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RALPH
The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities
Early Fall 2002. San Diego, CA.
by Lolita Lark, Editor-In-Chief

“Mr. Mack?”
“Yes, Brother?”
“Do we detain you?”
“No Brother.”
“The phrase fidus Achates. You were asked to decline it.”
Effortlessly he did so. But he did not look at the brother. And he sat down afterwards before being told.
“Achates,” said the brother. “The friend of Aeneas. Virgil has given him the epithet fidus and the phrase has come down to us as the paradigm of friendship. A bosom companion, one might say. A friend of one’s heart even. Animæ demidium meæ, says Horace of Virgil, meaning the half of his soul.”

It’s Dublin 1915–1916, a time of perfervid passion for god and country: Ireland’s fatal, flawed rising but also the rising of young love – and mark the words. Not only an uprising, but the rising sea, the sea in which two boys swim together, at swim, two boys. And thereby, the rising of the tide of love, or, more bluntly, the verge.

World War I has begun and has already left its many seeds of death. And with the English – along with the French and Germans – embarking on the murder of several million young men in the fields of Flanders, it is a time for the Irish to rise up in rebellion.

A year before the action, we have four participants. There is the clerk’s shy son (Jim Mack – fifteen), a friend who collects the city’s sewage (Doyler – also fifteen), the elegant lady of Ballygihen (Eveline – ageless), and her disgraced nephew (MacMurrough – late twenties/early thirties). Jim Mack is worried about self-abuse and going to hell. Doyler is pure ruffian, a virulent Irish patriot. Eveline spouts upper-class French and worries about the servants, what to wear, and her country. MacMurrough appears in his uniform as the captain of the Irish Volunteers and talks to the ghosts of his prison past.

They all admire the boys (even as the boys even admire each other):

MacMurrough conjured Arcadian groves where lover and beloved, ephebes both, reclined upon the coarse grass. Cicadas sang in the boughs above, where olives swelled in the sun. Or it was later in the palaestra when, weary of wrestling, lover draws down the tender blade to scrape the beloved’s sweat. Of serious things they speak.

Aunt Eveline, who sees one of the choir boys at mass, readying for war, thinks:

He would go out, this young Ireland, he and a necessary few. In the beauty of his boyhood he would offer his life, by the overwhelming sword to die: a ravishment really: and Irishmen everywhere would shake for shame.

Boys and love. It washes through At Swim, Two Boys like the tide along the Irish coast, is the stuff that holds it together. Jim Mack and Doyler lie about on a rock at the edge of the sea, seen from afar by MacMurrough:

In the dip of that rock he knew there formed a primal unity, which was not, as Aristophanes had thought, an egg-shaped being, rather a twin-backed flapping seal; that unity the jealous gods had sought to sunder, not reckoning the human heart.

When Doyler disappears for a few months, Jim makes a rendezvous with a soldier at the Forty Foot (the pier at the ocean), a soldier who he imagines to be his now buried-among-the-poppies brother Gordie, and (loving shades of Joyce!) there is passion above the sea:

Waves dashed on the rocks, tumbling over in their hurry, creaming as far as the path below. Great gurgling sucks, like the sea drew breath, then roaring through chasms and spouting out in a froth of foam. It seemed to hang in the air, the foam, and shine of its own luminescence. The wind was boastful in his ear ... He felt it in the pit of his stomach, the exhilaration of the deep, and the mystery of the deep reaching up to take him.

As always in Ireland, there is the Mother Church. Father Polycarp pontificates on Virgil, the “friend of one’s heart,” pines for Jim Mack, is jealous of his Doyler. But when Jim Mack finds himself being fondled by the self-same Polycarp, there comes a distancing:

He was sensible of this detachment in Brother Polycarp’s room when the brother would roam his hand on his skin: he did not feel but he saw himself felt. His mind’s eye watched a boy. It watched him at home and it watched him at school and it was watching him now at the Forty Foot. And looking back, it seemed to Jim that he had never prayed for himself at all but for this other boy that his mind’s eye watched, a rawney-looking molly of a boy, the son of a quakebuttock, a coward himself, praying that he should hear his calling and join the brothers like Our Lady wished.

Later, the good father thinks on this fifteen-year-old, ruddy-cheeked, thin-faced boy,

Jim Mack, Jim Mack, his heart sang a canticle of songs. How beautiful he was and comely in delights! His cheeks were as the turtle dove’s, his neck as of ivory, his throat most sweet. Such is my beloved, and he is my friend.

The boy enraptured him. What joy it was to pray with him, to hear the delicate pant of his soul as heavenward it soared. There She reigned, resplendent with miracles, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, but terrible as an army set in array. In the blue and stelliferous light he could not bide, but the innocent soul of the boy thrilled to Her presence. Next week your feast, O Queen of Heaven. I have vowed to you my darling.

For the flesh is weak and the blood unruly and how else to atone the sins of the heart than dedicate to Her the heart’s desire? Receive my gift, love him as I would I would, pray for my wrung and twisted soul.

Boy-boy and boy-man-boy love appear here in the classical, Spartan mode, à la Paul Fussel-A. E. Housman-Wilfred Owens. The writing of the love between Doyler and Jim Mack is as sensual as Joyce writing in, say, his loving passionate final nightblooming saga of Molly Bloom (and yes yes I will yes I will yes).

But what ultimately compels the reader is more than this love (so dangerous for the time). It’s the other equally dangerous passions – patriotic Ireland, cursed as it is with the rule of England and the dogma of the Church.

And then there is the passion of that fertile fecund language, where one finds the seeds of tragedy as constant as “the ever-changing never-changing sea” – a grand language (a language of the conquerers of 700 years) to narrate the appalling history of a people who have never and will never escape the twin blights of the Roman gods and English soldiers. The love of Jim Mack and Doyler – and the love that MacMurrough has for their love – thus are partially destroyed by this bitter counterpoint, the plagues of spirit and patriotism that can never be hedged, and can never be gainsaid.

The author doesn’t let us forget that we’re on the streets of Dublin, and the geography of that city as much a part of this story as it was for Ulysses – the drinking and carousing, the songs and the newsboys and the horses and the trolleys and the rare automobiles (Eveline has one of the few in town). On the streets, in the homes and the pubs, there’s the music of words, the songs of Ireland, the delicious puns: Doyler asks Jim Mack, “Are you straight?” The priests? “Most fathers are hard to conceive.” After a night with Doyler, when questioned by his aunt, “MacMurrough laughed, a single ejaculated breath.”

MacMurrough was a dandy before he was cut down in his prime by two years in Wandsworth Prison; and we find there the price of the “love that dare not speak its name:” how much is a wand’s worth?

The revolutionaries? Eveline

turned the hasp and the casement opened. She inhaled the breath from the sea. Casement, how very beautiful was the word. She spoke it softly. A decidedly beautiful name, Casement. “He is far from the land,” she softly hummed.

