The novelist who sets his work in the past faces the in-built difficulty of getting the sense of time and place just right. It is not enough merely to toss in a scattering of topical references as decoration - the manner in which people conversed, their body language, fashion, the very resonances of life are pertinent to establishing the reader's belief that such and such a period in the past is being re-created. To take just one example: swearing. The film Michael Collins was spoiled for me because of the frequent use of the "f" word. Even when I was growing up - in the 1940s and 1950s - the most popular "f" word in use was "feck", with its broader cousin little, if ever, used. When people swore, it was usually hinged on some profanity, the religious connotation apparently giving weight to the amount of feeling being expressed. These thoughts struck me as I was reading Fergus Linehan's new novel, which is set in the latter part of 1941 and the New Year of 1942. I was slightly put off in the early stages by the old-fashioned air, the rather prosaic language, the stereotyped characters, the cliched ring to the storyline, but then it dawned on me that I was viewing the narrative with an end rather than a mid-century outlook.
To get a particular period right, it is best to compose the account in the manner it would have been composed in at the time. Using this proposition as my criterion, I then happily galloped through the rest of the text, enjoying the rise and fall of the story. And what are the bones of said story? Well,
Young Eddie O'Sullivan, reared in a hotbed of republican frenzy in his native Tipperary, comes to Dublin to help assassinate a policeman who has been assiduous in putting away IRA volunteers. The detective is duly done to death, but Eddie, rather innocent in the use of arms, is immediately sorry for the part he has played in the killing. His nationalistic outlook is also tainted by the fact that he has fallen in love with a girl, Kay, who sings in the Coliseum, a vast variety-cum-film theatre, where the top-of-the-bill comedian is the lizard-like Dickie Delaney. Eddie just happens to be in lodgings with Dickie's straight man, Frankie Fox, an embittered wannabe comedian himself. Also playing a part in the melodrama are Nora Keating, who runs the lodging house like a female Uriah Heep; Mr Dolan and Mr Corrigan, clerks in the Department of Supplies; and a comic maid, Nellie; while in the house next door Mrs Kennedy mourns the disappearance of her husband on the Western Front and her youngest son is befriended by republican Eddie.
The characters, although moulded to a pattern, are quite well drawn. Take Corrigan, for example: "Corrigan was a pious man - he went into the church at lunch hour and after work; he'd been known to hand out little cards with devotional prayers on them, invoking Our Lady of Lourdes and various saints; he carried rosary beads and wore a brown scapular under his shirt; he was a member of the Society for the Abolition of Evil Literature and had on several occasions spoken vehemently and bitterly about the appalling effects, particularly on the young, of filthy books and moving picture shows." It comes as no great surprise, later on in the book, to find this particular gent masturbating determinedly to a remembered image of Betty Grable, her million-dollar legs on show and gazing provocatively at him over her shoulder. The book, then, is a slightly old-fashioned recreation of the early 1940s in Ireland, during the time of the so-called Emergency. Mr Linehan is no prose stylist, but he tells his story well, has done his research, and has painted an authentic picture of a time and a place long gone. Nostalgia-filled for those of us old enough to remember it, absorbing, hopefully, for the younger crowd.
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