the reader raises a mental cheer.

Undeniably, there is some overt button-pushing going on here; O’Neill has a weakness for the high stance and the grand gesture. For if the revolutionaries were poetically knowing, he is doubly so. Jim’s realisation in the face of personal tragedy and political struggle that he will become “a stone” and MacMurrough’s suggestion of pacific withdrawal to “a small island all to ourselves” take us out of the world O’Neill has so carefully wrought and place us firmly in Yeats’s corpus, his sad assertion in “Easter 1916” that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” and his wishful idyll in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. As Yeats knew, the mythic aggrandisement of Irish martyrdom was an uneasy enough project in itself. This is literature aggrandised through literature.

But the rigorous clarity of O’Neill’s prose and the rich saga of his story, teeming with satisfying coincidence and revelation, remain a fine and involving achievement. At Swim, Two Boys is both footnote and foot forward, flexing its muscles within the Irish canon and breaking new emotional ground.

LITERARY REVIEW
December, 2001. London, UK.
Reviewed by Marcella Edwards.

Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys is a triumph. The title echoes that of Flann O’Brien’s masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds, and it more than bears the comparison. This novel grabs you from the first page and sweeps you through the epic events of the year leading up to Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising. It tells the story of the love affair between two young boys in an Ireland where homosexuality was a crime and the Catholic Church had an absolute stranglehold. Jim and Doyler are from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but are bound by a common desire to swim to the Muglins rock and raise the Irish flag to claim this tiny outcrop for themselves and their nation. Their bid for sexual and social independence is set against the backdrop of the national demand for political independence. O’Neill’s historical accuracy is extraordinary, his narrative fast, hilarious and tender. Don’t let the length of this book put you off; you’ll never want it to end.

THE OBSERVER
Sunday, September 16, 2001. London, UK.
His master’s Joyce: Jamie O’Neill’s fine novel about two boys in 1915, At Swim, Two Boys, audaciously revisits Ulysses. Reviewed by Adam Mars-Jones

The massive satisfactions to be had from Jamie O’Neill’s first novel, in terms of language, character, plot, never quite stand apart from its sheer curiosity value. It’s rare enough to come upon a house built up against a church, so that the growls of the organ, mutterings of choristers, come faintly through the wall. Unheard-of to have a house entirely built inside a cathedral.

The cathedral is Ulysses, and the overwhelming influence on At Swim, Two Boys is Joyce. Never mind that at least two aspects of O’Neill’s project – its paean to love between men, its rousing version of the events leading up to the Easter Rising – would have seemed rather foreign to his idol. So much is borrowed from Ulysses, almost page by page, that it seems impossible for the debt ever to be made good. Yet the book makes an impact far beyond pastiche.

James O’Neill was brought up in Dun Laoghaire (once Kingstown) and what could be more natural than that he should use scenes familiar to him in his writing? Except that Joyce’s footprints were in those sands before him, and the Martello tower at Sandycove loomed over the opening section of Ulysses long before O’Neill was there to see it.

The 16-year-old heroes of his book, shy pale Jim Mack and bold dark Doyler Doyle, childhood friends, make a pact in 1915 to meet the next Easter, and to swim out together to the distant rocks called the Muglins. The pretext is to plant a green flag there, to claim the rocks for Ireland, but there is also an attraction between them, a deeper promise to be together.

Withdrawn, guilt-prone, motherless, Jim is like Stephen Dedalus with a heart. Even MacMurrough, an older man with designs on both boys, who gives Jim swimming lessons, is Blazes Boylan with a brain. And certainly Jim’s father Mr Mack, shopkeeper, good neighbour, interested indefatigable outsider, is Leopold Bloom redrawn. Mr Mack is an outsider by virtue of his loyalism, more a matter of emotions than politics since he was more or less brought up by the Army. Being made a sergeant cost him his dearest friendship – with Doyler’s father – and even now he harbours a futile desire to rise socially.