More puns: Jim Mack’s father is called “General Maid,” because he knits socks for the boys in the trenches. But he is remembered by all as much for his knitting as for running from battle in the midst of the Boer War; thus, there’s the hint of the not-so-straight about him: “Quare fine day,” says one of the loafers at the door of the pub.

Throughout, there are the thrown coins of the rich intonation of English mixed with Erse: “gigglepot,” “conk,” “the neck of him,” “the pratties,” “the fecker,” “the shawlie.” There are the words for passion: “rise,” “knob,” “dick” and “dic” (for dictionary).

There are too the wonderful literate Jesuitical dialogues, reminding us of Buck Mulligan and Stephen Daedalus, or Daedalus and his friends in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. This is MacMurrough, speaking with his imagined cell-mate, reflecting on his childhood:

– What did your aunt intend, Scrotes asked, when she spoke of the good people taking you away?
– The fairies, MacMurrough answered. They take the beautiful boy and leave a changeling brute in his place.
He looked back up the lawns to where the boys still paraded. In their golden kilts they looked like tulips, tulips that glowed and marched in the dusk.
– We’re gods, he said. And these our playthings.
– There are many gods, returned Scrotes. Many to whom even you are but a whim.
– Ah yes, scaly-eyed Themis, guardian of law.
– One was thinking of Eros, whose arrows pierce and bring life.

At Swim, Two Boys is thus not only a rich Irish stew of words and word games, it’s an extended epic full of overtones, sly allusions to the likes of Wilde, Joyce, and Beckett.

But the great novel needs more than poetry and puns. It needs worthy and recognizable characters, it needs a worthy plot line, and it needs artistry in love – not only love between the characters, but love between author and characters.

We have them all here, and I’m at a loss how to convey the grandeur of lively, often very funny dialogue – along with a sheer narrative beauty. It’s a rare work of art that leaves us reviewers at a loss for words: after all, we construct ourselves from them. At Swim, Two Boys took me to the heights – but then it brought me to the depths, for as the story wound to its natural end, I found myself with real tears clouding my vision and the last few pages. I suspect I was grieving not only with the ending of a fine piece of writing (I didn’t want it to end), but, too, touched by the sad passings. I had lost friends – friends I was reluctant to part with through the madness that was, and is, and presumably always will be Ireland.

THE WORLD AND I
January 1, 2003. Washington, DC.
Rewriting Bloody Easter – The year leading to Ireland’s uprising against British rule and an account of the failed rebellion take on new dimensions in Jamie O’Neill’s rich and absorbing novel. Reviewed by Robert Ross.

At Swim, Two Boys records a significant episode in Irish history and rewrites that tumultuous time into a contemporary statement. To inject such vitality into a cherished and often-told story, Jamie O’Neill loads the novel with musical language, memorable characterization, and forceful narrative. Through its layered themes, the book resonates far beyond Ireland’s uprising against the British in 1916.

Although O’Neill grew up in Dublin, he has spent most of his adult years in London. The novel’s publication and favorable reception on both sides of the Atlantic have dramatically altered the forty-year-old writer’s life. The generous publishers’ advances and plans for filming the book have made him something of a celebrity, especially considering his past. For in interviews he recalls how he once lived on the London streets, then for the past ten years served as a night porter in a London mental hospital while working on his book. He had written two other novels, which he now rejects.

O’Neill bristles when critics call At Swim, Two Boys “a gay novel” – and rightly so. There is nothing self-conscious, prurient, apologetic, or sensational in the book’s handling of the love between the two boys. The relationship simply unfolds as an integral and unaffected part of the narrative, and their sexual rebellion blends into the political insurrection. In a similar vein, the older character, who has been jailed for “indecent behavior,” grapples with society’s attitude toward sexuality, and frequently calls on Oscar Wilde’s writing and comments to help him sort out his own conflicts.

Critics have also been quick to point out that O’Neill must have been reading James Joyce’s Ulysses attentively during the ten years he was working and writing in the mental hospital. Certainly the Joycean flavor abounds. In fact, the two novels begin at practically the same location along Dublin Bay, and at the outset they both follow a Dubliner as he wanders through the city streets. O’Neill’s narrative approach and style in the first few pages bring Joyce to mind so clearly that one wonders if the whole novel will turn into a warmed-over Ulysses. Soon, though, that misgiving disappears, for it looks as if the writer was just having some unabashed fun with the Irish classic. O’Neill soon gains his own voice and the elder Irishman fades into the background where he hovers, approvingly, it seems.

The novel’s awkward title also brings to mind another Irish masterpiece, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Published in 1939, this farcical and impressionistic novel bears little resemblance to the new one that makes a play on the earlier, near-nonsensical title. Although not well known abroad, At Swim-Two-Birds is still widely admired and read in Ireland; so perhaps there is some kind of in-joke at work.

Now that the critical caveats have been considered, the discussion can focus on the novel’s important features.

A dominant metaphor

However cumbersome the book’s title might be, it does encapsulate a dominant metaphor around which all of the action revolves. The first of the two boys “at swim” is Jim Mack, an amiable, rather naive young man, who lives over a modest grocery shop with his father and an unpleasant old aunt. Jim’s life is not a happy one. His mother died years earlier, his much-admired older brother serves in the British army, and his demanding father shows slight understanding of adolescent trials and tribulations. As well, the cheerless aunt spends most of her time praying, and the boys at the school where Jim is a scholarship student ridicule his humble background as a shopkeeper’s son. A faithful Catholic, he believes for a time that a career in the church will redeem him, but a drunken, lecherous church brother cancels out that hope. The one bit of light in this humdrum existence comes from his friendship with the second boy, Doyler Doyle, who calls Jim the “pal o’ me heart.”

This aggressive and swaggering young man is the son of Jim’s father’s army buddy, who drinks himself into poverty, ill health, and finally death, while his wife and too many children go hungry. (Like any good Irish novel, this one has its requisite drunk and long-suffering family.) One of the book’s most complex and intriguing characters, Doyler exerts considerable influence on the more passive Jim. They develop a strong friendship in spite of their differences and the objections of Jim’s father. As their relationship grows, they make a pact to swim from the shore of Dublin Bay to an island off the coast. There they will raise a green flag to establish Ireland’s independence from England. Doyler, a determined socialist even at his young age, firmly believes that his salvation, and his country’s, will be gained only when British rule is abolished.

After months of practicing their swimming and sharpening their endurance in the cold, choppy water, they set out on Easter Sunday morning to fulfill their dream. The passage describing this epic swim appears near the end of the novel. It is the crucial act that enlarges what has gone before, and it foreshadows the calamitous events that unfold once the insurrection begins. The vivid account of the boys’ swim out to the rock, the planting of the flag, and the exultation over their conquest develops into a personal act as well as a political one.

