Fiction:Mark Collins's novel charting the experience of Hungarians in an Irish refugee camp in 1956 is topical not only because of the recent 50th anniversary of the failed Hungarian revolution, but also because Ireland now receives an extraordinary amount of immigrants.
The issues for a novelist to get his teeth into are palpable: was Ireland brash or noble in the generosity of offering to accept 500 Hungarians at a time when it couldn't offer opportunities for them? Were the Hungarians hasty or justified in going on hunger strike over their conditions? Do economic conditions explain Irish protectionism, or do they make it all the more inexcusable? Furthermore, the novelist is afforded the chance to set the past echoing by implied contrast between Ireland then and now, and through an exploration of the relationship between two small countries long before Hungary was reduced in this nation's consciousness to little more than a stag party destination and real estate opportunity.
Collins, whose Hungarian mother was 11 when she arrived in Ireland, explores all these issues; you cannot fault his thoroughness. What you can fault, however, is how he uses his materials. This is the story of Sandor Lovas and his sister Eva, but neither these nor other characters are richly delineated. Nobody has an individual voice, and dialogue in long, writerly speeches is common; elsewhere, questions to the authorities voiced by vexed Hungarians are more like journalists' at a press conference than those of desperate people: "Sandor asked, 'Was the Irish Red Cross solely responsible for bringing the refugees to Ireland?'"
This is a book that does not wear its research lightly. The expert novelist's narrative sweep and imaginative empathy are not here. This is not helped by an extremely episodic structure that sustains a feeling of distance because it never subsumes events in a flowing plot. Collins fails to write from the inside out, as the novelist must, and only writes from the outside in, which is the historian's job. Unsurprisingly, then, the historical context reads like a textbook: "Nagy, a 40-year member of the Communist Party, sought a form of political independence from Russia, a balance between the aspirations of the Hungarian people and the realpolitik of Russian influence in Central Europe during the Cold War." While this succeeds in communicating circumstances, the novelist's principal jobs of character development and emotional insight are neglected throughout, leaving Stateless a dry experience.
Pillar Press is an admirable new publisher. Its books are published in Marian blue jackets, adorned only by the title and the author. The inspiration is clearly the 1922 Paris edition of Ulysses. However, the famous failings of that edition - typos, inconsistencies and solecisms - are all too present in Pillar's publications so far. For example, you should not, as you do here, read a prologue and turn to the first chapter and find it begins, "Three years later". This makes the prologue part of the continuum of the novel proper: chapter one, in fact.
On the fly leaf the following are found: a space before a full stop, "the Irish Times" versus "The Examiner" (and, while we're at it, why not "The Irish Examiner"?), and "1950's". This adds up to a very sloppy welcome to the reader. Inconsistencies abound in the main text too. Both "Khrushchev" and "Krushchev" appear, "de Valera" and "DeValera"; there is confusion of en and em dashes, and "Gardaí" and "gardaí". Because of the volume's pretensions towards being an objet d'art, these slips jar all the more. More importantly, they are the most obvious signs of a deeper want: more editing. Stateless cries out for this. As it is, one is left with a sense of a novel that falls short of its potential .
• Alan O'Riordan is assistant editor of Magilland a freelance journalist and theatre critic
• StatelessBy Mark Collins Pillar Press, 314pp. €12.99