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
Synopsis
Ireland, Easter 1915, turbulent times, and two young boys make a pact. In a year's time they will jump off Forty Foot, a jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, and swim to the glow of the Muglins light to raise the Irish flag and claim it for their country and for their love of each other.
From the Publisher
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
From the Author
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.