Jim grasps the significance of what he has undertaken as he feels the water press against his naked body. It is as though he were experiencing a primitive kind of baptism:

He gave up looking and centered on his stroke, till gradually he found that state where exertion became timeless. The moments no longer heaped the one upon the other. He felt the water, its living run along his body. He lost his sense of the sea’s resistance and felt instead its acceptance of him. It was the sea’s ache in his chest and limbs, the sea’s toil that crawled him on. He had been doing this for ever and surely he must go on doing this for ever more.

The swim and its aftermath alter Jim irrevocably. He truly becomes Doyler’s “pal o’ me heart,” and once he is challenged he will take up his destined role as an Irish revolutionary.

So the pivotal act of the two boys “at swim” confirms the thematic implications, both political and personal, which reverberate throughout the novel. The audacious act of planting the flag on the rocky island symbolically marks the beginning of Ireland’s striving for independence. At the same time, the swim evolves into a rite of passage for the two boys, who have at last gained their personal identity, freedom from restraint, and manhood.

A wealth of characters

While the all-important swim across the harbor dominates the narrative, much more is at work in the novel – especially the spirited characterization. Those with whom the boys interact always come across in a believable and sympathetic manner. On one level, the various personages represent diverse attitudes toward Irish independence and the planned uprising. Some support the rebellion, others reject it, and a few simply do not care. Still, not one character, no matter how minor, is a stereotype.

In particular, Jim’s father, Mr. Mack, springs to life in the opening lines of the novel and remains throughout a colorful man, both comic and sad. Here an observer describes him: “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 top of the morn there, tip-top, everything’s dandy. He’d bare his head to a lamppost. ... Oh on the up, that’s Mr. Mack, a Christian genteelery grocerly man.”

Having served in the British army in South Africa and India, Mack remains faithful to the monarchy and objects to the talk of Irish nationalism. A social climber, he lets his pretensions involve him in several embarrassing situations. At the end of the novel, though, he has shed his foolishness and has turned into a broken man, unable to grasp the sorrowful events that have altered his life.

Another character who lives fully is Dublin’s grand lady, Madame MacMurrough. Although an aristocrat through and through, she believes firmly in a free Ireland: “For she too felt the change in the air. ... But this was not the evening twilight of the foolish poets. It was the half-light before dawn, the morning of a new Ireland. ... And she, a MacMurrough born to lead, knew well where lay her duty.” An extraordinary creation, Madame MacMurrough behaves at first as an elitist who shows little patience with the lower classes. Yet, when called on to serve her country, she sets aside her condescending ways and displays her true spirit as an Irish patriot.

Madame MacMurrough’s errant nephew, simply called MacMurrough, also becomes an important participant in the action. In his late twenties, he has disgraced the family by being imprisoned in England for “indecent behavior” and has sought refuge in his aunt’s Dublin home. At first appearing as a dilettante, totally absorbed in the misfortune he thinks has ruined his life, he shows little interest in Irish independence, instead seeing Ireland as a ridiculous, backward sort of place. The passages recording an imaginary conversation between MacMurrough and a former fellow prisoner and mentor do turn tedious. These digressions, which border on the didactic, weaken the novel, which makes its point about individual freedom without preaching. Yet the sardonic MacMurrough sheds his self-pity and gains dignity when he inadvertently finds himself defending the Irish when the British troops set out to crush the rebellion: “He remembered the moment in the street with a dreamlike vividity. ... He had taken a breath, and in its inspiration he heard his aunt’s voice telling him again and again to be brave, to be proud. Then he had felt it, all about him, the wind of the beat of magnificent wings. Here was splendor at last, splendor indeed, splendor enough for a lifetime.”

A wealth of unforgettable characters wander in an out of the narrative: the nationalistic priest who is more political than religious; Nancy the assertive servant girl, who presents Mr. Mack with an unexpected grandchild; Doyler’s dauntless mother and good-for-nothing father; the drunken teaching brother – to name but a few. They are all very Irish, very human.

To an extent, the city of Dublin might well be considered a character. In recording Mr. Mack’s walk through the streets, the first chapter introduces the city that plays such an important role in the lives of the characters. Soon the city map expands to include the Forty Foot, which is the rock where the male Dubliners gather for their daily swim, and the departure point for the boys’ great adventure. Then the MacMurroughs’ grand house and gardens come into view and stand in contrast to the dismal slums where Doyler’s family lives. The church and the school, along with the commonplace street where Mr. Mack’s shop is located, also become focal points. It has been noted that Joyce’s Ulysses provides a map of Dublin. Much the same could be said of O’Neill’s treatment of the city.

A robust narrative

Considering the general familiarity with what has become known as “Bloody Easter,” it is fairly obvious at the outset where the narrative will lead, at least on the national level. O’Neill, though, manages to create suspense and conflict as he follows his assorted cast of characters from all levels of Irish life through that fateful year preceding the rebellion. He transforms the time into a robust narrative that focuses on the individuals who are about to keep a date with history – and whose lives will be changed dramatically by encounters with forces far beyond their control.

A master of the set piece, O’Neill develops scenes so fully that they could stand by themselves, yet they all blend into a carefully drawn pattern. He also constructs remarkable comic sequences, such as the conversations between MacMurrough and his aunt, or the strained relationship between Doyler and MacMurrough, or Mr. Mack’s efforts at social climbing. Yet the never-ending sadness that is so much a part of Irish literature (and life?) always lurks in the background.

As well, the retelling of the Irish patriots’ valiant stand against the British invaders is vigorous and forceful. Not only does O’Neill capture the pathos of the ineffective and disorganized uprising that led to bloodshed and defeat, but he also celebrates the bravery of those who dared to confront the empire’s power. At the same time, he sets that critical act of revolution into both the historical and modern context of the Irish problem, which is far from settled. He also connects the uprising to a personal rejection of contemporary social strictures and an acceptance of the fluidity of human behavior.

The turbulent history and the imagined events so full of human strife and promised redemption are all wrapped in an exquisite prose, or worked into a musical composition. Of course, there are times when the Irish expressions make the non-Irish reader wish for a glossary. As the novel progresses, though, the unfamiliar wording simply blends into the intricate design. Granted, the language is excessive at times, but that very excess lends the novel its distinctive charm and beauty.

Finally, At Swim, Two Boys ranges far beyond an account of a single historical event. It is an exceptional book in its inventive style, penetrating characterization, and narrative energy. It offers as well a rare and truthful portrayal of the human condition, no matter what the outward circumstances. Not much more could be asked of a novel.

Robert Ross is a freelance critic and writer who lives in Germany. He has published extensively on postcolonial fiction.

THE WEEKLY NEWS
Miami, Florida. August 1, 2002.
“An elegant dive into love and history.” – reviewed by C.L. Frey

The tide is turning. Turbulent times are coming to Ireland as the country struggles with notions of freedom from British rule, circa 1915. For the citizens of Glasthule, just south of Dublin, it’s a time for forming alliances and chasing dreams.