Bloomish in particular is his habit of thinking up slogans and wanting to see them in print: ‘Shocks and stares – should send that in the paper. Pay for items catchy like that. Or did I hear it before?’

Over the course of Ulysses, James Joyce made incomparable advances in realism, and then left realism behind. O’Neill doesn’t follow him so far, though he rivals some of his thrilling arias of notation: ‘A milk van round a corner came clopping, colloping, collapaling to a stop clop.’

Dublin speech is present in strength and depth, from a saucy servant girl’s ‘giving such a slice of the ignore’ and the newsboy without even the words for his wares (‘the even papers’) to the grandiloquence fed by the ritual of worship in Latin. Mr Mack himself picks up some classical scraps, though he doesn’t quite get the hang (‘Deo volenting’, ‘cosmos mentis’). Salting the latinate vocabulary – ‘the viraginous mob’, ‘cows munched their post-emulgial cud’ – is another more local and urgent: ‘fust’, ‘scringe’, ‘stookawn’, ‘claub’, ‘kerf’, ‘sulter’.

By limiting the action of Ulysses to a single day, Joyce foreshortened the growth-curves of his creatures. Jamie O’Neill grants himself more leisure but still sometimes seems to force the deepening of his characters. The boys’ growing confidence in themselves and each other is well managed – their sexual idealism chimes with the political climate, its romance with ideas of freedom and belonging. MacMurrough’s redemption, though, by the love he sees between them comes across as sentimental.

Historical personages are deftly mixed in with fictional ones. Sexual oppression shadows the purely political: Roger Casement haunts the book as an offstage presence, though there is no speculation about his private life. The two strands coincide in the figure of Sir Edward Carson, a staunch Unionist in the present tense of the book but also the man who took pleasure, as a barrister in court, in bringing Oscar Wilde down.

It’s only in the last 50 pages of the book that the magnificence of Jamie O’Neill’s rhetoric seems forced. There may be correspondences between throwing off the yoke of Empire and claiming the right to love your pal in pride and dignity, but no amount of lyrical prose can make them the same thing. It’s a shame that this remarkable writer, having poured so much eloquence into his book, couldn’t resist throwing in also his thumb on the scales.

THE OBSERVER Paperback Review
Sunday July 21, 2002. London, UK.
In Bloom’s shadow, by Jane Perry
Paperback of the Week

Jamie O’Neill and his extraordinary novel were making headlines even before first publication; there was the £250,000 advance, the job as a hospital night porter for the 10 years it took to write, and the added spice of him having been Russell Harty’s boyfriend. But this rich, complex and beautifully written book towers above all the hype and publicity, marking out its author as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Irish fiction.

O’Neill is a modernist and his novel is an obvious homage to Joyce’s Ulysses, from the Dublin setting to the colloquial, stream-of-consciousness narratives of the protagonists. But his Dublin is a city brewing with unrest in the year leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916; with Irish soldiers fighting a thankless war abroad on behalf of their British occupiers, a new nationalist cause is taking hold of the city’s young men.

At Swim, Two Boys is at its heart about identity, both national and sexual. Against the backdrop of the war and the nascent rebellion at home, two young men discover a relationship that threatens the status quo of their own lives.

Jim Mack is a shy scholarship boy whose older brother is away fighting with the Dublin Royal Fusiliers, and whose father is a Leopold Bloom-like shopkeeper with aspirations to ‘the quality’. Doyler Doyle is the boy who takes away the slops from the city’s middens, a charismatic rough diamond with Fenian sympathies, and in 1915 they pledge to meet the following Easter to swim out across Dublin Bay and claim the Muglins rocks for Ireland as their friendship deepens into attraction in spite of the obstacles in its way.

O’Neill’s prose is infused with the music of Dublin dialect and with its own poetry; his vast and lively cast of characters are drawn with tenderness and humour. At times the influence of Ulysses is a little too prominent, but overall the novel is a remarkable depiction of our deepest longing for love and freedom.

