FICTION: A State of Mind By Kevin CaseyThe Lilliput Press, 296pp.€15
ART AND POLITICS intertwine in Kevin Casey’s poised but disturbing new novel. Its central character, John Hughes, was once a Northern Ireland correspondent and a successful novelist. He has been suffering, however, from prolonged writer’s block and has ceased producing either journalism or fiction. The bourgeois comforts of family life in rural Wicklow with his wife, Laura, and teenage daughter, Rachel, provide him with an outward respectability and seeming compensation for his inability to create. Also, a vaguely decadent existence that centres on daily visits to a seedy local confers on him a fake bohemian allure.
Through Hughes’s friendships with two other writers, who have moved to Wicklow to enjoy the tax-free benefits of Ireland, Casey sketches further portraits of middle-aged artists in crisis. Their plights mirror the anxieties of the detached but increasingly beset protagonist. He becomes acquainted with the English author, William Cromer, who has moved to the area with his young German wife, Ingrid. Cromer has earned literary acclaim for his autobiographical fictions, but worries about his declining status and the stability of his relationship. Hughes also enjoys the companionship of Barbara, an author of popular historical romances. Her jauntiness, commercial success and frank sexuality belie her actual loneliness and sense of failure as a writer.
Hughes, however, stands out from his associates because of the destructive impact of his actions. We learn early on that the novel we are reading is, in fact, his journal. His commentary on the process of compiling this text becomes increasingly unsettling as we realise that he is an unreliable narrator and that he has structured the narrative to suit his own ends. Omissions and sudden confessions upset the smooth progress of things.
Above all, the novel starkly highlights the ethical questions raised by an author who manipulates his experiences to kick-start his flagging inspiration and incorporates them indiscriminately into his art. Metacritical asides prompt the reader to reflect on how stories are constituted and to interrogate their purchase and truthfulness. Art and life are disturbingly interfused in order all the more pressingly to raise questions about the costs of creativity.
The Troubles form the backdrop of A State of Mind, which is set in the mid-1970s. Pointedly, however, Casey mutates a well-established genre. In effect he creates a Southern Troubles fiction as his focus is on the way in which Northern politics inflect life in the Republic in this period. Cromer is threatened by local members of the IRA who attempt to blackmail him. They stalk him because they see him as a British spy and as a blow-in profiting from the privileges for artists in Ireland. The open hostility of an aged local, who is a veteran of the War of Independence and took part in a violent ambush in which several Irish rebels and Black and Tan soldiers were killed, adds further to the atmosphere of menace.
Suspicion and distrust reign in the personal and in the political spheres, the novel reveals. Hughes’s furtive affair with Ingrid quickly turns recriminatory and seems to yield only fleeting moments of pleasure, which are, however, precisely rendered. Eros eventually cedes to violence when she is savagely beaten up. In the aftermath of this attack, Hughes loses contact with Ingrid and Cromer and fights desperately to save his marriage and the roles that he has concocted for himself as husband and writer.
At the end, he appears to have achieved a semblance of happiness, but doubt still prevails. He reminds us in the closing paragraphs that the novel we have read is, after all, fiction, and that we have been drawn into the story of someone at pains to exculpate himself. His self-interest as an artist precludes expansive empathy. All he can do is to produce a botched portrait of himself. The things he glosses over – such as the fate of Barbara which is shockingly revealed towards the end of the novel – are as resonant as the issues that overtly preoccupy him.
In overlaying a Künstlerromanwith a political allegory, Kevin Casey has written a subtle and unsettling fiction. The xenophobia and political antagonisms of Ireland in the 1970s act as a counterpoint for a tale in which the processes of artistic self-discovery are shown to be shoddy and compromised as well as capable of delivering insight. The text unflinchingly tracks the problematic convergences between political violence and the designs of the writer.
However, in producing a portrait of the artist as destructive anti-hero and post-modern fabricator, Casey also reveals the ability of the novel to reflect on its own points of departure and ethical responsibilities. In returning us to the 1970s, A State of Mindconjures up an Ireland that has seemingly been erased forever. It shows that a revisitation of the recent past is vital in order for the current position of the artist to be renegotiated.
Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce studies at UCD and co-editor, with Luca Crispi, of the Dublin James Joyce Journal