Irish Fiction: Sean O'Reilly's maze of rage is an outstanding Irish novel, writes Eileen Battersby.
Noel Boyle, no longer quite so young, but determined not so much to change his life as to find one, has fled the North of Ireland for Dublin. His determination is a bit half-hearted but still it staggers on, shaped as it is by a ramshackle courage - or perhaps it's only terror.
Attending his lectures at Trinity College, he has a go at writing his essays, works part-time in a telephone call shop, and thinks - thinks and festers and remembers with a relentless lucidity as he remains firmly, if shakily, on the run from himself.
This is the world of Sean O'Reilly's second novel. Two years on from the triumph of his debut, Love and Sleep, an outstanding European novel, comes this longer, more complex and ambitious work. To describe it as further confirmation of his gifts is an understatement.
It is a major achievement; poised, raucous and real, and simply light years superior to anything published by his contemporaries in Britain, and most other places as well. It is an outstanding Irish novel and also an outstanding modern novel by a youngish writer who happens to be Irish and has caught his society in freefall in an urgent, vivid narrative of energy and perception.
Admittedly, none of this amounts to a revelation. After all, he gave a clear indication of what was to come in most of the eight stories in Curfew, a collection published in 2001. It shimmered with the anger, humanity and desperate black humour that mark O'Reilly's emphatic, eloquent fictions which never lose sight of his native Derry. Northern Ireland and the Republic run side by side, they are both one and the same and two separate places. His grasp of this injects an element of the essential familiar and alien, the ambivalence of two cultures, one country.
Love and Sleep told the story of Niall, a disaffected son-of-a-bitch torn between self-belief and fear. A writer incapable of writing, he has returned to Ireland carrying all of his angst in his suitcase. His Derry merely provides another stage for his discontent. So absorbed in his own woes is Niall that the collective agonies of everyone else are reduced to a sideshow. O'Reilly makes no pleas on Niall's behalf and allows him to give his version of events in a bitter first-person narrative. The result is an exciting variation on a familiar theme, a portrait of an artist wallowing in the usual self-created mess.
The narrative rages and convinces because O'Reilly's prose is charged with a muscular grace and earthy defiance. Just when your nerve-endings have become raw with the grimness of his realism, an unexpected lyric image eases the passage. The same and more applies to The Swing of Things, an often beautiful maze of rage.
Boyle is more sympathetic and far more lost than Niall ever was. Boyle is the Northerner adrift in a Dublin populated by drifters. O'Reilly's depiction of the communal trauma that appears to have drenched each of the misfits, dreamers and losers trapped like so many flies on sticky paper, confers an extraordinary depth to the narrative. All of the characters are floundering; most of them survive.
Hardly surprisingly, Boyle's world-weary air of defeat attracts a beautiful young girl, whom he nicknames The Dove. She certainly flutters and swoops, drawn to him as a person her campaigning spirit can save. Meanwhile, he feels uncomfortable in the face of "her permanent state of inspiration". His edgy sensibility can't cope with anything beyond his new routines.
As the narrative opens Dublin has become obsessed with the face of its newest martyr of the moment. She is, or rather was, a mysterious young woman who drowned in the Liffey. Her body was pulled from the water and her face, in death, possesses sufficient allure to woo the media and attract the hungry masses. Plaster death-masks capturing her serene features are being sold at street-corners. Boyle is fascinated by the woman's tragedy but repelled by the cult and commerce now surrounding her.
Into Boyle's life comes Fada, a daft street-poet and hanger-on with a dangerous flair for trouble. The pair team up less through friendship than mutual hopelessness. Fada has many problems. Compounding his inherent tendency to drift from person to person is his loss of a packet of poems that belong to an old lady. He needs to find them. The search is expectedly chaotic but the mystery is solved - only too late for the lady who owns them.
Caught up in the slipstream of Fada's mess is Boyle. By supporting Fada through his latest chaos, Boyle meets up with Eleanor, with whom further escape and salvation is possible. But he declines the offer. All the while, running parallel with his new existence - life is too strong a word - in Dublin is Boyle's history, the mistakes he made back home in the North. They helped him pass eight years in prison, but their legacy remains, and with it, a price to pay.
A sense of that former life is kept very much alive by the presence of Boyle's old friend, Dainty, a man with a tongue like dirty washing. It is impossible to forget your former self when a witness with a memory as sharp as Dainty's remains in touch.
Heroes hold no appeal for O'Reilly, who prefers his characters real and battle-scarred. Yet Boyle is not exactly a coward either. Ironically, when he makes his biggest mistake to date, it echoes the tragedy of the young woman whose peaceful dead face has brought her temporary fame. His short period on the run is the culmination of Boyle's multiple confusions.
Story is all, and this chaotic, though deliberate narrative possesses the plot of a thriller. Yet O'Reilly the inspired stylist is most concerned with mood and tone. As a study of one man's inner turmoil, The Swing of Things is close to perfect. As a portrait of a modern city caught in a violent present devoid of history or culture, it also speaks volumes. Through a voice which is alive and profound, here is a world-class novel of the moment with the strongest claim on the future.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Swing of Things. By Sean O'Reilly Faber, 302pp. £10.99