By Trevor Butterworth

Published in the The Washington Post's Book World
April 14, 2002

AT SWIM, TWO BOYS
By Jamie O'Neill

"The modern novel should be largely a work of reference," insists the unnamed narrator of Flann O'Brien's dizzying comic masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds. "Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before -- usually much better. A wealth of references to existing works should acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimble riggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature."

O'Brien's swipe at James Joyce, whose presence had begun to dominate Irish letters by the late 1930s, was met with generous praise from the ailing, near-blind writer, who rarely acknowledged any genius but his own. For At Swim-Two-Birds was a brilliant comic assault on the literary conventions of realism and modernism (its curious title derives from a spot on the River Shannon visited by mad Sweeney, a warrior from the halls of Irish mythology cursed to live as a bird). In a gleeful ironic shift, however, the novel's dramatic premise -- that the great characters of literature should be recycled -- turns out to be poor advice; for in returning, they ultimately visit chaos and destruction upon their authors. If there is a lesson here, it is lost on Jamie O'Neill, who begins a vast recycling of Irish history and literature with the very title of his third novel: At Swim, Two Boys.

The setting is Dublin's coastal hinterland, 1915. Two teenage boys, college-bound Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle, a lame dungman's lackey, strike up an unlikely friendship, which at first appears to mirror the one between their fathers during the Boer War. But when a Christian Brother warns Jim that he is playing Alexis to Doyler's Corydon, the allusion to Virgil's homoerotic pastoral suggests that there will be much more than agape at stake in their budding camaraderie.

Unlike the abundant Homeric riches deployed in Joyce's Ulysses, Virgil's eclogue "Alexis" is too slender to provide O'Neill with much in the way of plot or symbol. The boys invoke the musicality of Arcadian life by fluting around in a marching band; Doyler persuades Jim to take up swimming; and in the frigid waters of Dublin Bay they make a compact to swim to a small island the following Easter -- a journey that will, ultimately, come to represent both their liberation and isolation as lovers.

Eros, however, does not rear its head until the introduction of Anthony MacMurrough, a former British army officer who, disgraced a[grv] la Oscar Wilde, has returned to his ancestral home and the rehabilitative care of his aunt, Eveline, a doyenne of the Catholic gentry. The MacMurroughs have a long and proud tradition of serving their country, albeit in the offices of the British crown; but now that an Irish Ireland beckons, Eva intends for her nephew to rise to the occasion and wear the green uniform of the Irish Volunteers (who, along with James Connolly's Citizens' Army, will eventually launch the ill-fated Easter Rising of 1916). Anthony's interests, however, lie more in ars amatoria than ars belli.

Into an unfolding and explicit portrait of mundane Dublin's gay demimonde O'Neill pours most of the novel's power and purpose, lyricism and drama. It is as if he has taken it upon himself to re-inscribe this convulsive time in Irish history and literature with the love that dared not speak its name. Such a single-minded aesthetic commitment exacts a terrible cost in a novel that must include, by way of historical context and explication, so much else. Inattentive to the need for a cohesive plot to bind all these elements together, O'Neill wallows in a surface play of historical and literary references, gluttonous pastiches of Joyce and O'Brien (which dazzle only by virtue of being so obvious), wooden characterizations and -- most troubling of all -- unconscionable cliche[acute]s.

What else can you say of a novel in which the two most prominent members of a paltry female cast are hysterical maiden aunts? Or where a washerwoman squeaks on stage to recall, inter alia, sleeping with a pet pig for warmth? Or where the lower-class characters are doomed to speak "Dublinese" -- a relentless sing-song of phrase-making, word play and mispronunciation? "Carry me out and bury me decent, so you have and all," to quote one of O'Neill's Central Casting Dubliners. Sad to say, Flann O'Brien beat the shtick out of this kind of turgid "Oirish" writing, and O'Neill, without any discernible register of irony or comic intent, puts it straight back in again.

Instead of adding verisimilitude or locating homosexuality in the literary tradition of Ireland, this grab-bag strategy transforms O'Neill's slender, affective story of love and friendship into an ostentatious work of postmodern architecture: a richly ornamented echo chamber where myriad voices rise out of the swirling confusion to call us back to the past. The thing is, when we are drawn back, ineluctably, to the clarity and vitality of the authors O'Neill so brazenly plunders, At Swim, Two Boys drowns.