There we were worrying about the little green men and they were blue all along. EL opens with Seán, a Cork-based student of the literature of the Irish language, observing microscopic blue men crawling from the head of a crushed fly. When his discovery is confirmed by his housemate Peadar, a physics student deeply committed to “the logic of science”, their beliefs, and possibly those of the entire human race as well, are rocked to their foundations.
The winner of the Irish Language Novel of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards, and here translated into English by Thaddeus Ó Buachalla himself, EL is a tongue-in-cheek speculative fiction that is equal parts Flann O’Brien and Dan Brown. Stunned by the appearance of tiny but apparently sentient humans, Seán and Peadar delve deep into the annals to find that they are by no means the first to encounter the little blue men. But as their investigations turn up coded references from sources as diverse as Galileo, John Milton, Robert Hooke and the Dutch entomologist Jan Swammerdam, the pair quickly find themselves targeted by sinister forces. Is it the little blue men out for revenge, or some kind of illuminati determined that the awful truth remain hidden?
There’s a lovely old-fashioned swagger to this novel, and there’s no doubt that contemporary Irish fiction needs more of this kind of risky, absurdist mischief-making, just to remind us what we’re capable of – it’s no coincidence that, before picking up Paradise Lost during a research trip to the library, Seán “looked at books by Seán Ó Ríordáin and Pádraic Ó Conaire, by Rabelais and many writers besides”.
Not that Seán considers himself in the same league as a storyteller. “I have to let you know from the outset that this is not a novel,” he says, keen to flag up his limitations. An overly earnest narrator, Seán is prone to repetition and digression, and the excerpts he selects from historical tomes and letters are starchily formal.
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EL is, however, a novel of impressively epic sweep, embracing the Black Plague and the Great Fire of London, the political chicanery of the Medici, the timeless battle between good and evil, and the search for “the universal absolute truth”. It may over-egg the omelette at times, but EL is an early contender for the most ambitious Irish novel of the year.
