Two Souls: Paramilitary and punk the divergent paths of Troubles youth

Two Souls

Author: Henry McDonald

ISBN-13: 9781785372575

Publisher: Merrion Press

Guideline Price: €16.95

So are youse game? Are youse game for a novel that channels the kind of Young Adult sex & violence of Richard Allen’s punks and skins books, with a plot that unfolds via serial prison communications, the build-up to the Cliftonville/Portadown Irish Cup Final in 1979, a forlorn love affair between a punk and a goth and the framing device of David Bowie’s Low?

Being game is what it’s all about for the young men caught up in the cultural and political spiralling of Two Souls, set during the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Here is Magazine’s Shot By Both Sides; games of Subbuteo played flat on your belly in the front room to avoid stray bullets from republican in-fighting; King Dong on VHS (or is it Betamax?); random acts of sectarian violence; here’s the Troubles, and football violence, and music, and art, too, presented as parallel manifestations of the same troubling energy; the trouble with the adolescent male.

McDonald’s second novel (he is also a journalist and has published several non-fiction books on the Troubles) presents the paramilitary and the punker as different paths taken; and art and sports as a safety valve, as a channel for volatile evolutionary forces.

R Dale Guthrie in his landmark book, The Nature of Palaeolithic Art, argues that much of the surviving Palaeolithic cave art (though not the bulk of Palaeolithic art, most of which, he surmises, didn’t survive), was made by adolescent males, depicting, as it overwhelmingly does, so-called “testosterone events”, ie, initiatory images of sex and violence. There are enormous cocks on the walls of prehistoric caves just like on the doors of modern toilet cubicles. And it was predominantly adolescent males, the argument goes, who were dangerous enough, and driven enough towards high-risk behaviour to climb down into that dark to attempt to leave their mark.

In Two Souls there is the sense of the drawing apart of two worlds, the wished-for, and the real, and the kind of dissonance that creates. Robbie McManus is torn between the world of his father – the world where he has sex his friend’s mother – and the world where he messes it up with the boys at Solitude, and buys records, and riots, and dreams of falling in love with someone that might save him from the certainty, the ineluctability, of his story. Yet he is always crashing in the same car.

In the wings there is “Padre Pio” McCann, a violent sociopath; punk rock cousin “Rex Mundi”; and Sabine, the goth who only dances to Bowie’s Low.

And sure, some of it is a little clunky. Low as a framing device, and indeed the character of Sabine, to a certain extent, seems a little imposed, or exposed as too obviously framework. Some of the dialogue is a little self-consciously explicatory to pass for natural speech, with not enough of the joy-in-language of words as spoken in Belfast, or indeed, of McDonald’s own spoken musicality. But in its abandoning of, or disinterest in, literary aura, it succeeds in capturing the aggressive angularity of punk, its blunt refusal. Indeed, some of the dialogue made me think of speech bubbles in a Jamie Reid graphic or a detourned comic strip from the Situationists.

McDonald talks about the almost literal trade in bodies that defined the unstoppable tit-for-tat momentum of those years as “the deployment of the dead”. Their deployment being more than a reason, or a right, but a fully-fledged obligation to violence, as if the more death you had around you, the more righteous the body count delivered in return. Which is, unfortunately, perfectly logical.

Still, there is something magically Young Adult about Two Souls, the way it captures that moment of initiation into all of the possibilities, though really the inevitabilities, of the future. The late Christopher Hitchens wrote that every person should experience three things in their lives: love, poverty and war. Not in order to have lived, exactly, but more in order to have lived as most of humanity has lived, and to have come up against the same. Which is to have come to the eternals. Which means to experience them as gods.

Two Souls’ superficially artless, sometimes obnoxiously crude, presentation liberates it from making any facile point about violence being simply “bad”. Just like punk, before it. Why spend years writing a novel to make the point that every single one of us “knows” in our hearts to be true? Why sing only songs of peace and love? McDonald presents – if hyperbolically, and graphically, in other words, just like The Sex Pistols – the cycles of violence we inherit, and which we struggle to forgive, while never being able to forget. And he asks us, are youse game?