US REVIEWS

“Jamie O’Neill has written a dangerous, glorious book: the kind that is likely to make absolutely anyone cry and laugh in public places.”  New York Times

“Possessing great humor and an elegiac quality that makes one mourn lost youth and poor Ireland alike, O’Neill’s saga achieves a kind of richness of scope and ambition that makes one reluctant to come to its tragic and inevitable close.”   Chicago Tribune

“An ambitious and absorbing novel. What elevates At Swim, Two Boys is the intensity of its central love story (an honest and moving one, whatever your orientation) and the vivid reality of the novel’s characters.”   Boston Globe

“A work of wild, vaulting ambition and achievement. In short: wow.”   Entertainment Weekly

“As a tender coming of age tale, vivid cultural portrait, and a story of courage in love and in war, this remarkable achievement lives up to its literary lineage and should establish Jamie O’Neill as a novelist of the first rank. By turns delightful and heartbreaking, At Swim, Two Boys is a breathtaking ride.”   Lambda Book Report

“A truly historic masterpiece ... a powerful Irish novel that uses a Joycean mastery of language, astounding historical detail and an engaging love story to raise questions about freedom, love, patriotism and desire.”   Irish Echo

“Intimate yet epic in scale ... as playful as it is powerful”   Seattle Times

“O’Neill’s novel is as extraordinary as it is risky ... it is the pleasure, heartbreak, and pure joy of the journey that make the book irresistible.”   Texas Observer

“The best literary news out of Ireland since the maturity of Roddy Doyle.”   Kirkus Reviews

“A funny, sad and stirring marvel.”   Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, March 17, 2002. New York, USA.
As it charts the lives of two gay youths and their mentor, Jamie O’Neill’s novel explores both personal and national identity – Michael Pye

Two boys swim out from the Forty Foot, a “gentlemen’s bathing-place” on the rocky Dublin shore, to plant the Irish flag on tiny islands where once either rebel patriots or doubtful pirates were abandoned, depending on whose legends you believe. This swim is what Jim Mack and his friend Doyler have promised each other, a deliberate risk in tricky seas, but that is the least of their promises: each is giving his whole self to the other. They have learned to be easy with the sea in order to swim this far; now they must learn to trust their bodies and their hearts as well. It is Easter Sunday, 1916, the year of the Easter Rising.

Jamie O’Neill’s wonderful novel “At Swim, Two Boys” is built on such risks – on the hazards of love, heroism, history and tenderness. We’re at the sunrise of a cause, a moment that can be made farcically human (Roddy Doyle did that recently in “A Star Called Henry”) or blown up in glorious Cinemascope and De Luxe color. But O’Neill writes of people living that moment, of exceedingly accidental heroes – like Jamie’s father, helpless Mr. Mack, a former member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, forever knitting for the British forces and yet finally being caught looking just like a nationalist hero – and of stalwart, ramshackle future soldiers like those two young lovers out swimming.

It isn’t simple to make us live the first love of boys around the age of 16, and to do it without prurience or sentimentality; you can get too close at times to the chat of bachelor classics masters, all about Spartan armies of lovers and suchlike. O’Neill has a device to help him, although it doesn’t seem like a device: he shows how the lovers’ closeness depends, in a dozen subtle ways, on the presence of a mentor.

MacMurrough is an older man (but not so much older), disgraced in England for his taste for “chauffeur-mechanics” and now living a corseted, dependent life on the estate of his splendidly, melodramatically political aunt. MacMurrough cherishes the boys, saves them, and he suffers from his own kindness, which is the most demanding of passions. This triangulation of love is exactly true to the making of gay families, to their heady muddle of protectiveness and lust, but it also gives us a close, adult view of what the boys are living.

O’Neill strikes a nice humane balance between what it means to “play the green card” (to pretend that MacMurrough’s jail time, imposed for a sexual offense, was simply an English slur on an Irish patriot) and the true vision of O’Neill’s characters, as when the kilt-clad boys in a local band metamorphose in MacMurrough’s eyes “till before him ranked the heroes of Erin’s past” – or when an altar boy is daringly transfigured before his aunt into Young Ireland, a shining sacrifice, “a chosen lad.”

The daring doesn’t stop there. This is a novel in which free Ireland rubs shoulders with the notion of a free gay nation; at times, they become one. The public talk of liberty is echoed, discreetly in the circumstances, by a dream that being a gay man could mean something more than a consistent pattern of sins, that community and identity could grow out of what others dismiss as a sexual foible. In O’Neill’s book, each cause humanizes the other and makes it live more vividly.

Our lovers are a dirt-poor night-soil carrier, dark and, of course, lame, and a scholarship boy whose shopkeeper father hopes for better and better things. This is something between cliche, literary reference and classical allusion when you put it so baldly, which O’Neill does not. Together, Jim and Doyler teach MacMurrough the possibility that the boys he desires might also desire him, that he is not alone. And the boys’ story is shadowed by the great youthful friendship of their fathers, now in abeyance.

Such elements could easily be drawn together into an excess of the worst sort of stage Irishness, not to mention a sexual politics that could seem anachronistic – and that’s before you begin to consider the ticklish business of celebrating under-age lovers and a grown man’s entanglement with them both. But O’Neill’s writing has such authority and life that you consider these questions only afterward; none of it matters as you’re tugged along on the tides of the book. It seems not only right but exhilarating when Jim Mack tells MacMurrough: “We’re extraordinary people. We must do extraordinary things.”

The book’s virtues depend on enormous and unflagging energy, but also on prose that was polished, it is said, for a whole decade. There is fine phrasemaking (as, say, Mr. Mack walks along a “tended imperturbable terraced street”), but you don’t trip over it. The obligatory mentions – of the gay writer Edward Carpenter, for instance – are for once properly integrated. And I don’t know a better, or briefer, declaration of love than Doyler’s: “I doubt I’m a man except he’s by me.”