INDEPENDENT on SUNDAY
September 2, 2001. London, UK.
Where Noman is an island: Cal McCrystal is swept away by a saga about the Easter rising

This heartachingly beautiful novel is reminiscent of James Joyce’s work. That doesn’t mean that Joyce is O’Neill’s model (though for all I know he might well be), or that there are imitative patterns here. No study of models or attention to an admired style could give the easy turn, the graceful phrase, the fervid movement, the tiny gem-specks, or the large clearness which delight the reader of this book. For one cannot be eloquent by borrowing from the opulence of another, or witty by mimicking the whims of another.

And yet, here again are Joyce’s Martello Tower and Forty Foot bathing place on the shore of Dublin Bay. Here too are Latinisms skittering among colloquialisms like unexpected sun-jabs on rain-soaked bogs (“I was only aetatis a nipper”, recalls one character conversationally), and arresting, adventurous, perfect words: “innominate”, “latration”, “leucomelanous”, “sclanderous”, “scamandering”, “mussitation”, “axiology”. The reader is re-exposed to the Irish Catholic narrow-mindedness and clerical arrogance that made Joyce an exile a few years before O’Neill’s chosen time-frame, 1915–16.

Having said that, there is no doubt that O’Neill is his own man. No one, whatever his felicity and facility of expression, ever produces good literature unless he sees for himself, and sees clearly. Since the author was brought up and educated in or around the novel’s main location, and is minutely acquainted with the issues his book explores, he very definitely proves to us that he has a visionary eye, the faculty to see “The thing that hath been as the thing that is”. This is a work of great originality, strength and sensitivity in which single words are often concentrated poems.

The story concerns the developing relationship between two boys, “Doyler” Doyle from a slum, and Jim Mack whose majestically affected father runs a corner grocery. Each to the other is “pal of my heart”. Their intimacy intensifies during their naked swims at the Forty Foot, and is soon infused with an ambition to be school teachers in love abiding. They agree to curtail their sexual feelings for each other until the day they might swim to the Muglins, an uninhabited rock with a lighthouse beacon, a hazardous distance offshore; they would plant a green flag there, claiming it for Ireland, and indulge their mutual passion under seagull eyes only.

Meanwhile James Connolly’s Citizen Army and Padraic Pearse’s Irish Volunteers are preparing for the Easter rising against British occupation of the greater Irish island. But ordinary citizens and non-volunteers jib at switching from “God Save the King” to “A Nation Once Again”. Even before the uprising is downfalling, Dubliners are jeering the rebels and looting on a massive scale, while Jim’s confused Da attempts to flee the ructions. “Every shawlie and shabaroon, every larrikin and scut, every slut, daggle-tail, trollop and streel, frowsy old bowsies and loitering corner-boy sprawlers in caps, every farthing-face and ha’penny-boy, every gutty, gouger, louser, glugger, nudger, sharper, shloother, head, every whore’s melt of them, mister-me-friend and go-by-the-wall, the dogs in the street themself – all rascaldom was making for Mr Mack’s tram-stop ...”

Without giving away the traumatic progression of the plot, it is enough to say that Doyler and Jim find themselves between a rock and the hard place that is an embattled and frequently absurd Ireland. But some marvellously memorable good things emerge: the selfless friendship of the two boys, and the redemption of MacMurrough, the cynical upper-class homosexual rapist, who becomes their protector; the recovery of Jim’s father from a pretentious, directionless existence; the wonderfully evocative smells, sounds and palaver of working-class Dublin; and, perhaps most of all, the instructive island-metaphor for those who are gay in a cruel sea of intolerance. When Jim yearns for an island where he and Doyler might be happy, MacMurrough suggests Noman. “Noman is an island”, though two men might be different.

