Gathering and Shaping the World (2024)

I’m gradually importing book reviews and reflections from other blogs and websites to this Substack site. I hope you enjoy my musings. Some posts are free but others are behind a paywall. Please consider subscribing to have access to all posts in “Imagined Worlds — Invented Lives”, including serialised novels and short stories, book reviews and reflections, and online workshops and seminars in which we’ll explore the joys and struggles of reading and writing.

During the last year or so, I’ve enjoyed a feast of Irish literature without having intentionally set out to do so. This has mostly been by way of unabridged audiobooks, thanks to several long car journeys to and from Scotland, a few road trips in the motorhome, and a couple of Italian train journeys.

When an audiobook is particularly well-written, I buy the Kindle version or the paperback so that I can linger over the writing. I binge-listen to formulaic thrillers in which the tension just about makes up for the clichéd writing, but when a well-written book finds a lasting space in my imagination and shapes my thoughts, then I have to refer to the text. That is true of several of the Irish books I’ve listened to and read recently. The Irish accent lends itself to a well-narrated audiobook, but I’ve been musing on other possible reasons why books by Irish authors have such an impact on me.

Missing God

There is a residual theological enigma, a sense of the absent other, that haunts many Irish stories and poems. Modern Irish identity has been shaped around Catholicism, and the rapid secularisation of a profoundly religious culture exerts a potent influence on how that culture expresses and interprets itself. A lingering Catholic sensibility leaves a watermark on the literary imagination, whether this takes the form of nostalgia for the rituals and reassurances of a lost religious past, or of regret and sometimes outrage over the wounds that the institutional church has inflicted on many Irish lives. This distress finds delicate and understated expression in Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Her writing is a miracle of depth plumbed with brevity and pitch-perfect prose. (I’ve decided to save writing about Small Things Like These and So Late in the Day for another post, since this is already too long.)

Often, this literary Catholic sensibility is an inseparable blending of nostalgia and disillusionment, for as individuals, communities, and cultures our identities emerge through complex interweavings of sorrow and joy, trust and betrayal, harm and healing, yearning for and freedom from the ties that bind us.

Dennis O’Driscoll’s (1954-2012) poem “Missing God” expresses the ambivalent emotional tug of the abandoned rituals of the Catholic faith:

Missing God
by Dennis O'Driscoll
His grace is no longer called for
before meals: farmed fish multiply
without His intercession.
Bread production rises through
disease-resistant grains devised
scientifically to mitigate His faults.
Yet, though we rebelled against Him
like adolescents, uplifted to see
an oppressive father banished—
a bearded hermit—to the desert,
we confess to missing Him at times.
Miss Him during the civil wedding
when, at the blossomy altar
of the registrar's desk, we wait in vain
to be fed a line containing words
like “everlasting” and “divine”.
Miss Him when the TV scientist
explains the cosmos through equations,
leaving our planet to revolve on its axis
aimlessly, a wheel skidding in snow.
Miss Him when the radio catches a snatch
of plainchant from some echoey priory;
when the gospel choir raises its collective voice
to ask Shall We Gather at the River?
or the forces of the oratorio converge
on I Know That My Redeemer Liveth
and our contracted hearts lose a beat.
Miss Him when a choked voice
at the crematorium recites the poem
about fearing no more the heat of the sun.
Miss Him when we stand in judgment
on a lank Crucifixion in an art museum,
its stripe-like ribs testifying to rank.
Miss Him when the gamma-rays
recorded on the satellite graph
seem arranged into a celestial score,
the music of the spheres,
the Ave Verum Corpus of the observatory lab.
Miss Him when we stumble on the breast lump
for the first time and an involuntary prayer
escapes our lips; when a shadow crosses
our bodies on an x-ray screen; when we receive
a transfusion of foaming blood
sacrificed anonymously to save life.
Miss Him when we call out His name
spontaneously in awe or anger
as a woman in the birth ward bawls
her long-dead mother's name.
Miss Him when the linen-covered
dining table holds warm bread rolls,
shiny glasses of red wine.
Miss Him when a dove swoops
from the orange grove in a tourist village
just as the monastery bell begins to take its toll.
Miss Him when our journey leads us under
leaves of Gothic tracery, an arch
of overlapping branches that meet
like hands in Michelangelo's creation.
Miss Him when, trudging past a church,
we catch a residual blast of incense,
a perfume on par with the fresh-baked loaf
which Milosz compared to happiness.
Miss Him when our newly-decorated kitchen
comes in Shaker-style and we order
a matching set of Mother Ann Lee chairs.
Miss Him when we listen to the prophecy
of astronomers that the visible galaxies
will recede as the universe expands.
See Also
The Relic - Destiny 2 Guide - IGN How to Complete Enigma Protocol in Destiny 2 How to Start and Complete Destiny 2 Enigma Protocol All Destiny 2 The Final Shape Seal Triumphs for Transcendent Title walkthrough: Secret Triumphs, explained
Miss Him the way an uncoupled glider
riding the evening thermals misses its tug.
Miss Him, as the lovers shrugging
shoulders outside the cheap hotel
ponder what their next move should be.
Even feel nostalgic, odd days,
for His Second Coming,
like standing in the brick
dome of a dovecote
after the birds have flown.