O’Neill’s novel is also a splendid piece of troublemaking. Anyone who entitles his book “At Swim, Two Boys” is calling down the memory of Flann O’Brien’s masterpiece “At Swim-Two-Birds,” and never mind the issue of punctuation – Swim-Two-Birds is a place name, while O’Neill is describing two boys, out swimming. The echoes are thunderous. You might almost imagine that O’Neill is proposing an alternative to the great Irish writing of the 1920’s and 30’s: not just a gay variation but also a restoration of the energy and exactness and jokes, without the fine grinding of modernist tricks.

There are, it is true, some occasional echoes of style. Both books have multiple beginnings that are not false starts, but for rather different reasons. O’Neill is simply shifting points of view, while O’Brien is playing with a mythical hero, a devil and also a character who has just been born at the age of 25. O’Neill is, noticeably, not whimsical. Like O’Brien, but not always for the same comic effect, he sometimes likes to proceed by interrogation. “How did it affect him?” he writes. “Coldly, literally. Name three emotions of similar character that MacMurrough felt. Grief, loss, regret. Of which the greatest was? Loss.”

Then there are the circumstances. There happens to be a pregnant servant girl in both books. There are the slightly grimed outskirts of Dublin, a world of crammed small shops, upward aspirations, drink and poverty and service and pride. The Gaelic League is the unloved arbiter of social life. The key issue in a young man’s life is how to slip away from the family on which he depends, which keeps him in short trousers (O’Neill) or in college (O’Brien).

Both books care deeply about working out moral questions, although O’Brien’s version sets a devil and a fairy to debating, while O’Neill has young people thinking for their lives in the shadow of a whole looming priesthood and allows MacMurrough only his ghosts. The heroes of both books think of joining the Christian Brothers, and around the same point in their stories, but times have changed: the call is a matter of mild ambition for O’Brien, but in O’Neill it’s a response to the emotional pressure of a sad, drunken groper.

Still, the title does matter. It suggests an elaborate, loving game with Irish myths and heroes – the Easter Rising, the hero De Valera and even the shadow of Oscar Wilde – as O’Brien tweaked Finn MacCool and his legendary brethren. There’s a good joke on the way E. M. Forster’s Maurice described himself: when someone inquires whether he’s “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort,” MacMurrough replies, “If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.”

For in this novel the cause of Ireland and the cause of gay people fuse with a complete lack of apology or embarrassment, which is remarkable given the attitudes you can disinter with a simple opinion poll around contemporary Dublin. O’Neill is not, however, being patly outrageous; the closeness and exactness of his vision prove that.

It’s not surprising that Sir Roger Casement’s name comes back again and again. He is the object of the hopeless passion of MacMurrough’s aunt. He is the gunrunner slipping into Ireland whose capture spoils the plans for the Rising. He is also a man whose great humanity cannot be separated from his sexual closeness to other men, to men of different colors and places – at least if you listen to Colm Toibin’s arguments elsewhere.

In “At Swim, Two Boys,” love between men is for once not a limit but a starting point. It does not require excuses or boasts or provocation. It can be tragic and comic, but all in the context of the wider world of rebellion, courage, idiocy and history. This is a gay man’s writing, but it has broken out of all the usual confines while keeping all its emotional particularity. Jamie O’Neill has written a dangerous, glorious book: the kind that is likely to make absolutely anyone cry and laugh in public places.

Michael Pye’s latest novel, “The Pieces From Berlin,” will be published next year.

Selected for Notable Books, 2002. “Two great causes – free Ireland and a free gay nation – coincide in this polished but energetic novel built on the hazards of love, heroism, history and tenderness, and placed in political and moral history by the Easter Rising of 1916.” NY, 8.12.02. Also selected for Books for Summer Reading, 2002.

Selected for New and Notable Paperbacks. “Accidental heroes and ramshackle future soldiers (including two boys who discover their love for each other) fill this novel about the hazards of romantic desire, heroism and tenderness in Dublin during the time of the Easter Rising in 1916. The result is a tale ‘in which free Ireland rubs shoulders with the notion of a free gay nation,’ Michael Pye said here last year. ‘O’Neill has written a dangerous, glorious book: the kind that is likely to make absolutely anyone cry and laugh in public places.’ ” February 23, 2003.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Sunday, April 21, 2002. Chicago, USA.
A debut novel of love set at a turning point in Irish history. By Robin Hemley.

In exquisitely sculpted prose, debut novelist Jamie O’Neill takes the defining moment of modern Irish history, the Easter Rising against the British, and makes it seem as though it had never been written about before.

Set in 1915 and 1916, O’Neill’s tale chronicles the love between two 16-year-old boys, Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle, the former the son of a parsimonious and buffoonish shopkeeper, the latter a dung-shoveler and son of a drunkard. The boys have known each other since age 12 but have lost touch for several years; they now make their reacquaintance at the local college, both on scholarship, both taunted by their well-heeled classmates. The boys quickly re-form their bond, though events and people wish to keep them apart, chief among them their teacher, Brother Polycarp, who’s ready to pack Jim off to a monastery and would like to send Doyler packing.

Of the two, Doyler is by far the more worldly; while Jim, under Polycarp’s somewhat prurient tutelage, contemplates the monastery, Doyler has committed himself to socialism. Jim, who has no idea what socialism is, asks his father, a staunch royalist and veteran of military campaigns in India and South Africa, for a definition:

“‘Well it’s, basically it’s, what it is is greed. Oh yes, there’s greed there. Greed and envy. A heap of envy involved. Then there’s pride. Greed, envy, pride – sloth. Sloth there, too. Oh, all the sins. Every man-jack of them. The entire boiling, the hopping-pot, the whole kit and caboodle.’”

