This is a moving, often beautiful, tale of the friendship between two boys of different social background in the year before the Easter Rising of 1916. Jim is the scholarly and religious son of Mr Mack, a shopkeeper on the rise after a period with the "Colours" in India; Doyler is the extrovert Larkinite son of Mr Mack's old dipsomaniacal army comrade.
The boys meet at the all-male bathing place known as the Forty Foot. Their attraction becomes physical, cutting across the class calibrations of a Glasthule which divides even its churchgoers according to the number of pennies which they subscribe at the door. They make a kind of Faustian pact to train daily in preparation for a swim to the Muglins planned for Easter 1916. It is a literary conceit, of course, but one which works rather well.
Less convincing is the portrayal of characters from the sub-plots. The local Anglo-Irish grande dame, Eveline McMurrough, appears to be modelled on Eva Gore-Booth, but the real Eva would hardly thank Jamie O'Neill for this portrait of a female hysteric. Her brother, who is infatuated by the boys and has just done two years at Wandsworth, is a cardboard Wilde, who is made to speak in the sort of clichΘs which Oscar himself might have considered actionable. The treatment of some of the extreme Irish Irelanders also verges on the unbelievable - there is a Father Amen O'Toiler (╔amonn ╙ Tβilli·ir, geddit?) straight out of Revisionist Central Casting.
That said, however, there are also very deft, understated portrayals-in-passing of Pearse and Connolly, of Tom Kettle and Constance Markievicz, each imagined not with the force of hindsight but as he or she might have appeared at the time. Pearse, for instance, comes over as at once spellbinding and a little foolish (something he observed cannily in himself).
The opening chapters seem too "literary" in a knowing Irish way. The interior monologues through which Mr Mack is rendered are filled with the verbal mannerisms of Leopold Bloom - so much so that it is hard for the reader who knows Ulysses to form a clear sense of Mr Mack's own inner acoustic. There are too many echoes also of O'Casey's alliterating autobiographies ("the flicker of a flame") and the language seems overladen with flavoursome phrases. The reader may fear that this is a plot which will develop more as an occasion for notching up Hibernicisms than from the pressure of a felt, fully realised experience.
Yet that fear is soon dispelled. As the story unfolds, O'Neill rescues most of the characters from the straitjacket of the caricatural, allowing them to grow in psychological complexity. One of the finest aspects of his technique is his determination, by the use of interior monologues, to see most of the protagonists as they would ideally see themselves. That openness of spirit extends even to the sceptical reader, who can forgive the imperfections as a price worth paying for a work of such panoramic sweep, one which offers a range of social types as comprehensive as that to be found in Jim Plunkett's Strumpet City.
Quietly but effectively, all the historical threads which shaped modern Ireland are drawn together - the imperial experience of soldiers in the colonies and in the Great War, the nationalist counter-movements of Gaelic League, Sinn Fein and Citizen Army. The living characters converse with the spirits of dead loved ones, as if this is an unremarkable daily occurrence (which for many people in those days it surely was). The decline of social deference sees Doyler at one point pushing the Anglo-Irish gent into a hedge in Stephen's Green. All of these social changes are observed without undue moralising.
The frank (sometimes brutal) accounts of gay sex may shock some readers, but are hardly gratuitous, being part of a developing narrative which explores the ways in which the Irish Question was implicated in the official English mindset with "the love that dare not speak its name", from Wilde to Casement. The classical theories of male friendship which formed a major backdrop to the experience of soldiers in the period are well explored. O'Neill is well aware that many men felt that they were dying less for their country than for one another.
In the end, even ridiculous, would-be-respectable Mr Mack emerges not just as the sort of clown who gets arrested for defacing military posters he is actually trying to restore, but as a dignified figure worthy of the novelist's interest and of the reader's love. He is in fact a sort of Fluther Good of the Southside, who helps destitute children and bumbles through the streets of Rising Dublin unaware of risk, indifferent now to his time in the "Colours", concerned only for the safety of his sole surviving son. He is a real comic creation, who stands for the live and the living, even when surrounded by death.
At Swim, Two Boys survives its mannered opening to become something rich and strange in Irish literature. Readers who are put off in the early stages should persist, for this is that rare enough thing - a novel of epic ambition which does not fail to live.
Declan Kiberd is head of the English Department at UCD and author of Irish Classics.