Raj Ayyar: This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VI, Issue 237). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.badpuppy.com online.
It is temptingly facile to describe Jamie O'Neill as a contemporary James Joyce. Indeed, many Irish and British reviewers have gushingly exaggerated the parallels between O'Neill and his celebrated Irish predecessor. I think this comparison is over-stretched. O'Neill lacks Joyce's easy familiarity with world mythologies and philosophies—Greek, Celtic, Hindu and others, and Joyce's almost lazily brilliant ability to infuse multi-mythic themes and texts into ordinary Dublin landscapes.
Moreover, though Joyce was intractably heterosexual, few gay writers can rival his many celebrations of the archetypal Androgyne. Case in point: the brothel scene toward the end of Joyce'sUlysses, where Bloom changes into a woman and the Madam into a man. Coupling wildly, they give birth to several fully grown children who become doctors, railwaymen and corporate chiefs! This is the kind of wildly farcical, gender-bendering surreal camp, that Joyce could pull off so well.
Having said all that, the absence of Joyce's mythic criss-crosses and ramblings gives At Swim, Two Boys a tightness of structure hard to achieve in a stream of consciousness novel. It gives the novel a rare quality: a stream of consciousness novel that can be descriptively realistic. Also, it allows O'Neill to explore the extraordinary intensities lurking beneath the surface of the ordinary—-intensities of sexual passion, unrequited love, trembling adolescent self-discovery and political struggle against colonialism.
At Swim is a deliciously big novel in every sense of the word and what's better yet, a big gay novel in a PoMo era where many writers shrinking from Grand Narratives, content themselves with brief deconstructive burps.
The novel bears all the marks of the Irish Blues—wild humor, self-pity and great appreciation of the sadness and the sheer waste of Ireland under the British yoke. It celebrates male-male love with intensity and passion. Walt Whitman's “love of comrades” is a major inspiration for the author and the epigram at the beginning of the novel is taken from Whitman's Calamus:
I will make inseparable cities with their arms
about each others' necks;
By the love of comrades.
At the heart of the comradely love in At Swim, Two Boys, is the weirdly comfortable gay triangle featuring three young Irishmen in the Dublin of 1915 and thereafter: MacMurrough, Doyler and Jim Mack.
MacMurrough is a decadent, dandyfied, self-consciously Wildean Irish squire, recently released from prison after serving a sodomy sentence. His unquenchable lust for young working class men is peppered with quotes and postures from Oscar Wilde and tempered by his superego/inner censor Scrotes.
Loosely based on an old professor he knew in prison, Scrotes is the voice of his Catholic guilt and training. The tug o'war between Dick (MacMurrough's rampantly thrusting, greedy phallus) and the disapproving, Aquinas-quoting Scrotes is often hilarious. Despite Scrotes, MacMurrough has his way with young working class Doyler and Scrotes retreats to a lone tower room in MacMurrough's mind.
“How shy they go, the boy with his peach. Buxom seat of unmanhood. MacMurrough's ring finger…crept into the crease now, discovering hair, a dampness, a hairyless wetness, dry spot….he worked his hand through the thighs, clutched in rather a how-are-ye way the tightening balls till, proud as the morning, he found what he sought. Pulled once or twice, then back throught the plush and silky skin to the stone-dry ring. Knotted. A Mary-hole. He seized the boy's shoulders and mounted him.”
Despite sad Scrotes, Dick rides Doyler “like a wild beast.” Most of the sexual encounters in the book are captured with detailed, descriptive stream of consciousness precision—every gasp and shudder of pleasure-pain, every thrust and the delectable delights of long, lazy foreplay.
The centerpiece of the novel is the growing passion between two adolescents: Doyler, that ‘dark, rough diamond' who has little flings on the side with MacMurrough and everyone else, and Jim Mack, the younger son of Mr. Mack, the shopkeeper.
The two young men meet on a regular basis at the Forty Foot, a great jut of rock, where men bathed in the scandalous nude. Doyler initiates the timid, virginal Jim into the joys of nude swimming and much more. They make a boyish pact to swim out to the distant Muglins rock one day, there to raise the Irish Green for Ireland and themselves. This novel offers a superbly heartachey account of sexual awakening, framed against a backdrop of a post-Parnell Ireland, hopeful of liberation from British colonialism and oppression, yet despairing of ever reaching that goal. The novel reaches way beyond the comforting but false stereotype that Sinn Fein was the only player in the game that eventually led to a free Irish Republic.
Parnell and Wilde are the two great Irish ghosts that haunt At Swim. By a deft mythic fusion, Jamie O'Neill ties in the homophobia that jailed Wilde with the colonial oppression that marginalized Ireland for centuries. In the end, MacMurrough, Doyler and Jim are comradely heroes fighting for their sexual as well as their national survival.
Interestingly enough, the process brings out a rare tenderness and strength in MacMurrough. By the end of the novel, he emerges as the central protagonist if only by virtue of the fact that he is the only character that has grown and developed way past his languid dandyisms and working class seductions.
In a curious way, MacMurrough offers the reader an alternative Oscar Wilde who transcends the brutalization of his incarceration and, far from crumbling, becomes a loving, gay fighting Irish patriot.
commenting closed for this article