Mr. Mack, as he’s known (or “General,” not for his distinguished service, as he believes, but because he owns a general store), is perhaps the novel’s chief comic character, trying his best to be a loyal British subject but always coming up short. His elder son, Gordie, is off fighting the Germans for the Brits, and Mr. Mack yearns to play the role of war hero himself, despite the fact that he actually deserted the army at the first engagement against the Boers in South Africa. When he spots a torn British recruiting poster on a pole, he tries to make repairs but instead ends up with more of the poster in his hands – just in time for a police officer to arrest him and bring him before a magistrate as a separatist hooligan.

Unwittingly, the authorities have collared one of the few loyalists among the characters in the book; virtually everyone else – from commoner, to noble, to parish priest – hates the English and yearns for independence. Yet the Irish have become so Anglicized that they scarcely recognize Gaelic and can’t pronounce a Gaelic name when presented with one. When a fervently nationalistic priest, Eamonn O’Taighleir, shows up at the college, he asks Polycarp to lead the band in an Irish tune. Polycarp responds by leading the boys in “God Save the King.” Polycarp calls the priest “Taylor,” and even the patriotic gentrywoman Eveline MacMurrough can’t pronounce the good father’s name. She calls him “Amen O’Toiler,” which, she notes, “sounded a sermon in itself.” The fierce O’Taighleir himself seems limited to the words “Thank you” in Gaelic, which he thrusts like a saber at his listeners at every opportunity.

Against the backdrop of World War I, and with the clock ticking ever closer to the Easter rebellion, Doyler starts to teach Jim to swim, and with practice the two of them plan to make an epic swim together during the Easter holiday. But O’Neill’s aim is not simply to tell a sweet coming-of-age story within the larger context of Irish politics, like some ship in a bottle. His ambition is greater, more like Chinese boxes within boxes.

O’Neill also takes on sexual politics, specifically the closeted lives of homosexuals of the time. Polycarp, it appears, joined his order to escape his homosexual feelings, which he buries further in drink and the furtive closeness of his body to Jim’s as the two pray together in the chapel. More central to the story is Anthony MacMurrough, nephew of Madame MacMurrough, who has come to Dublin in disgrace after serving 2 years at hard labor in an English prison for his sexual preference having been found out. One of the most complex and intriguing characters in the book, Anthony starts off the book so unable to cope with everyday life that he has constructed a series of imaginary personalities who argue, advise and browbeat him. He becomes sexually involved with Doyler, but it is Jim and Doyler’s love for each other that drives the book, and it is Jim who leads Doyler and Anthony into the heat of battle against the British.

The imaginative intertwining of sexual politics and colonialism makes this a wholly original book, and it’s no wonder it took nearly 10 years to complete. At nearly 600 pages, and written in a prose that is sometimes dense in its Irish euphemisms and virtuoso turns of phrase, the book requires some patience at the outset. The plot might sound melodramatic at turns, the intrigues between characters contrived, but the prose here is everything, and O’Neill makes every plot twist seem earned and believable. The characters, Anthony MacMurrough in particular, understand Ireland’s suffering through the lens of their own suffering, and O’Neill cradles them all in a compassionate and sorrowful embrace.

Possessing great humor and an elegiac quality that makes one mourn lost youth and poor Ireland alike, O’Neill’s saga achieves a kind of richness of scope and ambition that makes one reluctant to come to its tragic and inevitable close.

Robin Hemley teaches creative writing at the University of Utah at Salt Lake City.

BOSTON GLOBE
Sunday, June 30, 2002. Boston, MA.
Love amid an uprising, by Bruce Allen

The Ireland observed in Jamie O’Neill’s ambitious and absorbing novel (his third, and 10 years in the making) is – to twist Yeats’s famous line – no country for either ardent young men or their sorrowing elders.

It’s Ireland during the First World War years: specifically, the Dublin suburb of Glasthule, on the edge of Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea, where the novel’s major protagonists, 16-year-old Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle, become fast friends and train for a marathon swim to a nearby island with a (confusingly) storied past where they intend to plant a green flag symbolizing Ireland’s independence from England – and where they fall in love.

The time is 1915, a year before revolutionary passions will erupt in the carnage of the Easter Rebellion. But tensions have long since been simmering. “We live in a country where nothing is named but for an occupying power,” Doyler proclaims, as he drifts toward involvement in various anti-British factions.

O’Neill sets immediately about the business of introducing his characters and laying out their complex inter-relationships. The opening pages focus on a typical day experienced by Jim’s widowed father, Arthur Mack, a semi-prosperous shopkeeper, and a former officer [sergeant – JO’N] in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who had served with distinction during the Boer War. [Or, er, he hadn’t – JO’N.]

Mr. Mack wants a less dangerous life for his younger son (Jim’s elder brother, Gordie, is overseas with the British Army), and opinion both in the Mack household and around Glasthule is that the thoughtful boy will become either a priest or a schoolteacher. And O’Neill’s forays into Jim’s own consciousness indicate that the boy expects no less, and no more, of and for himself.

Enter the irrepressible Doyler, a cheeky “dungman’s lad” who plays flute alongside Jim in the local youth band. It’s Doyler who initiates and cultivates their friendship, urging the introverted Jim to further swimming exploits (“There’s a freedom I can’t explain”, Doyler says of their shared exercise), and toward the further physical intimacy Jim both longs for and fears.

As we grow better acquainted with the boys, O’Neill reveals the several relationships connecting their families and acquaintances. Anthony MacMurrough, a former British Army officer [er, not – JO’N] and the nephew of wealthy patrician (and patriot) Eveline MacMurrough – as well as a disgraced homosexual who has served a prison term for “indecency” – connects to the other major figures as the “gentleman” who pays for Doyler’s sexual services, then later as mentor (for he is himself a championship-caliber swimmer) to both boys.

Once these characters are all in place, they’re variously overtaken by events. Doyler’s inherent rebelliousness takes him to the eye of the burgeoning hurricane. In Doyler’s absence, the grieving Jim makes the commitment from which he had long withheld himself: “I love him. I’m sure of that now. And he’s my country.”

