FICTION: South of the Border By James Ryan, Lilliput Press, 233pp. €15 A novel that contrives remarkably to interweave the charged sensitivities of neutral Ireland into a compelling narrative.
JAMES RYAN'S acclaimed first novel, Home from England, published in 1995, addressed with an impressive mixture of subtlety and clarity a major issue for the social history of 20th-century Ireland: the complex series of loyalties and nostalgia prompted by movement between Ireland and England - a major part of the experience of a huge number of Irish people throughout that century. Since then Ryan's novels have sustained a concern with social and political contexts, particularly in the crucial period immediately before the present: the seminal moment at which politics is turning into history.
These concerns are even more pronounced in South of the Border, which is set in neutral Ireland in 1942 and contrives remarkably to interweave the charged sensitivities of that tense time into a personal and compelling narrative.
Ryan, who is himself a historian among other things, has the rare gift of infiltrating the political into the fictional without sounding preachy. Like the earlier books, this one has such an air of authenticity that it is tempting to read it as a memoir, like David Thompson's masterpiece, Woodbrook, say; chronologically of course, Ryan's book cannot be that.
It tells the story of Matt Duggan, a newly qualified national teacher who takes a job in a school in Rathisland in the Irish midlands (evocative of Ryan's native terrain in Laois). The question of neutrality hovers over everything: his relations with his headmaster (a figure who is a masterpiece of the obscurely sinister), his pupils, the parish priest, his landlady - if that is the term for the tennis club hostess who provides his digs - and his pupils. Above all it shadows his relationship with the Coll family, a slightly-faded-gentry trio of siblings, and their luminous 19-year-old niece from England. Duggan falls in love with her, but in a remarkably confident and forceful way for an Irish bildungsroman; he is more like a country Stephen Dedalus than the repressed stereotype of the form. He is pressed into service as a translator of Irish broadcasts from Nazi Germany.
The moral here is clear, typically unlaboured as it is: the local nationalists can't understand the Irish; the vaguely sympathetic but cowardly headmaster doesn't want to get involved; Duggan, with his liberal, anti-Fascist, Dublin background but the national teacher's ability in Irish, has to do it with angry distaste.
Ryan's compelling narrative skills are pre-eminent here: his ability to let events emerge with an inevitability that seems more like real life than fictional planning. The story is told too with an even-handedness that wrongfoots any reader who assumes it is a simple morality tale. There is an unforgettable moment when Duggan reports back to his mother the standard-version, nationalist cliché of Irish history in an anecdote told in the classroom by the child of the Nazi-sympathising radio listener.
"'It said that English military cadets, with the police from the town and the Black and Tans, broke into someone's shop here and beat him to death . . . They made it sound like it really happened. 'Course I was able to tell them it didn't.' 'It did,' their mother said emphatically", before adding "'Your father didn't want you brought up looking backwards. No more than I did myself.'"
It is inevitable that the events will drive to a tragic conclusion, before a final framing chapter re-establishes narrative uncertainty by showing parents giving their children incompatible accounts of their first meeting: again, a device that introduces the relativity of historical judgement with characteristic quietness.
There are wonderful glints of humour, but these too have their significance: the Father Ted-like "meandering medley of party-pieces" at the town concert (a semi-aborted production of Hamlet): "Daisy, Daisy, Báidín Fheidhlimid, A Long Way to Tipperary, Three Little Maids, Eibhlín a Rún, all accompanied by blind Billy Foyle on the spoons." The list is convincingly familiar, but a brilliant social sample too, from Gilbert and Sullivan to the Gaelic Revival.
This is the work of a major historical novelist. But it is something more than that too: the term "historical novel" has a reductive ring to it, as would the description "political novel". What we get here is imaginative fiction of a high order, built on reliable documentation and a historian's insight, all written with impeccable style and narrative compulsion.
Writers who combine this degree of accomplishment with serious historical insight are rare indeed.
Bernard O'Donoghue's Selected Poems have just been published by Faber