Amidst the sea change, two teenage boys – one with a keen mind, but the misfortune of birth to land on the wrong side of the tracks; one a shy scholar stifled by his father’s shortsightedness – forge an unbreakable bond of friendship that turns to love. It’s their relationship that charges the astonishing novel “At Swim Two Boys” with emotional resonance.

Doyler, the son of a hard-drinking newspaper man, and Jim, the son of buffoonish shopkeeper, Mr. Mack, make a pact that they will meet each morning at the Forty Foot Gentleman’s Bathing Place and practice their swimming in the sea. The following Easter they will brave the icy currents and swim to the Muglins, an outlying rock formation in Dublin Bay, to claim the spot for Ireland – and in truth, for their own deepening union.

Author Jamie O’Neill dedicated 10 years to the book and his commitment shines in every historical detail. Traveling the course of a year in Ireland to the Easter rising of 1916, he offers a perfectly preserved snapshot of life in wartime and the class wars that impacted the nation.

The novel ebbs and flows between the boys’ relationship and the cross-section of family, friends and townspeople who impact their shift away from adolescence. Mr. Mack and Doyler’s father once shared a close camaraderie while serving in the military together, but that faded when Mr. Mack’s promotion in rank created an insurmountable divide. Now, they have an uneasy dialogue mired in pity and contempt.

From her grand estate, Eva MacMurrough defies societal expectations of women while grappling with the quandary presented by her nephew, who recently joined her after serving two years for indecency involving a chauffeur-mechanic. The younger MacMurrough, an Oscar Wilde devotee with a raging libido, “befriends” Doyler and later takes an interest in Jim – and the dynamics within the unlikely trio gives the novel a powerful dose of gay pride:

(A friend of sorts speaking to MacMurrough) “Help these boys build a nation of their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literatures for words they can speak. And should you encounter an ancient tribe whose customs, however dimly, cast light on their hearts, tell them that tale; and you shall name the unspeakable names of your kind, and in that naming, in each such telling, they will falter a step to the light.”

In traveling back to a time before rainbow flags flew in honor of the GLBT movement and focusing on a greater sense of nationalism, O’Neill has reinvigorated the now stale genre of gay love stories. But make no mistake, “At Swim, Two Boys” transcends any gay fiction pigeonhole. The sprawling tale, with its Irish dialects and historical sensibilities, requires patience and care to best appreciate its multi-layered charms – studies of class, revolution, loyalty all find a home in its pages. The reward for making the long narrative swim is the opportunity to bask on distant shores, in a long-age time, and revel in the poignant (and slyly witty) story of two boys who fought for freedom in all of its forms.

MILWAUKEE SHEPHERD-EXPRESS
May 16, 2002. Milwaukee, WI.
Swimming to Ireland – O’Neill’s novel finds the heart of Eire. Reviewed by Matt Kubacki

Writing a novel set in Ireland in the early part of the 20th century is not only a daunting task; it is a deed leading inevitably to comparison. James Joyce, who provides the benchmark to which most Irish literature aspires (as well as the shadow into which most of it falls), is always the name brought up to point out such a novel’s shortcomings and derivations, as well as its relative merits. Thankfully, through its course, Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (Scribner) is able to find its own voice.

Ironically taking its title from the metafictional novel At Swim-Two-Birds by another Irish writer, Flann O’Brien, At Swim, Two Boys is able to exist in the same fictional world as Joyce and O’Brien, yet succeeds in not summoning their influences at every turn. It is much less modernist experiment and much more contemporary Romantic. What O’Neill does have in common with Joyce and O’Brien and with other similarly branded “Irish” writers is a deep affinity for Ireland, the land and its people.

Social Aspirations

O’Neill’s tale takes its life from the very people who give Ireland its own. The “two boys” of the title are presented to us as the respective offspring of former military buddies, now long estranged by social class and aspiration. Jim Mack is a young scholar, the younger son of Mr. Mack, whose eldest went off to fight in the Great War. Doyler is the son of Mr. Doyle, who works a newsstand and is losing a battle with a respiratory infection. The Macks aspire to climb the social ladder, and Mr. Mack tries to instill in Jim the airs that come with it. The Doyles are constantly in a struggle, getting bogged down by too little income and too many mouths to feed. The fact that O’Neill is able to flesh these characters out without making them archetypes is very important because he hangs his novel on these two, while the workings of the world are played out around them.

At Swim, Two Boys takes place in the year leading up to the Easter Rebellion against Great Britain in 1916. It explores the dualist relationship between Jim and Doyler as that of scholar and worker, thinker and fighter, conservative and socialist, at a time when young men are just finding out who, in fact, they really are.

O’Neill never misses that last fact. He builds his main characters upon a thoughtful examination to both the hesitancy and the openness of growing up. He is able to provide an accurate picture of two boys searching for something they feel, not something they know. In this, it truly becomes a portrait of two boys at swim in their own existence. Not surprisingly, Jim and Doyler grow in their relationship while literally at swim, in a spot secluded enough that the swimmers bathe in the nude. There, Doyler begins to teach Jim to swim, to think of Ireland as a sacred homeland, and to think of physical and emotional love between two boys as a natural off-shoot of intense friendship. It is here, at swim, that the divergencies of Ireland begin to blur, and it is here that O’Neill’s voice really starts to shine. He describes the boys as “not boys but youth itself. Distance detached them, water unformed them, particularities washed away.”

Ireland’s Turmoil

As the boys grow close and their differences merge into a single voice, the rest of Ireland tumbles into the light of turmoil. As the Great War is played out away from its shores, the Irish are becoming increasingly aware that their toiling and their sons’ deaths are going for the sake of the British Empire. But as Jim and Doyler exist as one voice, so does Ireland. Where there once was duality, there is now unity. Classes mix with classes and people ignore their differences for a united, independent Ireland. It is a statement applicable to the time as well as applicable today as battles still rage for such a nation.

The way O’Neill uses the boys to parallel the struggle for Irish Ireland gets at the heart of the whole issue for the author – the heart itself. Jim and Doyler illustrate the heart of Ireland, the part that gives it personality, the part that gives a face to the nation, the part that makes one feel instead of know. In fact, O’Neill states it much better, “The Struggle for Irish Ireland is not for truth against untruth. It is not for the good against the bad, the beautiful against the unbeautiful – the struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and cast a shadow its own in the sun.”

At Swim, Two Boys does deserve its place. It treats its subjects with accuracy and thoughtfulness, and O’Neill allows the reader to feel the same deep affinity for his characters as they do for each other and as he must for his homeland of Ireland itself. At Swim, Two Boys doesn’t have to beg comparisons to Joyce or even to O’Brien. It can stand on its own merit as a statement that Ireland has a heart. And O’Neill is that heart’s voice.