The boys are briefly, ecstatically reunited. But omens of disaster are omnipresent. Just as the prophetic soul of Jim’s aunt Sawney (who lives with the Macks) has foreseen, Gordie is reported missing in action, at Gallipoli. During a climactic swim, Doyler nearly drowns (and is rescued by Anthony). Then that fateful Easter Sunday arrives. To Arthur Mack’s dismay, Jim joins the Citizen Army [the Volunteers, actually – JO’N]. Doyler rushes to his friend’s side and all is torn asunder, as the bullets and bombs fly, and Jim Mack becomes a cool-eyed, ruthlessly efficient “patriot”. And long after the smoke of battle has (temporarily) cleared, an elegiac coda looks backward on “years that spilt with hurt and death and closed in bitter most bitter defeat.”

”At Swim, Two Boys” is a melodrama, susceptible to both hyperbole and romantic cliche. But it’s also a carefully layered novel that makes knowing use of two eminent literary models in its bold reimagining of classic Irish fiction as a paean to both national and gay liberation.

O’Neill’s title of course alludes to the pseudonymous Flann O’Brien’s 1939 comic masterpiece “At Swim-Two-Birds”. That impudent romp transmogrified Irish history and legend in a work of perverse, pun-filled linguistic prowess, whose specific influence on this novel is perhaps most visible in O’Neill’s frequent recourse to high-spirited wordplay (in such arresting phrases as the “leucomelanous complexion of Ireland” and the use of unfamiliar words like “amplush”, “obfusticated”, “rorty”, and “poweration”).

The other, inevitable influence is that of James Joyce. An early reference to “the Martello Tower” in Dublin’s Sandycove Bay evokes instant memories of the opening lines of Joyce’s “Ulysses”. The contrast between “scholarly” Jim and scapegrace Doyler recalls that between Joyce’s fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus and Stephen’s uncorseted fellow student Buck Mulligan – as do the “conversations” between Anthony MacMurrough and his deceased former cellmate Scrotes, an elderly scholar likewise imprisoned for homosexual behavior, whose “hauntings” of MacMurrough often assume the form of mock catechism.

What elevates “At Swim, Two Boys” well beyond labored mimicry is the intensity with which O’Neill presents its central love story (an honest and moving one, whatever your orientation) and the vivid reality of most of the novel’s characters, from minor figures like firebrand fanatic Father Taylor (who styles himself “O Taighleir”) to such fully developed persons as stern, vainglorious Eveline MacMurrough (whose love for her country will, ironically, exile her from it), naive yet stoical Jim, and the vibrant Doyler: equal parts compassionate son of Ireland, mischievous lord of misrule, and importunate, defiant lover.

This big book takes numerous risks, and many readers may find it overwrought, overly coincidental [you want to try living in a small country like Ireland – JO’N], and preachy. But there’s undeniable passion and eloquence in it, and a spiky revisionist spirit that would probably perturb the standoffish Joyce and amuse and entertain Flann O’Brien, and may have many of the custodians of the Irish literary tradition, be they alive or be they dead, spinning dizzily in their graves.

Bruce Allen is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and a freelance reviewer for several other magazines and newspapers.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
April 4, 2002. New York, USA.
Editor’s Choice

A gay novel, an Irish novel, and a landmark on both counts, Jamie O’Neill’s “At Swim, Two Boys” is a work of wild, vaulting ambition and achievement that transcends any genre label a critic might be foolish enough to impose on it.

The place is Dublin. The time is 1915–16, the eve of the bloody Easter Uprising. And our heroes are a pair of 16-year-olds: Jim, the studious, tentative son of a shopkeeper, and Doyler, a brash, impoverished laborer, each of whom, under the guidance of an older onlooker, falls in stunned but sure-hearted love with the other as the terrifying onrush of history moves to engulf them all.

If linking free sexuality with a free Ireland seems an act of novelistic hubris, O’Neill is astonishingly up to the task. His writing is rich and allusive (think Joyce, Wilde, Flann O’Brien), his language is blisteringly exuberant, and his vision is both generous enough to take in the sociological sweep of a nation and acute enough to create one of the most psychologically accurate and moving love stories in recent literature. In short: wow. A plus. – Mark Harris.

LAMBDA BOOK REPORT
May, 2002. Washington, DC.
A Date with History, by Elizabeth Flynn.

Jamie O’Neill has a great history to contend with. Setting his first novel on the banks of Dublin Bay, in the shadow of James Joyce’s Martello tower – site of the opening chapter of Ulysses – is a bold and unequivocal gesture, a challenge few writers would dare to attempt. Even the title is a reference to Flann O’Brien’s masterful and beloved (though little known out-side of Ireland) comic novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). Unlike his realist contemporaries (Colm Toibin, or John McGahern) O’Neill seems determined to follow the imaginative, postmodern tradition of Irish literature – a daunting prospect, when your measuring yardstick is Joyce.

O’Neill is clearly mindful of his literary predecessors, but seems joyfully unencumbered by them. From the novel’s breezy, conversational opening (“There goes Mr. Mack, cock of the town. One foot up, the other foot down. The hell of a gent. With a tip of his hat here and a top of the morn there, tip-top, everything’s dandy...”) his language is fresh, lively and loaded; you can practically feel his delight on the page. Like his protagonist – the sixteen-year-old James Mack – O’Neill’s narrative feels propelled by the abundant, explosive energy of adolescence.

O’Neill spent ten years at work on the novel, and the result is a dazzling and richly layered story: of Ireland and her early, ill-starred grasp at independence; of young men’s search for sexual and spiritual identity; of heroic friendship in a tumultuous time.

The setting is Dublin in 1915, the year before the Easter Rising. Young Jim Mack – fresh-faced, eminently likeable – has lost his mother to illness and his only brother to the British Army, and now lives with his father and an elderly aunt above their grocery shop (“a corner-huckster’s” as the wealthier boys at Jim’s college tease). The one bright spot in Jim’s lonely existence appears in his friendship with Doyler – a swaggering, working-class tough whose own father has drunk himself and his underfed family into the poorhouse. Jim aims to stay out of trouble, to please his fastidious father by keeping his nose in the books; while the defiant young Doyler looks to socialism – and an independent Ireland – as his only hope.

