FICTION: This novel, set during the Biafran war, was first published in 1973. It tells the story of the Irish expatriate teacher Painter, who stays in his remote school as the war begins, and also deals with a number of others, including an Irish priest, caught up in the war's cruelties and exigencies, writes Colm Tóibín.
An End to Flight. By Vincent Banville. New Island, 235pp. €9.99
It is a relentlessly dark book, dramatising, at first, Painter's listless and lascivious self and his profoundly anti-heroic stance as much as any version of the war or the fate of Biafra. Vincent Banville writes with enormous skill about Painter's innocence and decency doing battle with his drunkenness and his laziness; Painter's longing for something pure is set against a badness lurking at the edge of his every action. His complexity, his store of opposites, especially the quality of his passivity and his sensuality, make him a uniquely interesting figure. There is no one like him in Irish fiction.
Banville writes vividly about the oppression of heat and sweat, sounds and shadows, a world of half-finished buildings, mould, remnants of colonial power, rumours of war. Most of the writing is clear and plain, but with full regard being paid to nuance, subtlety and the right of each moment in the book to be unexpected. When Painter attracts a woman's interest, for example, Banville manages to stop us in our tracks for a second by writing that it was his "tired smile and sincere inattention \ had strangely comforted her". He writes well also about physical discomfort. Painter's newly grown beard "was like a sentient thing: it crept and crawled about his face and itched so badly that he would like to have torn it out in tufts".
Just as Painter's lassitude, which fills the early pages of the book, breaks down in the face of violence and brutality, so too the style of the book can move from plainness to carefully balanced sentences to moments of rhetorical flourish. The war in Biafra, which slowly takes over the book, was "full of noise and fury and high-flown proclamations of defeats and victories, but at the centre it was hollow. It was a small, mean war, and the appearance and the sound of the guns caused more destruction than the actual shells that they fired . . . In the beginning, the dream of nationhood had hovered bright and steadfast, and perhaps the leaders still believed in it, but now after almost a year of the reality of war the people saw the dream for what it had become . . ."
Against this background, Vincent Banville is not concerned merely to portray his Irish anti-hero and his heroic priest as European victims of African disorder, but to create in his novel a sort of quest in an evil hour for the right terms and the right motives to achieve salvation, or, more mundanely, survival. Much of the dialogue dramatises these concerns. The dialogue is, by necessity, stilted and at times awkward. The war is the pressure on his characters, forcing them to ponder the nature of bravery and goodness and cruelty and evil.
The genuine power of the novel comes from Banville's skill at creating dramatic scenes, some of them unforgettable in their tension. It is very difficult to make drunkenness work in a novel; Painter's crazy night of the soul is both convincing and compelling. Both the sex and the violence are created with a crisp and shocking brutality. None of this prepares the reader for the slow and grim horror of the final chapters which are full of an extraordinary sense of darkness and despair.
It is unbelievable that this deeply disturbing novel of the cruelty of war and the search for redemption has been out of print for many years; New Island has done us a great service by re-issuing it.
Colm Tóibín is a novelist and critic. His books Love in a Dark Time; Gay Lives from Wilde to Almódovar (Picador ) and Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (Lilliput) were published earlier this year