LIBRARY JOURNAL
February 1, 2002. New York.

Published last year in Great Britain, this novel has been compared to works by James Joyce (or Flann O’Brien, whose At Swim-Two-Birds the title plays on), but it has more in common with the film Chariots of Fire in its painterly depiction of male athleticism and relationships.

The sheltered son of a pro-British shopkeeper, 16-year-old Jim develops a doting and eventually homosexual relationship with Doyler, a bright boy from an impoverished family, as the two train for an ambitious swim across Dublin Bay on Easter 1916, a date that happens to coincide with a planned Republican uprising. Both become entangled with McMurrough, scion of wealthy Irish gentry, who is back in Dublin following imprisonment in England for indecent behavior. Jim is too naive and Doyler too politically sophisticated for their years, while McMurrough is typecast as an Oscar Wilde figure. Still, these are rich characterizations, and together with the playfully rendered Irish dialect they outweigh the book’s imperfections.

O’Neill also offers gorgeous descriptions of the Dublin environs and remarkable details of the period. Recommended for most fiction collections. Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA.

BOOKLIST
American Library Association. February 1, 2002.
Starred Review

This powerful debut novel, which took Irishman O’Neill 10 years to write, has a truly exhilarating style as the author rhythmically bends language that is, at times, of his own making. It is the story of two boys – scholarly, reticent James and cocksure, poverty-stricken Doyle – and their tragic involvement in the 1916 Easter Uprising. Despite the novel’s broad canvas – it tackles class, religion, and patriotism – at heart it is a deeply moving love story.

James and Doyle strike up a friendship at Forty Foot, a local beach, and make plans to swim to Muglins Rock far out in Dublin Bay on Easter Sunday a year hence. As the two draw closer and eventually fall in love, they must contend with disapproval of their relationship from peers and from the church and the jealousy of upper-class Anthony MacMurrough, who has served time in jail for sexual misconduct. James plans to attend college on scholarship and become a schoolteacher, but Doyle, bitter over his own lost chances, is hell-bent on revolution.

Over the many pages of his novel, O’Neill creates a stunningly vivid world (“a strange land of rainshine and sunpour”) in a language all his own. – Joanne Wilkinson.

PHILADELPHIA GAY NEWS
April 19, 2002
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan

Jamie O’Neill has done something wonderfully audacious with “At Swim, Two Boys.” He has written a thoroughly homoerotic novel that is also deeply Catholic and profoundly Irish.

In the simmering Dublin of 1915, Jim attends a Christian Brothers school and misses his older brother Gordie, who is fighting Germany under the British flag that flies over Ireland. Doyler pulls the local dung collection cart, and dreams of the day when Ireland will be a nation once again.

Childhood chums, later separated by Doyler’s chaotic family circumstances, the boys resume their friendship as teenagers. Their relationship deepens into love as Doyler teaches Jim to swim. And they make a pact: together they will reach a rocky island known as the Muglins by the following Easter – a date which, coincidentally, will mark the start of a doomed uprising against British rule.

The boys’ progress, both athletic and emotional, is watched by one MacMurrough, scion of an influential Dublin family who has returned home after serving a British prison sentence for solicitation in a men’s room. Supercilious, pompous and seemingly callous – especially with regard to his Aunt Eveline, a secret revolutionary – MacMurrough prowls the cruising grounds, picking up boys and conversing with his former prison mates:

“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. These things will take care of themselves. The struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and cast a shadow its own in the sun.”

That these gorgeous words are uttered only in MacMurrough’s mind – by a man who is dead – suggests that MacMurrough is mad. But like all of O’Neill’s characters, MacMurrough is complicated and contradictory. The truth of him is something the reader discovers gradually, through the sort of cumulative encounters that occur in a relationship with an actual person.

This is one of the greatest of the novel’s many strengths: its characters live and breathe. And do they ever talk! So much and so vividly that a reader seems to be listening to their conversations. This is not simply due to the inherent charms of Irish-accented English, but also because of the author’s fine ear. To say the dialogue in “At Swim, Two Boys” is musical does not do it justice, although it certainly does sing.

It’s while hearing an orator speak about Irish hero Wolfe Tone that Jim realizes the depth of his feeling for Doyler:

“Jim knew this man’s heart was deep and true, for he made Jim wish for an equal love and an equal truth in his heart. He was swept by a great desire to take Doyler’s hand and tell him in his ear, That’s how I think of you, that’s exactly how I think of you.”

Later, when MacMurrough asks Jim why he wants to fight for Ireland, he answers, “It’s Doyler ... I don’t hate the English and I don’t know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I’m sure of that now. And he’s my country.”

Surely, other novelists have portrayed homosexual love as noble, although often within the cloying context of special pleading. But few, if any, have connected the long struggle of gay people and the long struggle of the Irish as proudly, perceptively and persuasively as O’Neill does in “At Swim, Two Boys.”

This great story of love between men, and love of country, attains a momentum and a majesty that do not subside until the last lovely words on the final page. Romantic, poetic, and tragic, “At Swim, Two Boys” is a beautiful book.

CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS
Sunday, June 2 2002. Chattanooga, TN.
“O’Neill’s love story set in turbulent Ireland” – reviewed by Emily McDonald

Jamie O’Neill’s “At Swim, Two Boys” is a beautifully crafted love story set around a turbulent time in the history of Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916.

It is the story of homosexual love, but O’Neill is never salacious in his descriptions. There is a gentleness to the telling that gives the book much of its pathos and appeal.

The boys are teen-agers Jim Mack, son of a shopkeeper trying to rise in the world, and Doyler Doyle, son of Mr. Mack’s Army buddy who is a drunkard and an abuser. Jim is a brilliant student at school and helps his father in the shop. His brother Gordie is with the British Army fighting the Germans.

Doyler leaves school to provide income for his family by hauling the midden (refuse) cart through town. He is also caught up in the political movements of his time and declares himself a Socialist.

Somewhat surprisingly, the two young men become friends and begin meeting each other daily to swim at Forty Foot, a rocky area where gentlemen swim in the nude. Doyler is the better swimmer and is teaching Jim. They agree that in a year, Easter 1916, they will swim together to Muglins Rock and claim it for themselves.

The aristocratic Anthony MacMurrough is another who swims at Forty Foot. He has recently returned to Ireland in disgrace from England, where he was a friend of Oscar Wilde and imprisoned for homosexual activity.

Temporarily, he is living at the MacMurrough estate with his spinster aunt Eva, a wonderful character who is a liberated woman long before her time. At one point in the novel, for example, she is caught running guns to the insurrectionists.

When Doyler disappears for a time, MacMurrough evolves into MacEmm, Jim’s teacher and confidant. MacMurrough’s motives are initially fueled by lust for Jim. However, he comes to genuinely love the boy but also realizes Doyler will always be the love of Jim’s life.