Both boys share a love for the ocean – though Jim has only dared watch from the shore – and when Doyler offers to give him swimming lessons, a powerful friendship is forged. Their plans to make an epic swim to an island off the coast become a test of courage and determination, the passage from adolescence to manhood – as all around them, the tide of history swells, and Ireland faces the ominous early stirrings of her own independence from Britain.

In O’Neill’s clever and capable hands, the swimming becomes a powerful metaphor for young men learning to inhabit their bodies, acquiring self-knowledge and physical grace (“that magical moment when the mind lets go and the body is released”). But with this knowledge comes an unexpected revelation. Catholic readers will recognize Jim’s near-delirious fever of self-reproach as – amid the baffling pangs of adolescence and the dire injunctions of the Church – he struggles with his growing attraction to Doyler:

A holy draught had come in then under the window to shake the holy Sacred Heart flame. And in that flicker he saw it, the fiend that was his soul. His monstrous heart, his vicious flesh, nothing escaped that searing flash. Flickered the flame like the kitchen walls had gaped and before him blazed the fires of hell, to which his bed was inching, dragging its length along, ever and downward, to tip him finally in the pit of damnation.

And there is much more at work in the novel, whose 500-plus pages are brimming with life. From Lady Eveline, a wealthy matriarch and freedom fighter, to her nephew MacMurrough, the family disgrace, to the ghost of an Oxford philosophy don, O’Neill creates a vibrant and colorful cast of characters, bound together by history, friendship or fate.

Anyone who has spent time in Ireland will appreciate O’Neill’s masterful grasp of the language and patterns of speech. He shares Joyce’s sense of the novel as an aural – almost musical – experience: the poetical stream of consciousness, the Irish brand of lyricism which brings it to life on the page. Even the seemingly stuffy Mr. Mack can be graced with a poetic moment:

Light green frilly leaves would put you in mind of, ahem, petticoats. A blackbird scuttled off the path like a schoolboy caught at a caper. Then he was out in the light, and the lawns of Ballygihen stretched leisurely to the sea. The sea oh the sea, long may it be.

At Swim, Two Boys reflects quite exquisitely the particularities of its time and place – and yet remains a universal and deeply moving story of friendship and love. O’Neill spares no side in his examination of the era – the hypocrisies of holy men, or the tragic, doomed ideals of patriots. (“Yes, this is poor old sold-out Ireland,” as Lady MacMurrough declares.) Still, from the same source of weakness and disillusion there emerges an undeniable strain of human courage that O’Neill and his characters struggle to name: “What is it that makes men go forward when every reason shrills their retreat? Not courage, but a kind of love, a bonding of disparate souls to the one company.”

In the midst of it all, young Jim Mack makes a compelling and very believable hero, struggling to develop his authentic self. As a tender coming of age tale, vivid cultural portrait, and a story of courage in love and in war, this remarkable achievement lives up to its literary lineage and should establish Jamie O’Neill as a novelist of the first rank. By turns delightful and heartbreaking, At Swim, Two Boys is a breathtaking ride.

Elisabeth Flynn is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer. She holds a masters degree in Irish literature from Trinity College Dublin.

IRISH ECHO
April 4, 2002. New York.
Swimming against the tide, by Stephen McKinley.

This novel’s title points to Flann O’Brien, but the pervasive influence is James Joyce. Ultimately, however, as it traces the growing love between two young Irishmen and the growth of their political and nationalist consciousness, it is clear that Jamie O’Neill has written something new and significant – the novel that might have happened, as one commentator put it, if Joyce and Oscar Wilde had had a son.

It is 1915, and whether Mr. Mack likes it or not, Ireland is about to change forever. The Great War rages in Europe and around the world. Meanwhile, the calm in Ireland belies a growing undercurrent of political ferment.

As he walks around “Glasthule, homy old parish, on the lip of Dublin Bay,” pondering the world around him in short, half-formed thoughts, Mack’s entrance reminds the reader of the start of Bloom’s wandering around Dublin in “Ulysses.” The moment passes, and the focus of the novel gradually sharpens into full narrative flow: it is as if O’Neill wishes to show that while he may swim in a Joycean stream, he has his own stroke.

Mack, a timid shopkeeper, proud of his lower-middle-class roots and service in the British Army, seeks only the respectability that evades him. Posters appear in his town, however, condemning British Army conscription and at his son’s school, a new priest has started to make the boys learn Irish. Something is up. Mack is swimming vainly against the growing tide of dissent, socialist ferment and rising Irish nationalism of the era.

Mack’s studious son Jim is swimming too, but in a wholly different direction. Initially timid like his father, Jim is befriended by Doyler, a boy of the same age who is an outspoken socialist. Having met while swimming in the Forty Foot pool by the sea, the pals make a pact to swim the following Easter to the distant rocky outcrop in Dublin Bay, the Muglins.

In 1916, they will reach the rocks in the bay, raise a green flag and claim them for Ireland. The symbolism of the venture is clear – but this is something more than mere boyhood adventure, a growing attraction between them, a deeper emotional and physical bond.

O’Neill takes a gay love story and makes it intertwine with the events leading to the Easter Rising. The pair’s love for country and love for each other are twin taboos: the growing Irish nationalism of the era is rendered as being everywhere but never directly before one’s eyes. For example, the unthinking loyalist Mr. Mack only peripherally notices the new, Irish-speaking priest. And, in a telling moment that blends the taboos, the aristocrat and nationalist MacMurrough, who becomes an older gay mentor to the two boys, comes out to an old army colleague, who demands, “Damn it all MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?”

MacMurrough’s response: “If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.”