(From Dennis O’Driscoll, New and Selected Poems, Anvil Press, 2023)

This enigmatic absence announces itself in much Irish writing, but the capacity of human creativity to spark across the abyss with a flash of the divine, trailing terror or ecstasy, dread or hope, in its wake, is discernible in every creative context in which faith has left its traces on fading cultural memories. Indeed, perhaps England is unusual in having achieved the near-obliteration of such memories from its shared literary narratives and imaginings. (When discussing culture, Britain is a meaningless term. England, Scotland, and Wales are home to different cultures and literary traditions). Some years ago, when I was a lecturer on the Open University’s excellent “Introduction to the Humanities” course, there was consternation about drawing students’ attention to the biblical references in some of the sources, as if it were an affront to liberal thinkers to suggest that an understanding of the Bible might be necessary to fully appreciate a literary text or work of art. It would be rare to find such willful ignorance outside the dogged determination of English secularism!

Browsing through the latest edition of the Art+Christianity journal, I read a review by C.M. Howell of the work of German artist and poet Egon Altdorf (1922-2008), which featured recently in two Scottish exhibitions and two publications.

Howell observes that “art gathers and shapes the world”. He quotes Michael Trevor who writes that “Words, [Altdorf] became convinced, don’t merely interpret the world, but themselves change it.” David Jasper reflects that “meaning is often not so much established as opened up by word and image”.

These observations are equally true of Irish literature, with a rich tradition of writers who are deservedly famous for not only having interpreted the world but also for having changed it. If Irish literature gathers and shapes the post-Catholic world around a fading faith, it also does so in the face of another failed promise—that of the economic boom known as the Irish Miracle or the Celtic Tiger. This exploded onto the scene in the mid-1990s with a surge of affluence for many, but by the financial crisis of 2008 its promises of prosperity had evaporated. Businesses failed, mortgages couldn’t be paid, building projects were put on hold. The neoliberal bubble burst as dramatically as it had appeared, leaving human wreckage in its wake.

Both these vanquished narratives of promise, religious and economic, find oblique expression in the novels I’ve been reading and/or listening to recently, in stories that transcend their cultural contexts. They confront us with the stark realities and threats of our times. Ireland becomes a metaphor for the meltdown of modern society: the vacuum that is left when religious narratives lose their communal significance, and with the collapse of neoliberalism manifesting itself as democracy morphing into populism, with violent cultural and political oppositions drowning out the quiet voices of reasoned debate and pragmatic compromise upon which social cohesion depends in liberal democracies.

Kala: the trauma of memory

So let me select a few of the books that illustrate what I mean, beginning with Colin Walsh’s Kala (2023). This is not the best example of the kind of literature I’m referring to, but it’s a well-written suspense thriller that probes the dark underbelly of Irish small-town life and how communities are shaped through shared memories, traumas, and changing relationships.

Three young adults are reunited after fifteen years, their teenage friendship group having broken up when its vivaciously wild ringleader, Kala, mysteriously disappeared. Walsh’s central characters drift through life, caught in the harsh glare of social media and grappling with conflicting experiences of loyalty and betrayal, responsibility and denial. Told in three narrative voices—Helen, Joe, and Mush—the book is a beautifully written reflection on modern Ireland. Helen, who emigrated to Canada and works as a freelance journalist, returns to the small town of Kinlough to attend a wedding. Joe is a successful rock star, whose self-alienation is manifest in his narrative voice being written in the second person. Mush, the most sympathetic character, has remained in his hometown working in his mother’s cafe. When Kala’s remains are discovered, the three must come to terms with the trauma of her disappearance and the unspeakable bond they share. Helen reflects,

GRIEF IS LIKE falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe. (Kindle loc. 1333)