Eventually, Jim, Doyler and MacMurrough are all caught up in the fighting for Ireland’s freedom from British rule. O’Neill vividly describes how unorganized and chaotic the rebellion was and how brave but unprepared the Irish were to fight a much stronger force.

The author’s descriptions of everyday life prior to the rising are brilliant, too. ln telling of a barefoot urchin trying to hawk newspapers to Mr. Mack, he writes of “his tiny toes curled over the curbstone.”

Perhaps the best of the writing, however, comes when O’Neill tells of Jim and Doyler’s feelings for each other. For a brief period Jim becomes Doyler’s caregiver, and O’Neill writes: “One boy caring for another boy. It was very beautiful.”

Truly, “At Swim, Two Boys” is a compelling, touching book, and readers should not be turned off by the nature of the love described.

[Thanks to Bruce Mitchell for passing this review to me – JO’N.]

OUT magazine
March 2002. New York.
Reviewed by Emily Drabinski

Two 16-year-old Irish boys agree in 1915 to meet the following April for a swim to an outcropping of rocks as far away, distant, and seductive as the promise of Irish independence, little knowing their plans will coincide with the start of the Easter Rebellion. What could be a slip of a story of “young love in a time of war” is instead an epic paean to that other Irish author James Joyce. Dublin-born O’Neill took 10 years to write this, his first literary outing. His patience shows in language that moves like the tides that beckon pale, bookish Jim and his love, the more rugged Doyler. Written in a rough and dirty brogue, with a constant playful invention, O’Neill’s language comes happily close to his master’s.

CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
Sunday, July 28, 2002. Charlotte, North Carolina.
At Swim mixes two Irish literary traditions: wit and inventiveness. By Lawrence Toppman.

The main characters of “At Swim, Two Boys” are everything I am not: young, gay, Catholic, Irish, poor, discontented, single-parented, locked into a rigid class structure, oppressed by a foreign government and living in the shadow of a world war. That I found kinship with them makes me believe this tale could appeal to almost any thoughtful reader.

The jacket says Jamie O’Neill researched and wrote his third novel over 10 years while he worked as a night porter in a London psychiatric institution. It combines two great traditions in Irish literature: The mordant, clear-eyed wit of Oscar Wilde or Richard Sheridan and the fantastical inventiveness of James Joyce.

We might throw in a third tradition, too: Flann O’Brien’s bitterness toward authorities who suppressed his culture, freedom of expression and even his language. (O’Neill’s title riffs on O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds.”)

Yet “Boys” is less angry than compassionate. O’Neill feels affection for these folks who come together during the year before the futile Easter uprising of 1916.

He especially loves Jim, the schoolboy seeking a vocation, and Doyler, the swimming partner who has found one in the rebel army. O’Neill also has room in his heart for Mack, Jim’s fond failure of a father; Eva, a would-be rebel thwarted by sexism; and MacMurrough, her nephew, once jailed for homosexual acts.

Sex scenes can be specific. But this is foremost a story of love for one’s fellow men, oppressed by unjust political power, and one fellow man, punished for the Sin That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

SOUTHERN VOICE
Atlanta, GA. November 1, 2002.
With nods to some great Irish authors, freshman novelist creates captivating imagery, refreshing view of teenage boys’ first love. By Walter Wadas.

Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle gently collide into each other in Jamie O’Neill’s new novel “At Swim, Two Boys.”

Perhaps that is how things should be in a coming of age story. For the year of the novel’s duration, Jim and Doyler are turning l6, and they are falling in love. Their home is Glasthule, near Dublin, and not entirely in the background, the Irish are uprising as the year turns from 1915 to 1916.

Jim’s father, Arthur Mack, keeps a one-room general store at the front of the house on Adelaide Road where he and Jim live. Jim’s mother is dead, and his older brother Gordon, who to their father’s pride fights for the English king, spends the novel off stage.

Theirs is a striving, rising household with at least as many pretensions as Arthur’s modest income can support. Aunt Sawney, Arthur’s sister, keeps their house.

Doyler’s father is a drunkard, and his home life has been sliding downward to “the Banks,” a place not much above the gutter. Down from Clare, Doyler has returned to Glasthule to take the only work he can find as an underage hand on the dungman’s cart. He comes “black as the devil’s waistcoat” to shovel “the middens” at the Mack’s house. Inside his lapel, Doyler wears a cloth badge with the “Red Hand” of Ulster because he is at all events anti-crown.

To his father, Jim is merely “Sixteen: hobbledehoy, neither man nor boy.” On Jim’s sixteenth birthday, Aunt Sawney gives Jim his first long pants, “the finest long black broadcloth trousers a young man could want or wish for.”

But long pants are not Jim Mack’s only longing. Earlier in the day, dispatched to distribute advertising bills for his father’s store, Jim dallies at the “Forty Foot,” a place for ocean swimming, where he observes a suggestive encounter between Doyler and Anthony MacMurrough.

Having served his prison term for “gross indecency with a chauffeur-mechanic,” MacMurrough lives in cosseted exile at Ballygihen House, his widowed Aunt Eveline’s estate. As MacMurrough flips a silver coin to Doyler, “[Doyler’s] gaze lifted and he saw Jim watching above. His eyes were dark as night, not dull, but gemmily shinning. The smile broadened as though in invitation … Jim found himself smiling back. … What curious cheer.”

“At Swim, Two Boys” is filled with this kind of sweetly affecting charm. The novel is rarely graphic or lascivious. Nor is it patronizing. Of the boys’ swimming together naked, Jamie O’Neill writes, “[Jim] saw the deep cleft of [Doyler’s] seat and the small stand of his front, the each made for the other.” O’Neill means to create an atmosphere of how his characters were feeling their thoughts, and he succeeds.

O’Neill writes a thoroughly Irish novel. Certainly Doyler Doyle is emblematic of the Irish predicament, for Doyler is buggered by both Roman Catholicism and the English. Even his name is a kind of coming and going manifestation of that. To O’Neill’s credit, he refrains from strident polemics or symbolism. O’Neill presents a pervasive and undisguised homage to Irish literature.

Author Flann O’Brien is invoked from the title similar to “At Swim-Two-Birds,” as well as by much of the inventive and playful language: “rorty,” “surdity,” “amplush,” “leucomelaneous” and “poweration.” The preamble to chapter one recalls the opening of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” as does the amply significant use of the “Martello Tower.”

But none of these nods to other works cause confusion, and any nuggets from Irish history are presupposed, including several historical figures appearing in the novel. Among these is Roger Casement, whose infamous homosexuality seems the real point of his being invoked.

If a slap-dash cop and car chase through the streets of 1916 Dublin seems improbable, it is in keeping with the sorts of antics characters in novels by Roddy Doyle and other of O’Neill’s younger Irish contemporaries get up to.