Surrounding the two boys are a cast of characters who are on their own political and personal journeys. They have subtle resonances that allow the reader to perceive qualities and quirks that remind us of real personalities from the Easter Rising. It is this method as well as the extremes to which O’Neill has gone to render authentic contemporary detail that makes this novel a truly historic masterpiece.

MacMurrough has recently returned from England to stay with his aunt, Eveline MacMurrough. MacMurrough has spent two years’ hard labor in a British jail, like Oscar Wilde, for “gross indecency” with another man.

His aunt aims to redirect his life in tune with her own growing Irish nationalism – but for those who know their Irish history, the pair’s name is a reference to MacMurrough, the King of Leinster, who infamously invited the English into Ireland in the 12th century to help him settle a score with a rival. The English never left, hence in the novel’s historical setting the name is a cruel joke and yoke upon them, their attempts to help the Rising by running guns a vain attempt to redeem for their hated name.

However, MacMurrough’s role in the novel ends up less important in the context of the Rising than how he becomes an unselfish mentor for the two young men and their growing love. Jim comes to understand that MacMurrough’s tales from ancient Greece were “more than stories, they were patterns of the possible.”

Where the novel falters is in the progression of some of the characters’ journeys toward the Rising. Particularly, Jim’s transformation from a petrified schoolboy who rebuffs Doyler’s initial advances in a fog of Catholic guilt, to a strong, confident swimmer, lover and fighter seems all too swift, even when it takes place during the winter and spring of 1915 and 1916. Also, occasionally, the use of real historical characters sometimes fails. The appearance of James Connolly in Doyler’s life is an unnecessary, forced moment. But in another passage, MacMurrough rescues Sir Edward Carson from drowning in the Forty Foot, then kisses him in revenge for his prosecution of Wilde – this seemed appropriate to the narrative. And Sir Roger Casement is there, but always an offstage presence.

Mr. Mack’s journey is almost the more interesting one, though he is a lesser character. Mack also provides much of the novel’s occasional flashes of humor. While walking one evening he sees a poster calling for recruits to the British Army that has been torn at one corner. He, the old soldier, dutifully attempts to fix it back into place – and is promptly arrested by a policeman who thinks he is ripping it down.

Earnestly, Mack goes to see the new priest, in the hope that he will intercede with the magistrate on his behalf. Instead, the priest, who has been breathing Irish nationalism into the boys whom he teaches, congratulates the spluttering Mr. Mack for his Irish patriotism.

As the book concludes, Mack is caught up in the Rising while out walking in Dublin. He still doesn’t get what is going on, and O’Neill’s power as a writer is stunning as he shows Mr. Mack’s vision falling dumbly on a strange new flag that some armed men are carrying down a street: “that same, strange, unaccountable flag, green white and orange. What on earth would Sinn Feiners want with a post office?”

The climax of Mack’s journey is a Joycean one, as he realizes that discipline, respectability and success in the world no longer matter, instead it is his son Jim that matters: “He stared back up the road where the soldiers had gone, the first of thousands to come, thinking only, helplessly, Jim, my son James, my son, my Jim.” For Jim and Doyler have achieved not the respectability of the status quo, but something far more glorious: they swim to the Muglins and plant their flag, they make love and then are quickly caught up in the doomed Rising.

This is a powerful Irish novel that uses a Joycean mastery of language, astounding historical detail and an engaging love story to raise questions about freedom, love, patriotism and desire.

SEATTLE TIMES
Sunday, March 17, 2002. Seattle, USA.
An Irish tale of the power of passion, by John Hartl

Intimate yet epic in scale, “At Swim, Two Boys” sees the bloody 1916 Dublin rebellion known as the Easter Rising through the eyes of two Irish teenagers, Jim and Doyler. As the showdown with the British becomes increasingly inevitable, the boys begin a passionate affair with each other that is not allowed much chance to mature.

Galway-based novelist Jamie O’Neill draws inspiration for his title from Flann O’Brien’s 1939 debut novel, “At Swim – Two Birds.”

But the plot outline suggests Peter Weir’s 1981 film, “Gallipoli,” which similarly demonstrates how two politically naïve mates are drawn into deadly battle. The fact that O’Neill’s friends are also lovers gets quite a bit of play in his variation on the theme.

The story takes place not too long after another Irish homosexual, Oscar Wilde, has caused a major stir, although the reasons for his trial don’t seem to bother these rabble-rousing characters.

It’s the notoriety they appreciate. After all, as one scandal-lover points out, “It’s good to know Ireland can lead the world in something.”

Yet O’Neill is quite serious about the soulmate potential of male-to-male relationships. Jim and Doyler’s fathers shared an intense, platonic relationship that was aborted in their youth.

An older man who falls for Jim is convinced this is the road to fulfillment: “Maybe it was true that no man is an island, but he believed that two very well might be.”

O’Neill’s language is slangy and sometimes challenging, which may be why the book has drawn comparisons with James Joyce.

Expressions such as “a slice of the ignore” fill its 576 pages with a love of language that’s infectious. Slow to start but ultimately engaging, “At Swim, Two Boys” is as playful as it is powerful.

TEXAS OBSERVER
Friday, August 8, 2002. Austin, Texas.
Love at the Worst of Times, by Emily Rapp Seitz

Jamie O’Neill is a brave man. Few authors would risk comparison with Flann O’Brien by calling a novel At Swim, Two Boys. The title is an open play on O’Brien’s well-known 1939 book, At Swim-Two Birds. Luckily, O’Neill’s novel is as extraordinary as it is risky. The meticulously researched narrative re-visits some of the most turbulent moments in modern Irish history, namely Ireland’s involvement in the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish citizen soldiers staged an armed insurrection against British colonial rule. Ten years in the writing, this is a deeply intelligent and well-crafted story about the search for what it means to be a man and what it means to be Irish:

The struggle for Irish Ireland is not for truth against untruth. It is not for the good against the bad, for the beautiful against the unbeautiful… The struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and cast a shadow of its own in the sun.