O’Neill took 10 years to write this long (643 pages) and excellent novel. Although I think the title somewhat infelicitous (a play on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a fair comment would be At Sink One Title), it has justified every gestational moment, and is bound, I believe, to be the subject of much literary and historiographic discussion for some time to come. A famous Dublin Protestant Archbishop, Richard Chenevix Trench, once described language as “the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.” Whatever else O’Neill may or may not write in future, this book will be forever amber.

INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Paperback Review

You know when the neighbours downstairs start playing music late at night and you think, “Satanists! Imperialists! Traffic wardens! I won’t crack – d’you hear?” But they have simply forgotten you at the close of a fun night on the tiles. An experience recorded by many on the first outing into Joyce’s Ulysses was the feeling that the author was not merely going to make life hard for you, but was actually out to get you... So, what do you do? You can complain, throw a fit, or you can listen. And this music must be listened to. Few will find the opening pages of At Swim, Two Boys an easy start. Joyce is a heavy presence here. The language has an intensity which is somehow unhygienic: you are left feverish, simultaneously horrified and faintly irritated by that green goblin which appears to be swinging its legs from the mantelpiece. The trick is to surrender: after that the prose sweeps you up into its blowzy embrace and you are left free to follow a story of such tenderness, wit and metaphysical conviction that you might well be tempted to have it placed on your breast when the earth takes you.

It is 1915, the year before the Easter Rising in Ireland. Dublin is not yet ready for revolution but the signs are there. Mr Mack, a perfect grocer for the Grocer’s republic, has two sons: one, Gordie, has enlisted, the other, Jim, is in his mid-teens. The benevolent but tortured Brother Polycarp has set his sights on Jim entering the monastic life, but Jim is increasingly drawn to Doyler, the son of his father’s army pal, now fallen on hard times. The boys’ patriotic fervour initially shows itself in a plan to swim out to a beacon on a rock there to plant the flag; later, of course, more savage tasks will be found for them.

In the posh part of town, Eveline MacMurrough, scion of a noble but troublesome dynasty, is plotting revolution as she opens fetes. Her nephew, a suave pederast, is in hiding from society and struggling with the ghost of a friend who died in prison, and who has returned from the grave as the keeper of his conscience. O’Neill is masterly in his portrayal of the fall of aspiration, first into farce, next into bloodshed. MacMurrough is given one of the novel’s most telling lines when, with Dublin exploding about him, he muses, “Typical to find oneself in the unfashionable end of a rising,” a line which embellishes the horror rather than diminishing it.

It’s true to say that love between adolescent boys has become something of a cliche in contemporary Irish fiction; it must also be admitted that the characters are a touch too familiar. But a stereotype is fixed and a cliche is dead; and this book, by its wit and astonishing subversion of cliche, vivifies whatever it touches. The depraved find that they are capable of nobility; there are sparks of deep tenderness in the meanest, most compromised souls. “They’re just kids,” we hear, but in this book everyone is. O’Neill never judges, the mark of a master.

THE SCOTSMAN
Saturday, 8th September, 2001. Edinburgh, Scotland.
“Rebels’ song” – reviewed by Tom Adair

Given its title, you might surmise that this book is a homage to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Had O’Brien’s great novel not been published in the teeth of Hitler’s war, it would have been lauded from the outset as one of the great books of the 20th century.

No such distraction dogs this much-trumpeted, far less inventive debut novel by Jamie O’Neill, which we are told took him ten years to write. No, it isn’t O’Brien (it lacks the daring), it isn’t Tolstoy (ditto the scope of its ambitions), it isn’t Joyce, whose language could scintillate, when, at best, O’Brien’s sings. But to accord it these denials is indicative of the stature of those authors who flit to mind while perusing its pages: including Synge, O’Casey, McGahern. Its language is rich without being dense. Sometimes it clogs, but never cloys. What seems archaic in its diction stems from the syntax of Irish-Gaelic, which flows like an undertow through the prose, often shaping its cadence.