It’s Joe, speaking in the second person and in the grip of a humiliating hangover, who articulates the sense of lost moorings and alienated lives afflicting the younger generation:

Up ahead on the Coast Road there’s a bunch of teenagers, guys and girls. You see them, but teenagers only see each other. You don’t understand kids’ clothes any more, what it all means. Back in the day things were tribal—clear lines. Your haircut and clothes said what music you liked, how smart you were, whether or not you were real, if you were reaching for the Other Place or stuck in the gutter. Internet’s taken all of that, mangled the codes. People are mongrels of whatever the f*ck now. Kurt Cobain shot himself for being a sell-out and these kids wouldn’t even grasp the concept. You hate these kids. Wish you were these kids. Envy their obliviousness, like the world had just come into being, and existed only for you and your friends, and all you had was time. (Kindle loc 2665)

Landscapes play a significant role in many of the books I’ve enjoyed. In Kala, urban and rural settings become living participants in the unfolding of the story. Heading towards Kinlough, Helen muses:

The bus veers off the motorway and we sink into the arterial maze of roads that fringe the town. Trees arc overhead and splinter the light across the sleeves of the other passengers. Bunched hedges seething about the windows as the road gets narrower and darker and thickens with branches. Witch’s fingers scraping against the glass. I am already in the veins of the place. Kala was the first person I heard call this place, these roads, the Warren. (Kindle loc 239)

Mush revels in the coming of summer and its sensuality:

I’M THE WRONG side of thirty and I still love it when summer bursts over this town. That school holiday vibe. First hint of suncream or cut grass hits the air, and I get the tingly bellyflut feeling. It’s always a surprise, like. As if every year I forget those smells exist, and bam! The world’s young again. Then it’s the stretch in the evenings, the drone of the bees, all that good sh*te. … People look the most alive they’ve been all year, like. Their smiles that bit wider. This type of heat makes sh*te out of everyone – people are lobster red and delirious by the end of the first week of it—but no one gives a f*ck, cos Kinlough’s being a giddy carnival of itself, all saturated colours. Mams with prams, pizza-faced young bucks messing, young wans smoking, all shimmering and exaggerated movements. For a few weeks a year, Kinlough gets to be the place it really wants to be. (Kindle loc 91)

Broken Harbour: the wild gets in

Walsh has been compared to Tana French. It’s several years since I read Broken Harbour (2012), but it lingers in my thoughts as a searing exposure of the human cost of Ireland’s economic crisis. I love her books because they are psychological thrillers and character studies, in which formulaic criminal investigations are a vehicle for deeper and more engaging reflections on modern Irish life. There are many resonances between French’s novel and the themes I’m exploring here.

In Broken Harbour, French explores what happens when ordinary lives implode and feral darkness oozes into the mundane. Confronted with a wounded woman’s vulnerability while investigating a crime of savage violence, the detective narrator Scorcher Kennedy muses, “I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.” (p. 366) In a world of rapidly changing values and disintegrating communities, boredom is a gift to be cherished:

Ordinary Human Failings: routine tragedies and enduring regrets

In Meg Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings (2023), themes of exile, random violence, social disintegration, and family breakdown play out in the context of a poor Irish family, the Greens, forced to relocate to a housing estate in London in the early 1990s to avoid the scandals of their teenage daughter Carmel’s pregnancy and their son Ritchie’s alcoholism. Facing a police investigation, Carmel reassures herself with the thought that “Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.” (p. 103)

Like French, Nolan disguises the profundity of the story she’s telling with what could be a routine thriller about the disappearance of a small child (Mia) and the subsequent finding of her body, but that is not the point of the book. The crime provides the scaffolding upon which to build an astonishing story of “an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness.” (p. 192) By juxtaposing the life of a disintegrating Irish family and that of a London housing estate, Nolan delves into the prejudices and resentments that are gnawing away at English communal life in the early 1990s.

Every character in this novel is flawed to the point of seeming beyond redemption or sympathy, and yet out of this emerges a powerful and at times heartbreaking story of how love can seed itself in terrible grief and adversity. A forsaken Catholicism is part of the background to the story, woven into the texture of memory and the formation of character—the formative influence of priests and nuns/religious sisters, sometimes benign, sometimes malevolent, on Ireland’s adult generation, and the desolation of young lives with neither faith nor hope to sustain them.

