Time to get down off the stage and into the street?

FICTION:There is a great book trying to get out of Peter Murphy's flamboyant, lyrical  but patchy second novel, based loosely on real events in Enniscorthy

Shall We Gather at the River, By Peter Murphy, Faber and Faber, 263pp, £12.99

Peter Murphy can write like an angel. Well, like a bad angel – a clarification he’d probably prefer. His gaze is mischievous, and he delights in words and can nail things and people with incisive descriptions that can be startling or funny but are always lucid. He has a showman’s zest for the flamboyant, the baroque, the subverted cliche and lyrical phrase. Echoes of other writers – Pat McCabe, Angela Carter, Flannery O’Connor, Samuel Beckett – reveal his good taste. And he has a gift that is much rarer in writers than it should be: a sense of rhythm, a feel for the way sentences follow each other to carry the reader with them. Murphy is also a musician, and it shows.

This impressive display of talent lets him get away with a lot. The first and most obvious in this, his second novel after the popular John the Revelator, is a plot or storyline so intractable it’s not easy to relate.

The rather lovely title, Shall We Gather at the River, is taken from an American 19th-century gospel song in which the gathering is composed of “saints” and the cool and refreshing river is a symbol of life and the paradise to come. Murphy’s river, however, is a different kettle of fish. (The metaphor may be unworthy of him.)

The Rua is a rusty-coloured river that flows through the town of Murn, in Co Wexford. Given a malign and quasi-animate persona, it’s a voracious siren whispering and murmuring and sucking at the heart of the town as it entices people to their deaths.

That the novel is inspired by an outbreak of self-inflicted drownings that took place in Enniscorthy some years ago is no secret. To distance himself from these all-too-recent events, Murphy sets his novel farther back, assembling his characters for their suicidal journeys in the 1980s.

So far so good. But this is not a novel in which a series of stark and unforgettable deaths are examined with the steely or exploratory or even compassionate intent that it could be claimed they deserve. It’s a confection, though one made of slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails rather than sugar and spice. A romance in the literary sense, suffused with legends and whimsies, an adolescent fantasy from the twilight zone tinted with black. His subject was certainly a tough one to take on. And you can’t but suspect, and be sorry, that the author might have taken refuge from an interesting but formidable reality in obfuscation and invention, confident that enough chutzpah and swashbuckling will carry it off.

The story, such as it is, hangs on one Enoch O’Reilly. The name Enoch, that of a prophet in the Old Testament, is a nod to the biblical references Murphy relishes. Enoch O’Reilly is a character not now unfamiliar in Irish fiction. A mama’s boy, an only child, he’s disaffected, a solitary and a narcissist devoted to strange obsessions and ambitions. His big obsession is the radio set his father keeps in the basement and the other-worldly voices he hears on it.

Departing early from Murn, he wanders the world – there’s a lot of medieval-style wandering in the book. In his 20s, his father long dead, his mother on the wander in her turn, “flitting from basilica to basilica”, he returns to a career on local radio.

He becomes a “radiovangelist”, a preacher of dubious sermons that his audience sometimes finds spellbinding but often baffling. A big, dark fellow in a frock coat, with weird and portentously apocalyptic notions that seem to relate to the river and its mysterious pull on the people of Murn, Enoch is a larger-than-life character. Like most such characters, he’s soon tiring, but unfortunately we get far too much of him.

Other voices

Luckily there are other voices, other characters who make appearances. These are brief and sketchy, but they have a tantalising interest and make up probably the best parts of the book. Drifting in and out in discrete chapters, they have their own stories that explain – or not – why they vanish into the Rua when, like a beast on a moon-driven rampage, it floods the town and devours the fields.

These are grounded sections, moving or funny or plain virtuoso. The one titled “The Story of Isaac”, in which Isaac’s girl leaves him and he shoots his cattle and his dog. The piece in the voice of the narrator, called “The Why”. The Ophelia-like or perhaps pre-Raphaelite Alice Stafford, a romantic waif if ever there was one. Alice is also the only female presence – and this absence lends a pervasive sense of phallocentricity that makes the novel curiously dated.

Alice’s father, Prof Stafford, the psychiatrist at the town asylum, is given a role as a voice of reason. With his urbane manner and plain language, he attempts to clarify the confusing mesh of Celtic myth and Gothic, local lore and Bible-influenced prophecy. But afflicted with grief after his daughter drowns, he joins the camped-up cast of wanderers on the face of the earth before he too enters the Rua. As for Enoch, he gets the last chapter in another lyrical episode of rambling and roving by meadow and stream. But by then not even the narrator can take him seriously.

There are times in this patchwork when you are struck by how good this book might have been. And just as often it strikes you as evasive and clumsy and pretentious. Somewhere inside it is a great book trying to get out, just as in Peter Murphy a very good writer indeed appears to be lurking. It may be unacceptably prescriptive to say this, and he probably wouldn’t want to, but couldn’t he get down off the stage or out of the preacher’s tent, with its props and artifices? Walk in real streets among real people? His talents are such that he should have nothing to fear.