At Swim, Two Boys is most of all a moving tale, written with diligence and heart. The author’s compassion is etched on his cuff as he sketches each clear, delightful, lucid, rhythmic sentence. He has a great ear and a sense of shapeliness and proportion that make this book a source of enormous satisfaction when the final page is reached and a sense of history duly achieved. This being the history, the formative, seminal period in the shaping of modern Ireland: the Easter Rising of 1916. It is the novel’s culmination, climactic, dramatic, an equivalent of the surge of turbulent yearnings, hopes and hurts in the lives of its beautifully realised trinity of male characters.

Jim is the innocent, a boy with much to learn, the college scholar. Doyler is smarter, the pal of Jim’s heart, a cocksure, politically wakened rebel, Irish-speaking with roots in Clare but, like Jim, bred in Dublin, the cockpit of war when the moment arises, the stage for their acts of love and fabulous vainglory. Meanwhile, Britain is preoccupied with its war against the Kaiser, a war in which Gordie, Jim’s older brother, fights for the crown. When Gordie goes missing, Jim’s father pines and clings to the comfort of Jim’s vital presence, scared the younger son will drown himself on his sorties off the Forty Foot, the headland at Sandycove where gentlemen swim in their pelts.

Step forward MacMurrough, a gentleman-swell from a much revered family of republicans. MacMurrough has done a stretch in Wandsworth prison for gross indecency. In the language of the time, he is a sodomite. His partner, Scrotes, is dead, yet somehow remains a swirling, disturbing, babbling presence. When MacMurrough offers Jim lessons, Jim’s father, innocently grateful, breathes relief. But the reader knows that a double adventure is in the wings for the novice swimmer.

The nascent homoerotic element, strongly present from the outset, is like a caress. It rustles stealthily in the background of the fruity, gauche, exuberant exchanges between the boys as they make their pledge to swim to the distant Muglins light, there to plant a flag of fealty to Ireland. There too Jim will yield to Doyler’s advances, but Doyler we know is already seasoned by sexual congress with MacMurrough, whose eye delights in every silky sea-borne curve of young Jim’s body.

Much is suggested, both on the larger political canvas depicting the rumbling, brooding forces of social unrest and on the tightened, detailed sketch-pad of the carefully shaded, delineated lives of Doyler, Jim and the troubled MacMurrough. Jamie O’Neill possesses the seemingly effortless gift of bringing these worlds alive simultaneously and convincingly.

The essential historical context emerges succinctly, and with the pungent force of prejudice, through the reflections of the older generation – Jim’s father, MacMurrough’s stick of an aunt, Father O’Toiler, a spoofish, embittered hard-line anti-British priest. There is much rum comedy, spats of ridicule, character walk-ons worthy of Sean O’Casey’s best plays.

Often in homoerotic fiction the sexual element undermines and overtopples every other salient feature of the characters’ development. Here the moral compass unwaveringly centres on traits of loyalty, friendship, duty. No whiff of prurience – that giveaway sign of a panting authorial presence – is discerned. One disappointment is the absence of women characters of great substance. The aunt is largely an ersatz male, the other women possess the potential to burgeon greatly, but live in the shadows. Yet this novel is not merely long (at over 640 pages), it is also large, as large as the talent of its author, a coming writer, with gifts to burn.

Jamie O’Neill’s story of gay love set in Ireland in 1916 confirms the arrival of a major new talent.

THE TIMES
Saturday, September 15, 2001. London, UK.
by Christina Koning.

A million-pound book deal for an unknown author, heralded by hyperbolic comparisons between the said author and various august literary predecessors, often means the work in question is not as good as the great claims made for it.

Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys, with its punning allusion to Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds in the title, has already been compared with works by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Set in Dublin in the months leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916, it chronicles the relationship between two 16-year-old boys caught up in the political turmoil. For shy, bookish Jim Mack, his involvement with the dashing, free-thinking Doyler offers an escape from the rigid conformity of his home life, presided over by his social-climbing father.

The latter is a wonderful comic creation. A former sergeant with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he is a passionate supporter of the British war effort – a set of beliefs that leaves him isolated as those around him are drawn to republicanism.

