Aiden O Reilly
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The Boy in the Gap

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Jack Sammon recounts his childhood years growing up on a small farm in the west of Ireland in the early 80’s. The father died some years previously. He and his older brother Seán learn the skills of farming and the rhythms of nature from an aging neighbour – Martín Conway – who becomes a father figure to them. Lambing season, bullying teachers, fights at school, and scoffers in the pub are all chronicled. The prose is underpinned by Jack’s sensitivity to the landscape and the seasons.

I took to visiting the faery wood whenever I could. I would climb another oak tree and sit on a bough looking out over the lake, watching and listening, sometimes talking aloud to the air. Things still had a wintry look to them. The hills in the distance might have a white cap from a night of snow or hail. The flock of whooper swans was nearing the end of the winter stay on the lake, and would soon be off to their breeding grounds in Greenland, Martín said. I counted upwards of thirty-three and wondered how many of them would make it back again the next year and how many would perish on their migration.

The novel is written as Jack’s memoir as he waits on remand to be tried for some unnamed crime. Each chapter begins with a short passage in italics depicting Jack’s inner mind as he sits in his cell. The narrative he writes in the prison-issue exercise book is neutral and slow-paced, in a functional prose. The italic passages however are fragmentary and immediate mixtures of memories of his arrest, experiences on remand, and despairing thoughts.

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The reader’s sympathies tend naturally to lie with the young boy at first. But Jack is a frustrating protagonist to root for. He resents his mother’s new partner and becomes more distant from his brother and younger sister. He harbours obscure resentments. He brings his girlfriend on a walk through some no-man’s land by the lake and tells her that the little flat stones are graves; they are in a graveyard for unbaptised babies. In one passage depicting a small-town rite of passage – a scuffle among the boys followed by an encounter with girls at the local chipper – his attention lingers on the girls and then skips on:

Shoulders nudged, heads flicked; legs, shapes and sizes were admired; tongues clicked, and as I came from the shop with two Cokes, Liam was talking to a girl from the convent. The amorous dogs hadn’t been distracted for long and were regrouped, snapping at each other in their excitement.

It’s disturbing image, just quietly dropped in there. Those dogs return over a hundred pages later at a moment of what should have been tenderness: “… and the old anxieties and self-doubt returned. I was waiting for the mongrel street-wise dogs to arrive sniffing and snapping; for a herd, heifers and their calves, to come bumping and bucking from among the trees and to walk in and foul the water; for a ram with flared nostrils to charge among the ewes.”

The narrator has implicated the reader too deeply in his story for him to be able to distinguish to what extent to what extent Jack’s predicament is a result of Catholic Ireland’s repression, Jack’s own morbidity, or the tragic secret his mother hides.

The author Paul Soye evidently holds to the Heraclitean wisdom “A man’s character is his fate”. After almost 200 pages chronicling his teenage years, the story jumps to London. The immersion in the buzz and hum of the metropolis is an invigorating change – for the reader – but it will not deflect the inevitable tragedy. His new girlfriend, marriage, and promotions at the concrete plant are sketched over in a couple of dozen pages. This should be the happiest time of his life. But his character has been formed, the trap is set, the return to Ireland looms closer.

The novel is a meticulously crafted depiction of that peculiar confluence of family loyalties, sexual shame, and love of the land which used to power the psyche of rural Ireland and still does in many hidden ways. The story has the peculiar quality that you get the impression the author himself is struggling to comprehend the forces at work here. Psychologists and sociologists will be free to draw their own conclusions, treating the novel as a window to reality which no interview or statistical survey can ever access.

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Colin Wilson’s Necessary Doubt

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The book fell into my hands again after a span of 20 years. I had been fiercely enthusiastic about it back then: it had set down thought patterns in me. I had gone on to read all the Colin Wilson’s books I could lay hands on – which was not very many, four or five perhaps.

I wondered what impact the book would have on me today. I feared the judgement of a past self which would be reawakened.

I began to read. This time around I was more aware of the social context. Details of rooms and London streets were vivid. The novel is set in the early 1950’s – the sexual frankness and openness to new trends makes it feel like the sixties, but the gentlemen’s clubs and occasional servants give it one foot in the Victorian era.

At first there was surprisingly little that that was familiar. Almost nothing. Almost as though I had never read it — all that remained was the recognition of the ideas driving it, but no recognition of characters or place. There were dim associations for a scene where they call on a ex-chief inspector who is dressed in a bright orange dressing gown. A couple of references to excellent brandy which I recalled finding pretentious. At one point the main character drinks two bottles of wine in a night – when I read it 20 years ago I wondered if that was humanly possible.

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The Russian woman who wields her sexuality with skill and creativity jolted my memory. She initiates a sort of ‘play seduction’ with the main character, an aging academic philosopher. I recall this had fascinated me – I was no doubt still steeped in the very Irish association of feminine charm with sinfulness.

No ‘aha’ moments of instant familiarity. This throws into doubt the continuity of Aiden. How can he even begin to assess the project he set himself back then?

The novel is structured like a thriller. The main character, a German professor called Zweig, catches a fleeting glimpse of a student of his from decades previously – Neumann – outside a London railway station. This student had been a deep-thinking and troubled young man in 1930’s Heidelberg. He had been under the influence of Nietzschean theories of rising above good and evil. Zweig had read newspaper reports years later of how Neumann had inherited millions from an old man who died in mysterious circumstances. And now Zweig spotted him in the company of an old and obviously wealthy gentleman.

