Krishna
Another Irish author, who describes the Irish lifestyle and tries to bring Irish atmosphere to you. But unlike Roddy Doyle, who brilliantly evokes the scenes, for example in Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha or The Barrytown Trilogy, this falls far short.
The story starts with Mack buying a newspaper. An odd beginning, where he meets a newspaperman. Mack carries the paper around for a while, with nothing major happening at all.
After a lot of nothing, Eveline MacMurrah enters the place in a car. The language of Irish is lovely. For instance, the car wants washing not the car needs washing. You are after drinking not that you want to drink. If there was only a story to go with it!
This Evelyn has a car and driving it up a hill is a major achievement, especially for a woman, according to the story. The car itself seems to be a novelty because the servants in the house fall over each other to have a chance to wash it.
Our man talks to a boy whose job is to clean the middens (before modern plumbing for waste was invented) and shows him compassion. My God, even telling the story is so boring, like watching one of those 70s artsy movie from somewhere like Czechoslovakia where they show the trees dripping raindrops for half an hour.
He torments his son with not buying a proper set of pants and is humiliated when an aunt does it for his son.
A dandy friend from the past, in the army, comes back but Mack realizes that he is taking him for a ride. The son becomes good friends with the father’s army friend’s son.
This story is about Doyle the friend who has socialist tendencies and the son, Jim. Their friendship with trace suggestions of gay relationships, a priest who has his hands wandering all over Jim’s chest in another indication of his gay intentions.
Mack Sr (Jim’s da) gets caught while trying restore a torn picture of UK government and is arrested for vandalizing. This earns him the respect of the priest. Also, the priest walks in front of the car of Evelyne and Mack Sr takes him in her car to the hospital.
There are then explicit scenes of what the author calls buggery, with the priest McMurray raping a boy. The boy is Doyler and he tries to protect Jim from the depredations of the priest. You learn to sympathize with Doyler and appreciate the deep friendship between him and Jim. Intertwined in the story is the struggle for Irish independence from the English and the struggle to preserve Gaelic from extinction, as well as communist class sympathies (of Doyler)
My God McMurray with his anthropomorphic Dick and Scrotes and the college lecture type of talk is so boring.
The two friends are edging into a gay relationship (love) tentatively. It is a time when the relationship, if known outside can ruin a man’s future.
Jim learns that his dad and Doyle’s dad were also best pals and when his dad became a sargeant, he insulted Doyle’s dad for having unpolished buttons and broke the friendship.
An interesting love story of two boys and a pedophile priest.
Gordie has made a girl pregnant and Aunt Sawhney keeps her in her house and there she gives birth.
There are poignant passages as to how the Irish, including their most famous son, Oscar Wilde struggled with the homosexual feelings and how it could have tarnished a whole career which could otherwise have been exemplary, for instance in the struggle for an independent Ireland.
However, McMurrough’s predilections border on paedophilia, his hunting small boys to seduce and so the message gets lost in the vileness of the crime in the reader’s (at least my) mind.
There is a moving portrait of Jim and Doyle swimming across to Wales and having sex for the first time in an abandoned island, watched by McMurrough from a boat. Weird. And when Doyle almost drowns on the way back it is McMurrough who rescues him, gives him first aid (throws some clothes on both boys) and gets him medical help.
Jim decides to join the rebel army for Ireland’s freedom from the British and sneaks off.
Then the whole story goes to dogs. MacMurrough and Doyler have sex again and then go in search of Jim and McMurrough beats up a constable and then they join the rebels, get arrested as prisoners of war and so many crazy things happen. The last few pages are full of rambling prose with the story wandering all over the place and ending even more weirdly.
Very odd, weird story. 3/ 10
– – Krishna (July 2018)