Also caught up in the “Cause” are the flamboyant, patrician Eveline MacMurrough and her nephew, Anthony, a Wildean figure, recently released from prison after serving two years’ hard labour for homosexual offences. O’Neill brings these and the numerous other characters that populate his lengthy work vividly to life.

Apart from the political and religious arguments that run through the book, there is also an underlying debate on sexual tolerance. At the beginning of the story, Jim and Doyler’s attraction to each other is unexpressed; later, following Doyler’s affair with the worldly-wise Anthony, the boys become lovers. Their affair is sensitively handled, with a humour that saves the account from becoming mawkish.

There are also funny set-pieces, such as the republican fund-raising fête organised by Eveline as part of her nephew’s social rehabilitation, and some lovely descriptions of Dublin.

By setting his novel in the city at this particular moment in Irish history, O’Neill shows himself worthy of his literary precursors in ambition, if not always in execution. But at its best, his writing has a freshness and charm that makes it very enjoyable.

THE TIMES Paperback Review
Saturday 28 July, 2002. London, UK.
by Brian Ellis

Ten years in its crafting, O’Neill’s tour de force is an intelligent and informative work that will join the greats of the Irish literary canon. His story follows two boys in the year to Easter 1916 and observes the ache of Irish nationality as it pulls away from fealty to the Crown, all within the wider context of the Great War. O’Neill’s characters are magnets: the innocent Jim Mack and the brooding Doyler, who traverses the story lightly but with complete control. As the struggle for independence comes to a head, Mack and Doyler lose their innocence. At Swim is a love story, of one poorly educated socialist boy for another who is caught in the aspirations of his father. Indeed the whole story is suffused with love – that of the protagonists and of the country. It “would brighten the sorrow of a saint”.

DAILY EXPRESS
Saturday, 15 September, 2001. London, UK.
The Trouble with Two Boys: The First World War is the backdrop of this beautiful, historical and lyrical Irish tale. By Graham Caveney.

THE IRISH imagination has long been haunted by the ghosts of its past. So prevalent is its impact on the present that even the most contemporary of Irish writers must engage with their fractured and bloody history. From the Famine through to the Troubles, memory becomes a touchstone for the culture’s sense of its own contours. The past is not a foreign country: it remains Ireland’s present-day reality.

This stunning debut treads gracefully in the footsteps of the Republic’s heritage. It is an ambitious doorstop of a novel, and is executed with a confidence and urgency worthy of its subject.

We begin in Dublin during the First World War. A man’s elder son is away fighting in the trenches, whilst his youngest remains at home pursuing a scholarly career. Amongst the libraries and pubs of his education, he strikes up a friendship with a nationalist rebel. Their relationship is one that dare not speak its name, and their love blossoms during clandestine meetings at the Forty Foot. It is a courtship of tender uncertainty, one that is forced to reconcile all the contradictory impulses of war-time virility, Catholic guilt, revolutionary fervour and blind hypocrisy.

The prose breathes the very air of the times, bringing to life both the grand panorama of history and the minutia of its detail. This is no picture-postcard idyll, but a raw and twitching account of lives wrestling with poverty, passion and the long dark shadow of the front line.

As the bodies mount up in Europe, the two boys prepare for a different kind of battle – one to be fought on their home soil. The story sows the seeds of the Easter Rebellion early on, without us hardly noticing, and then has them grow with a palpable intensity. Fact rubs shoulders with fiction until the narrative erupts with all the gore and the glory of the 1916 uprising. The politics of the rebellion are dramatised in such a way that they are self-explanatory, with all the pacts, bravery and treachery providing their own momentum. Forget the Hollywood Heroism of “Michael Collins”; here is Irish history in all its murderous complexity and stoic resilience.