Zweig plays a ‘what if’ game with his suspicions. But then more and more evidence accumulates – a police inspector friends reveals Neumann was investigated briefly over the death of yet another old man in Maidstone.

It’s a thriller workling on two levels. On one level Zweig and his friends track down Neumann and piece together the evidence against him. But through flashbooks to pre-war Heidelberg and readings of Neumann’s published articles, Zweig pieces together the mind of a man who has strayed far from conventional morality.

The core question is whether Neumann’s nihilistic philosophy set him on a course that led straight to murder, or whether (the more comfortable thought) all criminals are basically self-deceiving, petty egoists. Crime in that case is an expression an inferiority complex.

Zweig does not for a moment doubt Neumann’s integrity and committment to living life with purpose. Could such a man have striven to rise above the merely human by setting himself beyond good and evil? He recalls a quote from Neumann:

All human beings are insects, and the gods laugh at us. There’s nothing we can do to become greatest … What can a man do to try to be more than an insect?

Wilson shows remarkable prescience. The decades since this novel was first published have thrown up megalomanic murderers time and time again.

‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius if unleashed would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?’

That’s from the Yorkshire ripper.

There’s a huge sense of intellectual excitement in the novel – coupled with Zweig’s sense of a loss of authenticity in his own life. Whether or not Neumann is a criminal, Zweig has been shaken from living day-to-day by habit.

The novel cleverly holds back from any encounter Neumann until half-way through the book. And in a reversal of momentum, it is Neumann who comes to the lair of his pursuers. The atmosphere of this meeting is tense and subtle: the reader begins to suspect that it is Zweig who has abandoned any seriousness of thought, Zweig perceives sees only personal malice in the encounter, while Neumann is still on his search for Truth.

The author clearly took these ideas as seriously as Dostoyevski did when writing his Brothers Karamanzov. In his contention that mankind is on the verge of a new evolutionary breakthrough in consciousness, Wilson may yet be proved right.

The novel deserves to be read again. But more than that, the “plot engine” deserves a re-visitation – a two-faceted manhunt, to pin down both the physical man and the ideas which drive him.

CONTINUE READING >
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Soul

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Andrey Platonov

A young engineering student in Moscow in the 1930’s is given the mission of helping to modernise the impoverished Dzhan people of a remote desert area. He is of those people himself, but his mother had sent him away when he was only ten or eleven, knowing she could never provide for him.

The desert area is a Nowhere-Land close to the borders with Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran. The people there are a motley assemblage of “runaway slaves, criminals, people who didn’t know God”, — with no proud traditions, no sense of history, no awareness of itself as a people. They live in reed houses and live off the pounded roots of the same reeds. They have lost all sense of being alive.

It’s a powerful story – part fable, part realism, part epic tale, part nihilism. I have just too many thoughts to write down anything here.

I am reminded of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who couldn’t bear to think that so many human lives pass by with so little significance. He advocated a universal project for mankind of using scientific methods to resurrect all those who have ever lived.

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The Tinker’s Curse

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Michael Harding’s play at Bewley’s Lunchtime Theatre

Integrity is the word that springs to mind after watching this play.

Michael presents the traveller Mikey on a visit to Croagh Patrick. He fumbles with his rosary beads and mass card, presses them into the hands of a member of the audience and tells her to mind that for a moment. His story is not a narrative, but is woven together from visionary moments, tales he has heard, and the occasional return to the present moment, there standing on Croagh Patrick.

This is not realism in the strict sense. It’s Mikey making sense of things. He shuffles about the stage, mixing memories, tales of ghostly horses and descriptions of a menacing band of travellers from somewhere up north: “You wouldn’t know where they were from,” he repeats. The threat from these mysterious strangers is more metaphysical than physical.

Michael plunges into the part with absolute authenticity. It’s not by chance he chose the name Mikey for his character. Michael has worked with travellers for years, knows their lore and their rhythms of speech. Rooted in close contact, authentic, faithful – yet charged with a vision that is needed to make sense of it all. This play will live for a long time.

CONTINUE READING >
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Selected Posts

  • Backstory of a book
    2019-02-22
  • Stinging Fly Wheldon essay
    2017-07-24
  • The Blocks by Karl Parkinson
    2016-10-02
  • London Trip
    2016-09-05
  • Honest Ulsterman interview
    2016-02-29
  • Greetings, Hero launch Hodges Figgis
    2014-11-21

Selected pages

  • Debut Book
  • Publications
  • Writers' Workbench at Block T

Crucial

  • . .
  • Asylum books
  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Daniel Seery
  • David Mohan
  • Djelloul Marbrook
  • Gorse magazine
  • Slava Nesterov Artist
  • The Penny Dreadful
  • The road to publication
  • The Short Review
  • The Short Review
  • Unthology

Other links

  • . .
  • Karl Parkinson's The Blocks
  • Unthology 4 review
  • Wandering minstrel Larry Beau

What I'm up to

  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Examiner review
  • Irish Times / Ashley Stokes
  • Irish Times Q+A Irish Times Q+A
  • The road to publication

Recent posts

  • Interpolated Stories, by David Rose
  • Renaud Contini’s The Infinite Castle
  • Hangdog Souls by Marc Joan
  • Writers’ Workbench, Block T Dublin 8
  • New writing course at Crumlin College
  • Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant

Quotation

The Tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction
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