Irish Fiction: The epigraph to Neil Jordan's new novel is a line from W. B. Yeats's poem, 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz': "Dear shadows, now you know it all."
What the shadows know is "All the folly of a fight/ With a common wrong or right", presumably a reference to the Civil War, but in any case it has little bearing on Jordan's book. Jordan's dearest shadow is Nina Hardy, supposedly murdered on January 14th, 1950, at the age of 53 by her beloved George, a man who has gone beyond or beneath reason but still knows enough to love and to kill. The dead Nina is the main narrator of the novel, the shade of the title, though there are also passages of narration in the first person and the third. "I am my own ghost," Nina says and, later, "I am that oddest of things, an absence now." Later still: "I am your perfect narrator, inhabit then and now, dance between both, am nothing but my story and my story seems already endless." Then and now, what might have been and what has been: the novel moves freely between one dimension and another, just as its characters are free to inhabit one another's minds. Jordan's fiction has always been on intimate terms with the dead, as in Sunrise with Sea Monster, where the region of the dead is the place of freedom, of speech beyond speech, of words Donal Gore's father could not have spoken when merely alive. "Death . . . is the realisation of all those lost possibilities in the life we have left." It is a Yeatsian notion in its way, an audible form of reincarnation.
In Shade, as in Night in Tunisia, Jordan returns to the flatlands of the Boyne, and has his characters moving about between Drogheda, Laytown, Bettystown, Baltray, Mornington, Portrane, Termonfeckin, and Clogherhead.
It is a story of childhood friends: Nina, her half-brother Gregory, George, his sister Janie, and Nina's familiar, a ceramic doll, Hester, who has her own life as a shade till she is broken and cast into the Boyne. The Boyne becomes a myth, like Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle, from the day on which Nina's father David tells her the story of the river's birth:
"How the well at its source blinded anyone who was bold enough to gaze at their reflection. How a girl of surpassing beauty, with flowing locks like her own, came to wash her hair in it. How the waters rose, shocked at her beauty, how she ran to escape them and how they finally overtook her here, at the seashore near Mornington, deprived her of both her sight and her life. Her name was Boinn, so the river was called Boyne, after the name of its first victim."
In the end, Nina is merged with the river:
"And I am the river now, the seaweed my hair, the barnacles my bed, the long slow womanly weight of water dragging me towards the house when the tide flows, away from it when it ebbs."
But, meanwhile, there are things to be done, sorrows to be endured, appreciated, loved. The most touching parts of the book are the scenes of childhood from Baltray House to the river and beyond.
At the end, the reconciliation of David Hardy and his wife, Elizabeth, is beautifully imagined, set among the flowers in their garden. But before that happens, George and Gregory volunteer for the British army and go off to fight in the Dardanelles. I had the feeling of having read these chapters of war before, in many novels and poems of the Great War. Only the trenches were in different places.
In these later chapters, too, Jordan's eloquence runs away with the story. He is always susceptible to a fancy style, as when Janie and Gregory talk blather after George and Nina have fallen from a tower, not to death but to injury; or when Nina and George talk high nonsense to Brother Barnabas; or when Nina, now an actress in London, charms Bernard Shaw until he brings her to Lake Como and takes her out rowing, to remove every impediment from their rigmarole.
Jordan likes to hear his own voice, and regularly comes forward with an aria, as of George at school: "But their neat girlish handwriting could never save him from the terror of recitation, his breath coagulating in his chest and his stutter rising gradually from staccato to the strangled lament of a dying swan." Or the landscape: "The fields are pure expanses of white and the sycamore by the gates is a palm of silver fingers appealing to the sky."
Shade is a literary novel. Much of its feeling is mediated through Great Expectations, As You Like It (the school play in Siena Convent, Drogheda), Twelfth Night and the Bible. Janie plays Celia, Gregory plays Jaques and Orlando, George does his best with Touchstone, and Nina plays Rosalind on and off the stage.
Indeed, the novel could be read as a refutation of Rosalind's speech to Orlando in the Forest of Arden where she has been ridiculing the legendary passions of Hero and Leander, Troilus and Cressida: "But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love".
Not true, according to Shade. All that Jordan's shadows know is love. One of them dies for it, and one of them kills for it.
Denis Donoghue is University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. His most recent book is Speaking of Beauty (Yale, 2003).