FICTION:
Ghosts and Lightning, By Trevor Byrne, Canongate, 318pp. £10.99
ON THE face of it, Trevor Byrne’s first novel looks like the Irish debut we have been waiting for, a novel which could fill out our incomplete literary map of Ireland and allow southwest Dublin to take its place alongside Tóibín’s Enniscorthy, McCabe’s Monaghan or Doyle’s Northside.
It tells the story of the sensitive and lively Denny, returning from Wales to his family home in Clondalkin after the death of his mother. Through a series of tragedies, epiphanies and adventures, we meet the people who populate Denny’s life: his sister, Paula; his friends Pajo and Maggit; and a long roll-call of peripheral characters.
Everything is narrated by Denny himself, in the present tense, and his voice is dutifully and phonetically rendered (“Fuckin grill yeh to death these pricks”; “Bollix, I’m after makin eye-contact.”). As a rule, a narrator speaking directly in his own local idiom is the most capable of pulling us into a novel’s world, of making us participate and feel complicit in its events. The particularity of accent and turns of phrase causes the narrator to become more fully individual, but also gives us a feeling of the circumstances of time, place and class which has formed him.
My hopes were thus high that the sights and sounds of early 21st-century Clondalkin would leap out of Denny's voice and into our imaginations, the way 1950s Clones is incarnated in the voice of McCabe's Francie Brady. But for the writer, narrating in a dialectal first person is a difficult undertaking. A local, spoken idiom must be stretched to convey poetic ideas (eg the grieving mother in Juno and the Paycockdescribing her murdered son's corpse as "riddled with holes like a colandher", using both her Dublin accent and the metaphorical possibilities of an object from her world). The resources of standard literary English are no longer available; it is the price which must be paid.
Byrne, unfortunately, wants to have it both ways. While ostensibly reproducing Denny’s accent, (“wharrever” for “whatever”), he is unable to resist the temptation of resorting to writerly writing whenever it is more convenient. To give one example of something that happens, alas, on every page: “Maggit . . . holds up the joypad . . . lookin at it like it’s some unfathomable fossil, alien and infinitely strange,” an accomplished literary sentence, but something that not only Denny, but nobody, would ever say aloud.
One cannot underestimate the damage this inconsistency in the voice at the novel’s centre does to our reading experience. We lose both the liveliness of spontaneous speech and the pleasure of crafted literary language, we cannot believe in Denny, and it becomes impossible to feel anything for him or for his story.
This failure to make difficult choices mars the novel in other ways. A dizzying number of plotlines are set in motion but forgotten. Seemingly endless characters and events are squashed into the pages without the trouble being taken to bring them to life for us.
Frustratingly, while they never feel real to us, one can sense that the characters and events do exist in full colour inside the mind of the author. Indeed, on a couple of occasions, Byrne shows that he is capable of the observation and care needed to fill out a fictional world. When Denny’s brother Gino comes home to find Denny on his doorstep, for example, his arrival on the novel’s “stage” and his greeting of Denny are described in a simple, economic way which causes Gino nonetheless to zing into throbbing existence before our eyes:
“He spits into the garden next door and draws his thick forearm across his glistenin forehead.
-Wha? he says.”
Such moments suggest that the problem is not a lack of talent but a lack of labour, an unwillingness to engage in the hard legwork of building a world in the mind of a reader. In the end, my guess is that this is not the book Byrne wanted to write. One feels the prose straining to break out of Denny’s voice and be more lyrical, more straightforwardly literary. If Byrne is willing to take on the hard work of really building a fictional world from the bottom up, starting with the humblest details, if he allows himself the luxury of the conventional literary language which seems to be his natural idiom, and thinks through his work from the point of view of the reader, then the world and people he is writing about will spring to life. Then, but only then, Byrne might yet become the one to finally give much-needed literary expression to the world of Dublin west of the M50.
Barry McCrea is assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University, and the author of the novel The First Verse