Perhaps the novel’s other leading character is language itself. O’Neill has a musician’s ear for the melodies of the Celtic brogue – its lyrical ingenuity and poetic precision. He is not simply writing about his culture, but deeply from within it. He reccgnises not only the importance of the story, but also the centrality of its telling. In this sense he stands in the tradition of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien: prestigious company for any writer, let alone an unknown first-timer who banged this out whilst working as a hospital night porter. Indeed, the title is a reference to O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds”, and O’Neill certainly shares the lilting warmth of his maverick countryman.

As much British writing retreats into deflated irony or grim parochiality, it is left to Irishmen such as O’Neill to remind us of the dexterity, scope and imaginative energy of which the novel is still capable. He proves to us that history is not only alive, but is kicking harder than ever.

SUNDAY TIMES
October 7, 2001. London, UK.
Sons and eventual lovers, by Tom Deveson

Its title may recall Flann O’Brien, but the pervasive influence on this highly accomplished and memorable novel is that of James Joyce. From the opening pages, in which the middle-aged shopkeeper Mr Mack walks the streets of Dublin, with his eye on the newsstands and his half-formed thoughts spilling onto the page, we are not far from the place and manner of Bloom’s pilgrimage in Ulysses. Yet it is no longer 1904 but 1915, and the papers are full of death. It is not, Mack thinks, the time for a boy to be a man.

The sound of Joyce echoes again and again. There are the reversals of expected word order and the appositional adjectives isolated at the ends of sentences. Two pages suddenly replay the catechistic questioning of the Ithaca section of Ulysses. Blasphemous puns such as “Male hairy ... the lard is with thee” make abrupt appearances. Classical references stud the text. This is a very learned book. But the erudition is not redundant and generously repays the attentive reader.

O’Neill calibrates the varying degrees of class and religion and of devotional, nationalistic or military zeal. This accompanies a deeply realised sense of a moment in history. Parnell’s fall still reverberates, Pearse, Connolly and Carson make appearances, Casement’s presence and promise loom off-stage. O’Neill’s range extends from the Big House of the gentry to the fetid slums. When the Easter Rising arrives in the book’s exciting second half, we see it from the point of view of participants and of corner boys; we hear rumours, nearby gunfire, breaking glass, the scandalised mutter of dismay.

The two boys of the title are Mack’s adolescent son, Jim, and his pal and eventual lover, Doyler. Jim goes to school with snobs and is taught by troublesome priests. Doyler works on a dung cart. Jim (like his creator) is fascinated by words; he uses them to monitor the strange and frightening sensations of his own body. Doyler is cocky, protective, physically confident although lame, and a socialist. Their tentative courtship is beautifully described. As Doyler teaches Jim the art of swimming, as they play their flutes together, they gradually approach an unabashed sexual union that is described both lyrically and pungently, with neither prurience nor mawkishness. “Rising” develops both an erotic and a political meaning.

Their fathers form a contrasting pair, old soldiers surviving from a barrack-room ballad. Mack is full of family aspirations and gruff, circumspect clichés. Old Doyle, once the smartest of squaddies, is now a dying drunk. Their spiky friendship is portrayed with occasional sentimentality but, like Mack’s tenderness towards his older son’s unsanctioned baby daughter, it makes a striking counterpoint to the gay motif that runs throughout the story. That in its turn is maintained by MacMurrough, a Wildean figure fresh from an English prison, who buys the services of rent boys and affirms a sometimes hallucinatory theory of male comradeship taken from his study of Sparta. Both selfish and patrician in his sexual ascendancy, he yet promotes the boys’ brief, doomed happiness at the expense of his own.

The novel’s rich texture is enhanced by its imagery. Beautifully vigilant writing evokes the sea’s constant shifting presence: its “dull imperative waves”, its “beckoning, sparkling, reckless” nature, its look of “a cat-creature somnolent after recent repast”. This, too, is language imbued by the example of Joyce. O’Neill pays homage to him by creating a vivid picture of human freedom; of moving from fear of the world to acceptance of its fluid variety, while illuminating the nature of the imagination that makes it possible to do so.