There is love—wounded, betrayed, enduring, but even that may not be enough to redeem the failings of the past: “She knew now … that the things you did or failed to do could not be erased by anything, not even love.” (p. 214) If there is redemption, then it comes not through the over-compensation of love expressed as regret for love denied, but through learning to live with losses that cannot be restored, broken lives that cannot be healed, and through daily acts of forgiveness towards oneself and repentance towards others for the wrongs that cannot be undone.

This is about creating space for ourselves and others to live and to love in spite of all the inadequacies and failures that burden us. It’s about making concrete our apologies in daily life, and learning to believe that in spite of it all, we are good. I’ve omitted a few words in this quotation to avoid spoilers:

She could not speak enough to take up the absences of others, but she could recite her own sort of prayers to fill the space of her former silences, she could provide room for her daughter to do the same. In that space she hoped the lineaments of her original apology, so negligible in its merely spoken form, would become evident and concrete. The apology she could not voice eloquently, the one which would never end and which she pushed toward …, and toward herself, each morning that she woke, thinking I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Thinking the mantra Richie had once told her he used to lull himself to sleep: I’m a good person and other people think so too. (p. 214)

To lead one’s readers into the depths of savage cruelty and seeming hopelessness takes great authorial courage, for the temptation is always to flinch away and offer a softer, less distressing account. But to gaze unblinking at the depths of human failure and regret, and to allow a story of fragile redemption to emerge, is I believe the vocation of any literary author who seeks to discover the universal within the particular.

Prophet Song: plumbing the depths

Sometimes, rarely, a work of fiction appears over the horizon of one’s imagination and looms so large that it casts a shadow across everything else. That’s how I feel about Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker prizewinning novel, Prophet Song, beautifully narrated as an audiobook but essential to read as well.

The book plumbs the depths of our times and brings us face to face with the tenderness, rage, bewilderment, and sorrow of people trapped in the iron jaws of war, dislocation, and exile. Written as a stream of consciousness, it’s told from the perspective of the mother, Eilish, with long unbroken sections and sometimes confusing timelines. The narration manages to convey this, though it’s no substitute for the effect of reading it.

The novel is harrowing in its unrelenting determination to expose how violence insinuates itself into the lives of communities and spirals out of control, but it is written with a deep, dark beauty that shines bleakly, tenderly, through the depiction of a mother’s passionate and complex love for her family. It is I think the best description of the profundity, complexity, and passion of maternal love that I’ve ever read.

While many Irish novels contemplate the traumas of the recent past, Lynch’s story is a vision of Dublin in a dystopian future. Inspired by the war in Syria and the refugee crisis to situate such catastrophes in a more familiar context, Lynch had mostly written the book before Russia invaded Ukraine, and it was published before the carnage that has been unfolding between Israel and Gaza since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October.

Like other writers mentioned here, Lynch’s concern is with the ways in which the predictable routines and habits of daily life can never be taken for granted, because catastrophic change may be just around the corner. The unfolding drama of Ireland’s rapidly changing world is never far from view, but like all great literature, this transcends its context to achieve something of the universal. Time and again, a small thought expands to become an acute observation about the human condition. For example, here is Eilish searching the face of her infant son asleep on her lap, in a quote that gives a sense of Lynch’s literary style:

… she seeks within the child for some semblance of Larry, hoping he will measure up to his father, knowing how it is so that all boys grow up and pull away from home to unmake the world in the guise of making it, nature decrees it is so. (p. 31)

Lynch vividly portrays the mundane details of domesticity, and the scorching tyrannies that rip these apart when a society goes into meltdown. The mounting violence of democratic decline, social disintegration, ruthless bureaucracy, and ideological conflict becomes an explosive force within the quiet comforts of an ordinary family home. To refer back to Broken Harbour, in the Dublin of Lynch’s story the line that keeps wild out has been breached, and the feral murderers are everywhere. We are lured into a future that is both unthinkable and all too credible, an ever-present threat lurking just outside the double-glazed windows and neatly demarcated boundaries of our suburban homes, playing out already in wartorn cities and communities around the world.

In a conversation between Eilish and her father—one of the many beautifully drawn relationships in the book—the old man tells her:

We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on—the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true—this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book. She watches his eyes travel down some distant thought, trying to see into his mind, the mottled hand that pulls a wrinkled handkerchief from the trouser pocket, he blows his nose then puts the handkerchief back. Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself, he says, you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales … (pp. 27-28)

Again, vanishing traditions are part of Ireland’s story, but they become a wider observation about the world we are creating. This process of altering truth is everywhere evident in the spiraling out of control of modern institutions, fuelled by the golem of AI and social media. And if reality reasserts itself, at what terrible cost to the people caught up against their will in the violence of the fantasy?

