The complexity of Peter Cunningham's narrative style has a purpose, although, to the dismay of the reader, what that purpose might be is not immediately obvious. But then what, apart from the grossly overt, is obvious about the interwoven life of an Irish town with its secrets and memories?
The town is Monument, a fictional organism which may be based on Waterford, where Cunningham grew up. Here, a newspaper staff is joined by Jasmine, a young woman whose attention is caught by the half-deaf handyman, Kaiser. As she falls in love with him she begins a kind of social and emotional excavation of Kaiser's past life; her journal is the case history on which the novel is based, but the novel itself consists of a series of annotations to the central theme, notes which seem at times to overwhelm or at least disguise the core material and which build into a complex orchestration of different voices from different times.
The figure around whom Monument revolves is Boss Pender, the newspaper proprietor whose gargantuan profile dominates lives both public and private. His spreading shadow darkens the life of Kaiser, and Cunningham's skill in setting this mis-matched pair in conflict compels; without this conflict the readers' attention may stray. Stray because of a series of stylistic obstacles. There is a habit of contrived lyricism, wearying and often inaccurate until a startling image singes a paragraph into resonance. There is the hindrance of dates, the structural mystery of sequence, place-names which are difficult to accommodate in the imagination, contradictions in the flow of fervent prose ("Worshipped the man she was coming to marry, would never alter that viewpoint" describes Lydia on page 31; by page 33 she is "anxious and terrified of her husband"). Above all, there is the fact that Cunningham is as fertile as an Old Testament patriarch in peopling his world of Monument, for which his own cryptic commentary provides both compilation and interpretation.
The commentary acts on the novel's headlong gallop like a knowing hand on a bridle of what comes dangerously close to what Rebecca West described as the tosh horse. Cunningham's very recklessness, however, is addictive. Once the clues in this cryptic crossword are understood and the lexicon established, the difficulties are forgiven and the tale is all. Here, at last, Cunningham's creative purpose achieves its goal: the method itself is a metaphor for the world it portrays. Its complexities reflect the complexities of the interrelationships of human experience, the domestic mesh of history with folklore, the tunnels of meaning navigated by natives who hear, without always heeding, the reverberations of political events happening elsewhere.
While Cunningham's earlier Tapes of the River Delta converts national Irish politics to its own violent scenario, Love in One Edition has so many of the same ingredients - meticulously detailed fights, the mental hospital as both refuge and penitentiary, close-mouthed local knowingness - that it's easy to see why it could be described, with Consequences of the Heart, as part of the "Monument trilogy". But it does stand alone: colourful, intricate and compulsive.
Mary Leland is an author and journalist. Her most recent book, The Lie of the Land; Journeys through Literary Cork, is published by Cork University Press