At Swim, Two Boys [Paperback]

You may have read the hype. Irishman Jamie O'Neill was working as a London hospital porter when his 10-year labour of love, the 200,000-word manuscript of At Swim, Two Boys, written on a laptop during quiet patches at work, was suddenly snapped up for a hefty six-figure advance. He had to open his first bank account to cash the cheque, the story goes. For once, the book fully deserves the hype.

In the spring of 1915, Jim Mack and "the Doyler", two Dublin boys, make a pact to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter. By the time they do, Dublin has been consumed by the Easter Uprising, and the boys' friendship has blossomed into love--a love that will in time be overtaken by tragedy. O'Neill's prose, playing merrily with vocabulary, syntax and idiom, has unsurprisingly drawn comparisons to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but in his creation of comic characters (such as Jim's pathetic but irrepressible father) and in the sheer scale of his work, Charles Dickens springs to mind first. But Dickens never wrote a love story between young men as achingly beautiful as this.

In the character of Anthony MacMurrough, haunted by voices as he pursues his illegal and dangerous desire for Dublin boys, O'Neill has created a complex and fascinating centre to his novel, rescuing the love story from mawkishness, and allowing a serious meditation on history, politics and desire. For as Ireland seeks its own future free of British government, so Jim, Doyle and MacMurrough look back to Sparta to find a way to live their own future. As Dr Scrotes, one of MacMurrough's voices, commands:

Help these boys build a nation their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literature for words they can speak.

In this massive, enthralling and brilliant début, Jamie O'Neill has indeed done just that: provided a nation for what Walt Whitman calls, in O'Neill's epigraph, "the love of comrades". --Alan Stewart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'The music of Jamie O'Neill's prose creates a new Irish symphony' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

‘heartachingly beautiful reminiscent of Joyce. (It will)be the subject of much literary/historiographic discussion for time to come' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

mesmerizing, sophisticated, intense, nearer to the truth of our lives than most established writers dream of... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

there is no crisis in fiction except for those who choose not to read it. Don’t miss out’ --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

‘[A] powerful novel... this is an exhilarating novel, because superabundant creative energy is always exhilarating’ --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A truly original - and utterly compulsive - novel, reminiscent of MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN and A SUITABLE BOY for its scope and vitality. Set in Dublin and its near surrounds AT SWIM, TWO BOYS follows the turbulent year to Easter 1916. At its core it tells the love of two boys, Jim, a naive and reticent scholar, the younger son of foolish, aspirant shopkeeper Mr Mack, and Doyler, the dark rough diamond son of Mr Mack's old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the scandalous nude, the two boys meet day after day. There they make a pact: that Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, they will swim the bay to the distant beacon of the Muglins rock, to raise the Green and claim it for themselves. As Ireland sets forth towards her uncertain glory there unfolds a love story of the utmost tenderness, carrying the reader through the turbulence of the times like a full blown sail. AT SWIM, TWO BOYS is written with great verve and mastery. It shares those elements that are the marks of all great books - the breadth of its canvas, the skill of its brush, the intensity of its subjects and, above all, the shining light of its humanity.

‘As a reader, an editor, and a publisher I know there are but a few times vouchsafed to you when you feel that moment of exhilaration, realising as you read those first opening pages that you are in the presence of something not simply special, but extraordinary, that the writer has a mastery not simply of his craft, but of his world and the people who live and breathe in it. In contemporary fiction for me it has happened in the streets of Bombay, in the fenlands of England, following the fortunes of an American baseball, and here it is again, outside Dublin, with At Swim, Two Boys. Like all great novels its tone, its language, its view of the world are of itself and like no other, and yet it shares those elements that are the mark of all great books; the breadth of its canvas, the skill of its brush, the intensity of its subjects, and, above all, the shinning light of its humanity.’ Tim Binding, Editor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

I wrote this book, so you won't be surprised that I give it a fairly high rating. Still, I think it is worth reading, from your library if not your bookshop. It's set in Dublin 1916, the time of the Rising against British rule. The main story is of two boys who swim together and who find in their friendship a country they believe they will fight for. Other things of course happen -- it is 200,000 words long. But the question it asks, put very simply is: Is the love of Ireland so very different from loving an Irishman? The writing at times, I've been told, is quite poetic. My email for any discussion on the novel is atswim@iol.ie, and I would welcome any reader's comments. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Jamie O'Neill was brought up in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin. He spent ten years working as a night porter whilst writing AT SWIM, TWO BOYS. He lives in Galway, Ireland.