I don’t think I need a spoiler alert if I quote a section that explains the title:

She looks to the sky watching the rain as it falls through space and there is nothing to see in the ruined yard but the world insisting on itself, the cement’s sedate crumbling giving way to the rising sap beneath, and when the yard is past there will remain the world’s insistence, the world insisting it is not a dream and yet to the looker there is no escaping the dream and the price of life that is suffering, and she sees her children delivered into a world of devotion and love and sees them damned to a world of terror, wishing for such a world to end, wishing for the world its destruction, and she looks at her infant son, this child who remains an innocent and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore … (pp. 251-252)

I have read that passage over and over again, and each time I interpret it differently. If it echoes the voices of the ancient prophets, then it is Job and Jeremiah who sing through it, calling a warning that we cannot hear because our time has not yet come. It is hard not to think of the children of Gaza when reading of “children delivered into a world of devotion and love and … damned to a world of terror”.

Lynch is warning us that, in the repetitions of violence that constitute the history of humankind, our time will come but the world will go on. All the tragedies and traumas will be glossed into folklore to make it possible for life to repeat itself again and again, with the spiral of terror, pity, love and redemption playing out in our little lives until the end of time, against the backdrop of nature’s majestic and indifferent life force.

There are deep subterranean echoes between Ordinary Human Failings and Prophet Song, and I am bleakly, deeply grateful for the dark gift that these authors have given me.

Rememberings: an Irish life retold

But now, let me end with Sinéad O’Connor. Her autobiography, Rememberings (2021), undoubtedly has many fictional flourishes, which deepen rather than diminish its truth-telling capacity. I listened to the book soon after her sad death last year, and wrote a blog about it here. Read by the author, it’s one occasion when the audiobook is essential listening. More than any other writer I’m discussing, her story embodies the complex entanglements between the abusive and violent aspects of Irish Catholicism, and a profound, at times childlike faith.

Mothers feature in all these stories. Lynch and Nolan offer us accounts of maternal love as a complex but sustaining power in broken lives and shattered families. Sinéad describes her mother as a devout Catholic Mass-goer who inflicted horrific torture and abuse on her little daughter. Her notorious act of tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II during his visit to Ireland in 1979 finds vindication as an eloquent protest against abuse, in light of what we now know about his collusion in covering up child sexual abuse.

Her life had all the struggles and sorrows, betrayals and sufferings of the fiction I’m exploring here, but she tells her story with a sense of humour that is at times laugh-out-loud funny and at other times darkly comic. I was weeping one minute and laughing aloud the next, as she swung from heartwrenching poignancy to comic genius, suffused with deep wit and wisdom. A violent encounter with Prince in his remote home is told like an episode from Dracula, and her visit to a barber to have her head shaved is hilarious. Here’s how she tells it:

1×

0:00

-2:42

Late in the book, after her conversion to Islam which was part of an ongoing quest for God through all the upheavals and tragedies of her life, Sinéad writes:

I’ve done only one holy thing in my life and that was sing. … I wonder: In heaven, do they make songs? And whisper them to composers on earth? What am I saying. The Koran is like a song. And it was whispered to Gabriel and then by him to Muhammad. … God’s an incredible songwriter, actually. I hope it’s true God loves a singer. And I bet Muhammad must have had a beautiful voice. I hope he’s still singing in nighttime paradise. Maybe if I just be quiet I’ll hear him. (pp. 276-277)

In Sinéad’s story, God is less an absent other than a spritely and all-pervasive presence morphing through the changing circ*mstances of her life.

There is a God-shaped absence in much Irish literature that for me is an essential characteristic of great writing. Such writing lets the absent other gust and echo through the text, as though somebody has left a window open through which can be heard the distant murmurings of ghostly prayers. It is quite different from writing that accepts as settled the question of transcendence, divinity, call it what we will, and proceeds with that assumption unchallenged and unquestioned. But those are claims to unpack for another time!

There are other Irish novels I’ve listened to during the last year, but I need to read and reflect on them before writing about them. Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren left me underwhelmed but might benefit from a more reflective reading. Claire Keegan merits a post all to herself, and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses also needs a more appreciative reading before I can comment.

So—to be continued, and thank you for reading.

Thank you for your interest and for engaging with my work. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I write for the love of writing, and I’m grateful to all who engage with my work. Some of my posts will remain free to all subscribers. However, since leaving my academic post I have to generate an income through my writing, so I really appreciate the support of those who can afford to become paid subscribers.