Although At Swim, Two Boys is both an Irish history lesson and a story about the search for authenticity, it is first and foremost a love story. A tale “of himeros, the desire that strikes the spirit through the eyes; of pathos, the soul’s yearning for its separated love,” it is the story of two young men united as friends, as soldiers, and as lovers, while their country struggles to define itself outside the colonial paradigm.

In 1915, when the novel begins, the social and political landscape of Ireland is rapidly changing. Many Irishmen support their countrymen “doing their bit” for the King in WWI, while others–mainly those of the aristocratic upper classes, who reap the most benefits from Ireland’s connection with England–argue against conscription, and view the revival of Irish language and culture as the only possibility for Ireland’s liberation. And then there are those who believe true freedom will only come about by empowering the workers, which James Connolly attempts to do at Liberty Hall. Meanwhile, the Irish Citizen Army practices marching drills with a handful of weapons and some shaky ideology.

Add to this landscape a relationship between two boys whose sexual evolution and search for social identity runs parallel to the rising tensions in the country. Jim Mack is an intelligent, introverted school boy who dreams of being either a priest or a teacher. While his older brother fights in the British army overseas, Jim lives under the watchful eye of his well-meaning but domineering father, Mr. Mack. A shopkeeper, Mr. Mack is as delusional about the valor of his service in the British Army (he deserted) as he is about his social status (the family lives inside their small shop in a working-class part of Dublin).

In the midst of this larger political confusion, Jim’s search for identity is both complicated and helped along by Doyler, the rough-talking, idealistic boy who picks up the Mack family’s dung cart each week, and whose politics Mr. Mack does not respect. In Doyler, Jim sees what his future might just as easily have been, had circumstances been different. Like Jim, Doyler was also granted a college scholarship; he was forced to work because his mother and many siblings, destitute and living in a Dublin slum, receive no support from Doyler’s abusive, alcoholic father. A self-proclaimed socialist, Doyler survives with his meager wages and the financial support of an older aristocratic lover, MacMurrough, a high society man disillusioned and depressed after a stint of jail time in England.

The boys’ friendship takes quick flight as Jim and Doyler meet each morning at the Forty Foot, a gentlemen’s bathing place in Dublin Bay, where Doyler teaches Jim to swim: “One time he called Jim cara macree, which he said means pal of my heart, and he took a thorn and pricked their palms and smeared their blood together.” The boys plan an Easter swim to the Muglins, an island in the distance that becomes, for Jim, a symbol of his relationship with Doyler: a perfect, self-contained, sovereign island that can be sought and reached. As Jim dreams, socialists and citizen soldiers–Doyler among them–are rallying in Dublin to stage their Easter fight for an independent Ireland.

Through his conversations with Doyler, Jim begins to understand that “politics was a puzzle at the best of times” as he unravels the political complexities of his world: “Sinn Feiners, Leaguers, Volunteers. They stood for Ireland, that much was clear, Ireland her own. Doyler was a socialist… His talk was names and slogans. Citizen Army, Liberty Hall, Nor King nor Kaiser.”

As their relationship deepens – “How did Doyler do this? He could make Jim so angry with himself, so ashamed. The next minute he was alive, like a spark was inside, like the full of him was electric” – Jim becomes better acquainted with gay life and culture and quickly falls in love: “How wonderful it was, this coming to know, certain of the knowing to come. Every word was weighed and every glance an inquiry. Each gesture gave just that little too much away.”

But his feelings for Doyler plunge Jim into a spiritual crisis, for the priests have taught him to subdue his desires, and his sexual attraction to Doyler is unmentionable in the Catholic tradition. In one heartbreaking scene, Jim tries desperately to absolve himself at weekly confession, but afterward he remains convinced of his damnation, “For no sin had been named that covered his wickedness.” He is tormented for weeks, confiding in no one; he simply hasn’t the words to explain. This is O’Neill at his most evocative and powerful – the narrative never flinches from the reality of what it was like to be a gay man in Ireland in the early decades of the twentieth century: “he felt a bursting to be known, to be born, that would no longer be delayed, but whose labor had come.” It is a story long missing from Irish literature.

The All-Ireland movement claims to seek the rebirth of a true Ireland but it, like the Catholic church, is cast in a less than favorable light. It is depicted as a country club movement obsessed with “the Christ-like sacrifice of youth,” existing solely for the privileged few who have the time and leisure for ideals, while the poor Irish, like Doyler’s mother, state the situation much more clearly: “‘Tis the dirty linen of them above that will keep us body and soul together.”

Although the church and other social institutions come across as morally bankrupt and filled with impotent ideology and corrupt politicians, one important lesson Jim learns in church – his faith in the innate goodness of people – enables him to believe in new “patterns of the possible” for boys like himself and Doyler: “How empty it would be if we didn’t know – it’s like a secret really – didn’t know how we could be.” His faith is steadfast, even as history unravels before his eyes and with it, the fate of both his life and his relationship with Doyler.

O’Neill takes risks in his book, imagining into history a love relationship between two young boys on the verge of being men, literally swimming to freedom, just as Ireland is at the brink of disaster. Those who know Irish history are familiar with the events of Easter 1916, when the novel reaches its emotional climax. When Ireland struck out against British forces, it led to the execution and martyrdom of the critical Irish leaders of the day, and the Rising, in many ways, sowed the seeds of the conflict still raging in Northern Ireland today. But it is the pleasure, heartbreak, and pure joy of the journey that make the book irresistible.

From the bits of 1915-specific slang, to the imagined sights and sounds of a Gaelic Revival garden party, to the fictionalizing of historical events and figures, to the Joyce-like precision with which O’Neill describes Dublin streets and landmarks, this is a novelist with a keen eye for detail, a critical, but honest affection for the history of his homeland, and an unflinching sense of the tactile world. But perhaps the greatest and most compelling risk O’Neill takes is to suggest that, no matter how war and politics may endeavor to destroy relationships, love is still the only bond worth fighting for – and at the worst of times, the only reality worth dying for.

