WE’VE TOUCHED here before on the potential misfortune of being saddled with the Irish forename “Sonabha”. A beautiful thing in itself, it can be easily led astray by the surnomial company it keeps. And it being exclusively a girl’s name is not much protection against phonetic misunderstanding.
Imagine, for example, if you inherited that well-known Kilkenny surname “Nunn” and your parents – temporarily distracted by the joys of a new-born baby – christened you Sonabha. Your school-days would surely be trying: even, or especially, if they were in a convent. Johnny Cash’s Boy Name Sue would have escaped lightly by comparison.
But I only return to the subject now because I met my first real-life Sonabha – Sunniva as she spells it – on Sunday, at the Dalkey Book Festival. She was among the audience for a panel discussion in which I took part: about Flann O'Brien and The Third Policeman. And whatever schoolyard traumas the name had caused, her sense of humour had clearly survived intact. True, she mentioned that she has spent much of her adult life in Germany, although I don't think she was forced into exile. In any case, here's the funny thing. She owed her name, at least in part, to the same Flann O'Brien. He was her godfather, no less. And it seems that – always the gas man – he suggested it would be an amusing thing to call a girl.
Names were something of an obsession with him, his own collection – real and pseudonymous – being famously extensive. He set the scene early on when he was born both as Brian O’Nolan and Brian Ó Nualláin. And not even those were without confusion: there remaining to this day a question about whether the anglicised version had any good reason to have an O, something not normally found among Nolans.
Whatever about his proper name, one of the reasons The Irish Times hired him to write a column in 1940 was to rescue the integrity of its letters page, which O’Nolan had by then thoroughly hijacked under a series of false identities: having arguments with himself and others, usually about literature.
The name “Flann O’Brien” made its debut on one such spoof and “Oscar Love” and “Lir O’Connor” were among other correspondents who also had O’Nolan’s fingerprints. More than 70 years on, it’s possible some of his cover-names have avoided exposure even yet. But with the centenary year provoking unprecedented interest, literary detectives are probably combing the crime scene anew as we speak.
The pseudonym under which the column subsequently appeared was not uncomplicated either. It started out as Myles na gCopaleen, before the author lost his eclipsis during the war. No, it wasn’t bomb damage: he just simplified the name, probably for the benefit of overseas readers, and thereafter went by Myles na Gopaleen.
Add in his other literary covers, from George Knowall to (maybe) Stephen Blakesley and you suspect that this constantly shape-shifting author belongs alongside another great mystery figure of Irish history. If Thomas Russell was The Man from God Knows Where, O’Nolan was the Man Called God Knows What.
And then there is The Third Policeman, in which the chief protagonist has no name at all. Or at least, we never find out what it is. In fact, as murder novels go, the book is doubly unusual, in that we learn the identity of the killer (it’s the narrator) in the very first sentence: whereafter the whodunnit becomes more of an existentialist question.
The reader could easily ignore this lack of identity – a first-person narrator doesn’t always need a name – except that, after a certain event early in the story, we learn that he himself has temporarily forgotten it. This sets up some classically O’Nolanesque scenes in which characters attempt to guess what it might be.
Here’s Sergeant Pluck, needing an identity by which he can legally hang the prisoner, applying his forensic brain to the task: “Would it be Mick Barry?” “No.” “Charlemagne O’Keeffe?” “No.” “Sir Justice Spens?” “Not that.” . . . “One of the Garvins or the Moynihans?” “Not them.” . . . “The Quigleys, the Mulrooneys, or the Hounimen?” “No.” “The Hardimen or the Merrimen?” “Not them.” In the end, this “astonishing parade of nullity” defeats even Pluck. Then, later, the narrator appears to recover his memory, name included. He just never gets around to telling us what it is.
It may be, as another contributor to last Sunday’s event – Prof Declan Kiberd – suggested, that through his multiple false personae, O’Nolan was seeking the ultimate anonymity: self-abnegation. Perhaps that’s why he drank so much too. The debate on this and other questions continues, and will intensify throughout the summer as the centenary events reach a climax.
In the meantime, a word of advice to certain members of the public. If your name is Nunn or Gunne or Pratt, or anything along those lines, don’t call your daughter Sonabha. This also applies if you’re one of the Hardimen or Merrimen. And if you happen to be a Looney, well – as you probably know already – you need to exercise maximum caution in almost everything you do.