WITH the great upsurge in Irish writing recently, it is inevitable Irish emigrants will be moved to write about the Old Sod. It is rare, however, that you find a writer like Michael Collins, a native of Limerick who now lives in Chicago, who writes with such compelling inaccuracy about this country. His fiction is like an Ed Wood remake of Ryan's Daughter.
"Is it true youse were found abandoned down at the Guinness Brewery and they raised youse, McGinty?" This is the kind of cliched paddywhackery contained in his new collection of short stories, The Feminists go Swimming. It is populated by Murphys, Maguires and Mackeys; stereotypes such as the priest who talks about the hymen over a pint; a wife beater named Sam Maguire who brings his injured wife down to the local priest on a tractor; and a shady publican "intent on pulling a pint". It portrays a Catholic, rain sodden, contemporary Ireland where pubs still have black and white TV sets with rabbit ear antennae, where men watch the cowboys" and make surreptitious bets in the lavatory. Exorcism, mad cows and murderous landers, IRA jailbreaks, are all packed into this book to make it as fully in touch with Ireland as a goat on acid.
In the title story, a group of men, among them a priest and a policeman, are swimming naked in the Forty Foot in Sandycove when a group of feminists strip off in the middle of March and prevent them from coming out of the water. A few of the men suddenly drown, out by the island (over a mile away) and the priest begs the women to let them out of the water and home for their dinner.
In a story called "The Fornicator", a husband named Murphy bids farewell to his wife for the weekend. In an effort to keep him at home . . . her dressing gown parted slightly in what amounted to calculated lewdness. The toilet bowl trembled . . ." On his way down the country with a lover, he is forced to stop at a checkpoint in Portlaoise where he whispers: ". . . let me do the talking." What country is Michael Collins talking about?
The couple get away from the checkpoint alive and stop for a moving love scene in the country where Murphy begins to manoeuvre her "over the quivering black gear lever", while the "exhaust puttered outside, the round hole smoking in the cold air". They wake up to find an injured cow trying to get in the window and subsequently murder the raving farmer after which they begin to wonder if they will be executed.
The dangers involved in writing about a foreign country, even if that is the country of your origins, can be avoided with some basic research. When Father Mackey in a story called "The End of the World" keeps asking his pupils if they are part of the Church of Ireland or the Church of Rome, the suspicion is that the author doesn't know the difference.
The genre Michael Collins uses could only be described as a kind of utan blight sit commerged with magic realism and literary aerobics, where priests, alcoholics, punters and crooked politicians have become modern day leprechauns. The real question is how Phoenix House, who have published such fine writers as Colum McCann, can be so ignorant of Ireland as to believe in this book.