More objectionable are the passages in which Anthony MacMurrough communes with “Scrotes,” the ghost of a dead cellmate from Wandsworth prison. The two fulminate about the nobility of Spartan soldier-lovers and similar topics in passages that are learned and preachy. Perhaps O’Neill means to suggest a late Edwardian ethos of “the love than dared not speak its name,” but at this he does not succeed.

Jamie O’Neill is reported to have worked on “At Swim, Two Boys” for 10 years, during which time he supported himself financially by employment as a night porter. With this, his third novel, he clearly deserves better employment.

INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW
December, 2002. University of Southern California, LA, CA.
Reviewed by Raj Ayyar.

It is temptingly facile to describe Jamie O’Neill as a contemporary James Joyce. Indeed, many Irish and British reviewers have gushingly exaggerated the parallels between O’Neill and his celebrated Irish predecessor. I think this comparison is over-stretched. O’Neill lacks Joyce’s easy familiarity with world mythologies and philosophies – Greek, Celtic, Hindu and others, and Joyce’s almost lazily brilliant ability to infuse multi-mythic themes and texts into ordinary Dublin landscapes.

Moreover, though Joyce was intractably heterosexual, few gay writers can rival his many celebrations of the archetypal Androgyne. Case in point: the brothel scene toward the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, where Bloom changes into a woman and the Madam into a man. Coupling wildly, they give birth to several fully grown children who become doctors, railwaymen and corporate chiefs! This is the kind of wildly farcical, gender-bendering surreal camp, that Joyce could pull off so well.

Having said all that, the absence of Joyce’s mythic criss-crosses and ramblings gives At Swim, Two Boys a tightness of structure hard to achieve in a stream of consciousness novel. It gives the novel a rare quality: a stream of consciousness novel that can be descriptively realistic. Also, it allows O’Neill to explore the extraordinary intensities lurking beneath the surface of the ordinary – intensities of sexual passion, unrequited love, trembling adolescent self-discovery and political struggle against colonialism.

At Swim is a deliciously big novel in every sense of the word and what’s better yet, a big gay novel in a PoMo era where many writers shrinking from Grand Narratives, content themselves with brief deconstructive burps.

The novel bears all the marks of the Irish Blues – wild humor, self-pity and great appreciation of the sadness and the sheer waste of Ireland under the British yoke. It celebrates male-male love with intensity and passion. Walt Whitman’s “love of comrades” is a major inspiration for the author and the epigram at the beginning of the novel is taken from Whitman’s Calamus:

I will make inseparable cities with their arms
about each others’ necks;
By the love of comrades.

At the heart of the comradely love in At Swim, Two Boys, is the weirdly comfortable gay triangle featuring three young Irishmen in the Dublin of 1915 and thereafter: MacMurrough, Doyler and Jim Mack.

MacMurrough is a decadent, dandyfied, self-consciously Wildean Irish squire, recently released from prison after serving a sodomy sentence. His unquenchable lust for young working class men is peppered with quotes and postures from Oscar Wilde and tempered by his superego/inner censor Scrotes.

Loosely based on an old professor he knew in prison, Scrotes is the voice of his Catholic guilt and training. The tug o’war between Dick (MacMurrough’s rampantly thrusting, greedy phallus) and the disapproving, Aquinas-quoting Scrotes is often hilarious. Despite Scrotes, MacMurrough has his way with young working class Doyler and Scrotes retreats to a lone tower room in MacMurrough’s mind.

“How shy they go...the boy with his peach. Buxom seat of unmanhood. ...MacMurrough’s ring finger...crept into the crease now, discovering hair, a dampness, a hairyless wetness, dry spot....he worked his hand through the thighs, clutched in rather a how-are-ye way the tightening balls till, proud as the morning, he found what he sought. Pulled once or twice, then back through the plush and silky skin to the stone-dry ring. Knotted. A Mary-hole. ... He seized the boy’s shoulders and mounted him.”

Despite sad Scrotes, Dick rides Doyler “like a beast of the wild.” Most of the sexual encounters in the book are captured with detailed, descriptive stream of consciousness precision – every gasp and shudder of pleasure-pain, every thrust and the delectable delights of long, lazy foreplay.

The centerpiece of the novel is the growing passion between two adolescents: Doyler, that ‘dark, rough diamond’ who has little flings on the side with MacMurrough and everyone else, and Jim Mack, the younger son of Mr. Mack, the shopkeeper.

The two young men meet on a regular basis at the Forty Foot, a great jut of rock, where men bathed in the scandalous nude. Doyler initiates the timid, virginal Jim into the joys of nude swimming and much more. They make a boyish pact to swim out to the distant Muglins rock one day, there to raise the Irish Green for Ireland and themselves. This novel offers a superbly heartachey account of sexual awakening, framed against a backdrop of a post-Parnell Ireland, hopeful of liberation from British colonialism and oppression, yet despairing of ever reaching that goal. The novel reaches way beyond the comforting but false stereotype that Sinn Fein was the only player in the game that eventually led to a free Irish Republic.

Parnell and Wilde are the two great Irish ghosts that haunt At Swim. By a deft mythic fusion, Jamie O’Neill ties in the homophobia that jailed Wilde with the colonial oppression that marginalized Ireland for centuries. In the end, MacMurrough, Doyler and Jim are comradely heroes fighting for their sexual as well as their national survival.

Interestingly enough, the process brings out a rare tenderness and strength in MacMurrough. By the end of the novel, he emerges as the central protagonist if only by virtue of the fact that he is the only character that has grown and developed way past his languid dandyisms and working class seductions.

In a curious way, MacMurrough offers the reader an alternative Oscar Wilde who transcends the brutalization of his incarceration and, far from crumbling, becomes a loving, gay fighting Irish patriot.

MINNEAPOLIS CITY PAGES
May 15, 2002. Minneapolis, MN.
“Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen” – reviewed by Tricia Cornell

All young Jimmy Mack wants – at least at first – is to trade his breeches for a pair of long pants so that the boys at school will have one less thing to tease him about. He lives in a muddy suburb of Dublin with his social-climbing shopkeeper father. “The Macks is on the up,” Mr. Mack is fond of saying – an optimism facilitated by his steadfast refusal to take note of the boot that keeps kicking him down to the bottom rung of the ladder.

Soon enough, Jimmy will.

It’s 1916 in Dublin. Young Irish boys who signed up to fight for their homeland are finding themselves fighting England’s battles in Belgium. A rigid class structure keeps half the country near starvation. The powerful Catholic Church has a spell cast over the population. Gaelic as a mother tongue is dying out, and with it a sense of what makes the Irish Irish. More than any slum, the situation positively stinks of revolution and opportunity. And in 1916 Dublin there are plenty waiting to make the most of that opportunity: socialists, nationalists, Catholics looking to drive out the Anglican devils, even a certain layer of the upper classes that wants to build its own fiefdoms.