Observer intern Emily Rapp Seitz is a student at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Kirkus Reviews
January 1, 2002. New York.
Starred Review

The hunger for liberation – political, emotional, and sexual – gnaws at the big heart of this young Irish writer’s engrossing, often very moving debut.

The title, of course, alludes to “Flann O’Brien’s” subversive comic masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds. But O’Neill’s real influences appear to be James Joyce’s Ulysses and James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, a romantic-epic portrayal of Dublin beset by the Troubles. O’Neill focuses initially on Arthur Mack, a widowed Dublin shopkeeper and Boer War veteran whose stubborn loyalty to Britain conflicts with the swirling energies of incipient rebellion against “foreign” rule that capture his neighbors.

If Mack is a dreamy, distracted Leopold Bloom, his 16-year-old son James, a model youth seemingly destined for the priesthood or a teaching career, is a kind of Stephen Dedalus – a passive, well-meaning boy whose life changes under the charismatic influence of his pal Doyler Doyle, a rebel with several causes who draws James into a plan to swim to a nearby island and plant a green flag (symbolizing Ireland’s independence). The rapidly growing love the boys share is interrupted when Doyler is imprisoned for “sedition,” then absorbed in his duties as a Volunteer soldier – and is consummated, with bitter irony, when the Dublin streets become a blood-soaked “nighttown.”

O’Neill’s replete characterizations of the aforementioned are deepened by the complex relationships each forms with such other figures as Jim’s stoical, quietly perceptive Aunt Sawney, aristocratic Irish nationalist Eveline MacMurrough, and the latter’s adult nephew Anthony, a sardonic homosexual (formerly convicted of “indecency”) whose imaginary “conversations” with his deceased cellmate explore both Anthony’s reluctant involvement with the Volunteers and his conflicted (and, really, rather contrived) dealings with both Doyler and James.

Excess and overstatement do crop up, but O’Neill’s warm empathy with his characters, stinging dialogue, and authentic tragic vision more than compensate: altogether, the best literary news out of Ireland since the maturity of Roddy Doyle.

ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
Sunday, May 26, 2002. Atlanta, GA.
Patriotism and puberty on minds of ‘Two Boys’, by Steve Murray

It’s 1915, and two Dublin lads are falling in love – with each other and with their country – in “At Swim, Two Boys.” Novelist Jamie O’Neill’s allusive, lyrical and very ambitious book fuses the personal and the political while offering some of the loveliest dense prose this side of “Ulysses.”

Comparisons to James Joyce (though O’Neill has said they make him wince) are unavoidable. (The title also playfully references Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds.”) The author makes it doubly hard on himself by setting key scenes at the Forty Foot, the coastal, men-only bathing spot, within view of the Martello tower where Joyce briefly lived.

That O’Neill has the guts to strut through the same turf as the master’s “Dubliners” is startling enough, but the author’s giddy love of language justifies the moxie. (Fair warning: O’Neill’s delight in animating obscure, dialectic words can have you reaching for your Webster’s.)

In this tale of star-crossed love and young patriotism, Jim is the 16-year-old son of British loyalist Mr. Mack, owner of a general store in the Dublin suburb of Glasthule. Doyler is Jim’s former classmate, son of Mr. Mack’s estranged boyhood friend whose drinking has paupered his family; Doyler now works cleaning the neighborhood’s trash heaps and cesspools. In his off hours, the boy gains interest in the anti-British Irish Citizen Army. And he swims every day.

The latter grows increasingly important as Doyler gives Jim lessons, with the goal of swimming out across the choppy sea to Muglins Rock on Easter Sunday, 1916. Overseeing their deepening friendship is MacMurrough, adult nephew of the town’s wealthy grande dame, returning to live with his aunt after jail time in England for sodomy, like his fellow Irishman, Oscar Wilde.

MacMurrough is perhaps the novel’s trickiest figure, an arrogant cynic who, at the start, has no qualms about raping a boy and then paying him for the trouble. And he engages in lengthy interior dialogues with the ghost of his old tutor, Scrotes. But as he becomes mentor to Jim and Doyler, he changes as much as the two boys do, accepting responsibility for their fate, as well as coming to terms with his sense of duty toward Ireland.

In one scene, Jim listens, transported, to a churchyard tribute to the martyred Irish hero Wolfe Tone, who attempted, with French soldiers, to wrest his country from the hands of the English:

Slow the soldier-speaker continued, slow and now suddenly stirring. For war at last has come and Tone is on the sea. The French fleet ploughs the waves. A shift in the drizzle – there is no rain but ocean spray – and Jim is there too. With Tone he stands at the prow of the ship. Beyond lies the beloved land. They come so close, they can see the houses and the people on the shore. They could toss a biscuit. But the coward French fear to land. Jim turns to Wolfe Tone. So proud his face, and generous. A tear falls on his cheek. His eyes are strangely bright and black.

Here O’Neill ties together patriotism and pubescent stirrings. You easily sense how the boys’ emerging sexuality meshes with their escalating pride in their country – even as you wish you could reach into the pages and steer their desires toward an outlet safer than drilling, as Doyler does, to be a rooftop sniper.

The tale of Wolfe Tone and its effect on Jim is itself a fine example of the power of “At Swim, Two Boys,” which rewards patience by transporting the reader into an epic that knows when to be intimate or sweeping, when to be sardonic or wrenching.

The boys are the heart of the novel, but its near-600-page span allows ample room for sharp portraits of other characters, including the estimable, steely Madame MacMurrough; Jim’s sharp-tongued, semi-omniscient great aunt Sawney; and the deluded royalist Mr. Mack.

O’Neill worked for 10 years as a night porter in a London psychiatric hospital, writing his novel on a laptop computer during quiet shifts. The hospital administrators, in retrospect, may not be thrilled with the personal use of his working hours, but the benefit is ultimately the readers’.

The verdict: A funny, sad and stirring marvel.

Steve Murray writes about television for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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