SUNDAY TIMES Paperback Review
August 18, 2002. London, UK.
by Trevor Lewis

Dublin, 1915. Two teenage friends, scholastic Jim and dung-shovelling Doyler, make a pact: in a year’s time they will swim out to a set of rocks off the coast and raise the Irish flag, an act that is to be a gesture both of nationhood and the consummation of a mutual love. The date of their tryst is pregnant with significance, of course, as the 1916 Easter Rising changes their country forever. The shade of James Joyce flits across O’Neill’s luminous epic, which reimagines a city and maps the heart in silver-tongued prose.

THE TELEGRAPH
Saturday, 10 September 2001. London, UK.
Liberation on the Liffey, by Francis King.

THIS powerful novel, set in Dublin and the area around it in a period culminating in the Easter Rising of 1916, is concerned with parallel battles for freedom, one political and the other sexual. Involved in both battles are the boys, each in his late teens, of the title.

Jim and Doyler are the sons of ex-soldiers who, during the Boer War, were inseparable comrades. Now the fathers are hardly on speaking terms. Jim’s father, having come to be regarded as a “quakebuttock” (coward) for fleeing South Africa before the war had ended, has become a pusillanimous small-time shopkeeper. Doyler’s father has degenerated into a consumptive drunk, living off what he can cadge and the earnings of his washerwoman drudge of a wife.

At the age of 12, Jim and Doyler fall in love with each other, without being aware of what is happening. Through the years that follow, despite the differences in their circumstances and their personalities – Jim is a scholarly introvert with thoughts of joining the priesthood, Doyler a rough, socialist extrovert, who works as hauler of the local midden cart – they remain staunchly attached.

Infatuated with both the youths is MacMurrough, the etiolated sprig of a famous Irish family. He obsessively watches them swim in the nude, buys Doyler’s casual favours and attempts to buy Jim’s. Though rejected by Jim, he manages to win his lifelong friendship. Like another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, MacMurrough has suffered the scandal of imprisonment because of “unnatural acts”. But, recklessly, he still cannot keep to himself his once-delicate hands, now callused from picking oakum.

These characters and a host of others – among them, the real-life Pearse and Connolly, eventually to be executed for their part in the Easter Rising, MacMurrough’s aunt, a grande dame besotted with Roger Casement and engaged in gun-running for the Cause, and an odious Roman Catholic curate – are characterised with a dazzling combination of humour and gravity.

There are times when either too much purple has gone into the thick impasto of this extraordinary canvas, or a sticky film of sentimentality has been allowed to blur the focus of the author’s over-indulgent depiction of the boys’ relationship. There are also times when audacity of style leads – as with Sean O’Casey, whose authorial voice O’Neill’s uncannily resembles – to embarrassing excesses. Phrases like “tonant rumour”, “scabrid knees”, “polished suaviloquence” and “innubilious morning” keep appearing.

There are also passages that emerge as though they were extracts from the work of some minor Georgian poet. The weirdest of these runs: “Oh God above, of love and light, loan me the blanket of the night, till on the cold and grumpy ground, I’ll warmly wrap it round me” – surely a reworking, conscious or unconscious, of T E Hulme’s poem “The Embankment”.

But these are minor blemishes. Even though so much of it is concerned with faltering loyalties, forbidden passions and frustrated hopes, this is an exhilarating novel, because superabundant creative energy is always exhilarating.

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH Paperback Review
Sunday, 1 September 2002. London, UK.
Paperback review by Sally Cousins

The personal and the political are seamlessly interwoven in this impressive first novel. Jim and Doyler, the two boys of the title, are childhood friends in Dublin at the time of the Easter uprising of 1916. Jim is shy and bookish. Doyler is made of much coarser stuff. But as they go swimming off the rocks together, they forge a deepening commitment, both to each other and to their country in its struggle for independence. Jamie O’Neill has not been afraid to milk his story for emotion; he also shows himself a master of crisp colloquial dialogue.

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