In At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill stirs all this up into a yeasty brew of adolescence, nationalism, and forbidden sexuality. (In these themes, the book recalls Patrick McCabe’s more comic Breakfast on Pluto.) The sexual is inextricably bound with the political: Before young Jim gets caught up in the various revolutions about him, he first is charmed by the tilt of his friend Doyler’s cap and the free and easy way he has with his, um, flute. Soon Jim wants more than just to shed his breeches. He wants Doyler to love him back. He wants the muscular fops at the Forty Foot beach to notice him. He might eventually even want justice and a free Ireland.

O’Neill spent ten years toiling over At Swim, Two Boys, his third novel, while – if the publisher’s promos are to be believed – working nights in a mental institution. His writing is dense with half-sentences, which makes reading it akin to listening in on someone else’s private thoughts. And he has a penchant for making you puzzle things out on your own. (Patience: If it’s not clear on the first reference, there will be a second.) Every polished sentence sings with O’Neill’s own authentic County Dublin vernacular. In the end, At Swim, Two Boys is a love story. Amid the incipient Troubles, it’s a beautiful thing when Doyler calls Jim, in the old Gaelic, cara macree – pal o’ my heart.

SOUTH JERSEY COURIER-POST
Saturday, April 13, 2002. New Jersey,NJ.
‘At Swim, Two Boys’ is the sound of Irish music. Reviewed by Kevin Riordan

It’s tempting to describe the voices, the language and the whole of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys as musical. But an adjective well suited to many other Irish novels seems unsuitably generic in the face of this book’s singular, almost audible, beauty.

Set in and around Dublin, this big, ambitious and accomplished novel opens in 1915. It culminates a year later in the Easter Rising, the famous (or infamous) moment in modern Irish history when the fractious and feuding opponents of British rule mounted a dramatic, if quixotic, attempt at revolution.

The two boys of the title are Jim, a student whose beloved big brother, Gordie, is fighting Germany under the British flag, and Doyler, a laborer who yearns to free Ireland from British rule.

Doyler teaches Jim to swim and the two 16-year-olds make a pact: They will become strong enough to reach a rocky island known as the Muglins on Easter Sunday, 1916.

During the summer Jim and Doyler swim together daily, their friendship deepens into love. Their involvement in what will become the doomed uprising deepens as well. And their struggle to be freely together becomes one with the Irish struggle for nationhood.

“He’s my country” is how Jim describes Doyler to MacMurrough, the secretly gay aristocrat who becomes something of a guardian angel to the two. Having returned to Ireland in disgrace after serving two years in a British prison for solicitation, MacMurrough is drifting and somewhat dissolute – until he, too, finds that comradeship and patriotism are intertwined.

As MacMurrough’s friend, Scrotes, puts it: “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. These things will take care of themselves. The struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and cast a shadow its own in the sun.”

Only MacMurrough can hear these eloquent words; they’re spoken by his fellow prison inmate Scrotes, who’s dead. But the ambiguity – is MacMurrough mad? bad? – gives way, gradually, to clarity. He is a good, if grievously wounded, man, in whose embrace the boys will find at least some protection.

Just as Jim, Doyler and MacMurrough come to know themselves, the reader comes to know, and love, the many vivid inhabitants of At Swim, Two Boys.

O’Neill’s living, breathing dialogue, lovely language and thorough command of his material, historical as well as emotional, give At Swim, Two Boys the resonance of, yes, music, but great music.

Jamie O’Neill will read from and sign his book at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 21, at the Philadelphia Free Library, 1901 Vine St., Philadelphia.

TAMPA TRIBUNE
Sunday 21 July, 2002. Tampa, FL.

With the backdrop of Ireland’s uprising against the British in 1916, this exquisitely written “coming of age” novel follows two teen buddies, Jim and Doyler, who meet each day to swim at a local watering hole. Slowly they fall in love as the world comes crashing down around them. It’s a tender and heartbreaking story that will shake you but also indubitably leave you awestruck. The writing is sheer brilliance, filled with memorable images and an almost Joycean beauty and complexity. O’Neill’s words don’t just sing – they yodel! The book took its author over a decade to write, and it was worth each second of the wait.

NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE
Saturday, March 16, 2002. New Orleans, USA.
Wild Irish Prose, by Susan Larson.

At Swim, Two Boys is a fine homage to James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and yes, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, a novel of male friendship and love set against the events leading up to Easter 1916.

Jim Mack is the son of the town storekeeper, embarrassed by his father in front of tony classmates at his school. His “pal of me heart” is Doyler, whose family circumstances have set him out to work at an early age. But his intelligence and goodness set him apart from the crowd. The two boys make a pact – Doyler will teach Jim to swim from Forty Foot Rock to Muglins Rock, and they will reach their goal on Easter Sunday.

O’Neill writes with tenderness and elegance of the romance between the two boys, the bedrock of friendship, and the tentative, hopeful steps towards intimacy. And underneath the text runs the refrain of a code word Jim Mack’s brother Gordie uses in his letters home from the front in Turkey: Aldershot, for “All Love Does Ever Rightly Show Humanity Our Tenderness.” Indeed it does.

Here are Jim and Doyler at their morning swim:

“Jim liked to watch him then, when the morning light hazed about him, fuzzing with gold the hairs of his outline. Behind loomed the battery walls and beyond stretched the craggy rocks. It seemed a glorious place in the morning, an extraordinary grace to be allowed there, where man and nature mixed and lost each other, one in the other like the land in the sea.”

But the boys’ relationship is set against the passions of the age. And there is also the growing friendship between Jim Mack and Anthony MacMurrough, nephew of the town aristocrat, back from serving two years in a British jail for committing the crime of loving another man. MacMurrough is not immune to Doyler’s charms himself: “a damnable honesty, the penchant for misery, a yearning for magnificence but a spirit unwinged.”

As all three men are swept out by the waves of history, violence threatens to pull them all under. This is a tragedy, to be sure, one the reader feels all the more keenly after growing to love these characters. “He slept that night thinking of loves and lighthouses. That one love might shine to bring all loves home. What more was the meaning of Easter?” MacMurrough wonders.

In imaginary dialogues with his old tutor Scrotes, MacMurrough hears him articulate the struggles of the historical moment:

“Like all nations, Scrotes answered, a nation of the heart. Look about you. See Irish-Ireland find out its past. Only with a past may it claim a future. Watch it on tramcars thumbing its primers. Only a language its own may speak to it truly. What does this language say? It says you are a proud and ancient people. For a nation may not prosper without it have pride. You and I, MacMurrough, may smile at the fabulous claims of the Celt. We may know that the modern Irishman as much resembles the Gael of old as he resembles the Esquimau or the Kafir on the Hindu Kush. And we may believe he is the better for that. But no matter. 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. These things will take care of themselves. The struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and cast a shadow its own in the sun.”

That struggle has never been more eloquently articulated than it is in At Swim, Two Boys.

Susan Larson is the Books Editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

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