This book has about it, in Charlie McCreevy's immortal phrase, "a high degree of unusuality". It may be one of the most absurd books ever written; it may be one of the least. Certainly it is nowhere in-between.
Nostos (from the Greek for homecoming) is, according to the blurb, "a volume of autobiography". This is voluminously precise: after 698 pages Moriarty, born 1938, is still stravaging through the 1980s. But the latter date is guesswork on my part: dates are as rare as palm-trees in this chronological desert, though more numerous than chapters (there aren't any).
Still, there is a thread to the narrative that for the purposes of this review is worth drawing out from the storm-torn thickets of Moriarty's prose. Amid all the philosophy (or anti-philosophy), the analyses of history, religion, myth and culture, the hectic questioning and hopeless answering, one knot remains Gordian: sex. Or rather, Moriarty being perhaps the quintessential Irishman of the mid-20th century, sex and the family.
On page 159 we learn that his parents are "getting on well together. It wasn't always so. What was so strange is that when it came to listing and naming the great volcanoes in school, Vesuvius, Etna, Popacatepetl, Misti, Mount Helen - what was so strange is that no one ever mentioned our house."
(By now one is familiar with the repetitively rhythmical syntax, and the hyperbole, and the chanting of proper names - the book is littered with Capital Nouns, and they so obviously constitute both an essential symbolic freedom and a psychological burden for Moriarty that one is tempted to think of him as a kind of Charles Atlas, an 8-stone weakling acquiring from his Superman reading the muscles of identity.)
One not infrequent result of this parental vulcanism was that his father would suddenly leave home and go to England for months at a time. Thus we have evidence of emotional dislocation. But where is the sex? Moriarty's answer, I imagine, is that it's everywhere in the book, including the places where it is not. And that answer, being as large (almost) as the author, is true as far as it goes. But this reviewer, taking his lead from the style of the book, approaches the question circuitously.
Reviewing Turtle Was Gone A Long Time in 1996 I wrote: "For Moriarty, though, the world is not only looking at us but also striking its horn into our vitals. When he comes to this meeting-point his language is often uneasily sexual: penis/ weapon and vagina/wound (the wound with teeth in it) engage in a life and death embrace". Reading Nostos, and long before I reached page 159, I found myself exclaiming involuntarily, "I hope he's not going to injure himself". All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Moriarty has, and knows he has, a deep-seated fear of emasculation.
I say he knows he has it - "In a kind of eucharistic despair, we drink the blood of our own castration" - but how well he knows it is another question. He certainly refers to it often enough, linking it explicitly to a memory of his mother cutting the head off a cock (well, yes) and seeing the blood spurting between her thighs into a bowl. But, apart from being a deliberately chosen theme - old Father Jung looms large - does he know how profoundly this dread informs the rest of the history?
TAKE for instance the cloaked account of Moriarty's intense relationship with a prostitute in London, which happened more or less at the same time that he was frequenting a strip-club in Soho. Both revelations are made, I guess, with great difficulty - the taste for striptease is suddenly admitted to near the end of the book - covertly yet repeatedly (the oddest kind of code), and shamefacedly. So it is the awareness of shame that I doubt. But in the present period of Irish history - when, for example, in this newspaper recently a journalist, Kevin Courtney, wrote frankly about his use of pornography, Moriarty's pudeur must seem very old-fashioned (though, to this reader at least, all the more interesting for that reason).
Sexual anxiety can be used to interpret Moriarty's inability to form lasting relationships, his hermeticism, his dualism (extraordinarily Eurocentric); it is also useful in making sense of his style, or rather tone of voice: babbling, baby-brilliant, obsessional, essentially nervous.
But that being said, not much has been said. It is not at all to engage with the depth of his imagination, the frequently wonderful writing, the radicalism of his vision, his intellectual and spiritual courage, his eccentric charm, his highly developed sense of the ridiculous. The last of these, though, is often unconscious; take for example the account of his courtship of a girl in UCD in the 1960s: "Avoiding all encounter with her for the next few days was a way of pursuing her. But pursue her I would. The question was how. On a freezing cold morning, I waited for her in the portico. `Terrible,' I said, touching one of them, `that we've turned the carboniferous into these Parthenon pillars.' Ever so slightly, she narrowed her eyes."
Is that not genuinely funny? I think it is. But does Moriarty think so too? By the end of the book I have the gravest doubts, not least because he has by then become Messianic, an aspirant Temple-founder: "I take Western civilisation by the hand . . . I lead it to a swordless second chance." Thus a poor little Kerry boy with a fear of losing his "Titanic bollocks" grows into an almost androgynous god, a chattering Christ. Nostos is more than absurd, no less than the truth, beyond unusuality.
Brian Lynch is a poet and screenwriter