FICTION: Nights Beneath the NationBy Denis Kehoe, Serpent's Tail, 245pp, £9.99
NIGHTS BENEATH the Nation, the title of this debut novel from Denis Kehoe, refers to the world of gay life and love in 1950s Ireland: a necessarily subterranean region, a place of fleeting freedom and joy away from the oppressions of official Ireland endured above ground. The narrative is complicated somewhat by splitting the time frame between the past and the present. Daniel, now in his 60s has returned to Dublin in the late 1990s from New York, only to be confronted by the ghosts of his past. The scene is set, then, for an unravelling of the mystery that surrounds Daniel's past life.
The emphasis is very much on plot, on actions and reactions. Daniel leaves small-town Ireland to take a job in the civil service in Dublin. Once there he becomes involved with a theatrical crowd. With no warning to the reader, though Daniel has obviously known for a long time, it transpires that he is gay. He falls for the dashing Anthony, a student, and - it can be guessed - their love is doomed.
This story is interwoven with the older Daniel's return to Dublin, where gay life has come out of the closet with a bang. The gay pub, club and sauna scene is the backdrop to Daniel's haunted return. Interestingly, it seems that love was actually possible in the past whereas the contemporary gay scene permits only casual and often brutal sex. Maybe the reader is meant to be shocked.
So much for the plot. In many ways it is cliched: an oppressive provincial life is escaped and life is embraced in the space and possibility that the city, any city, might offer. The difficulty is that Kehoe positively revels in this trite reading of Ireland's past. Every now and then we are presented with a history lesson of the 1930s and 1940s: the Spanish civil war and second World War are breathlessly mentioned as facts, lacking the atmosphere and real authentic detail that might give substance to this background. Namechecking various real-life characters from the period and listing off Dublin's dance halls and the cafes around Grafton Street does not recreate a world. Sadly, such superficiality is never overcome and, try as he might, Kehoe is not able to plumb any depth beyond the surface of things.
Kehoe wants his novel to rise above mere story. Federico García Lorca's Blood Weddingis the play put on by the theatre group and its passion is meant to inform the action of Daniel and the others. But it is a note of melodrama rather than tragedy that is struck.
It is in the telling of this story,particularly in the voice of Daniel, that the real problems with Nights Beneath the Nationemerge. No effort is made to conjure up the authentic voice of a 60-year-old man: Daniel sounds like a 1990s 20-year-old most of the time with the built-in cynicism, not of age, but of youth. Nor is any effort made to truly differentiate between that past and present: the language used is the same for both time frames and therefore the imagination is the same for the 1950s as it is for the 1990s. Such stylistic laziness leads to leaden prose; no development of character is consequently charted and no revelation can really come to light because of it.
This is a first novel, and hopefully Denis Kehoe will learn from its shortcomings. There is certainly ambition here and that is to be welcomed and encouraged. To match that ambition he needs to challenge himself, and his readers, by beginning to tell us things that we might not know, rather than resorting to well-worn ideas and wearisome stereotypes. Only then, perhaps, will Kehoe find an authentic and original voice.
Derek Hand is a lecturer in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra