Tag: Irish Literature

Unrevealing Revelations in John Banville’s The Sea

John Banville is perhaps Ireland’s most celebrated living author, and as I wanted to read something contemporary and English-language I picked up my copy of The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 2005. With its focus on grief, mourning and aging, it seems perfect for appealing to a prize committee of well-established adults who may feel their bones creak more than they used to, while its use of an unreliable narrator looking back on his life places it alongside Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (also a Booker winner in 1989) and Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (Booker in 2011). Budding writers eyeing the prize, I hope you are taking notes.

The problem with The Sea is that it lacks that wonderful structural bifurcation of The Sense of an Ending, where the story seems finished until the narrator realises he has completely misunderstood his own past. It also, even putting aside the escapist enticements of the interwar manor house setting of The Remains of the Day, lacks a narrator with anywhere near the charm of Stevens in that book, or that tender readerly experience of sad frustration we get as we watch the old butler repeatedly missing what really matters until it is (almost) too late. Instead, what we have in The Sea is a narrator who does not even pretend to himself to be a good person, and some final revelations that really reveal nothing. It’s clever, but has very little heart. 

In The Sea, Max Morden, our art historian narrator, returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday. He carries the grief of his wife’s recent death from cancer, a certain amount of estrangement from his daughter, and another, deeper trauma from that old childhood break, where he got to know the Grace family. As he sits in his room, he writes musingly about these two pasts – the childhood past at the beach with the Graces, and the adult past with his wife Anna. The two are divided by time, but narratively glued together, as Max shifts from one to another as his memory travels. It is this split structure which gives The Sea its great curiosity.

Why write? Perhaps to cope or find order in what seems a mess, or perhaps simply to pass the time. As for us readers, we peruse these notes trying to make sense of the enigma that is the human soul. Max’s soul, that is. What we discover is essentially an exploration of the way that a man’s life can be influenced by his past. The first narrative strand, where Max is on holiday and spending time with the Graces, brings out in him a character trait – shame at his class origins – that influences the rest of his life, which we then see manifested in the second strand concerning Max’s wife Anna, and also ultimately in the narrative set at the time of his writing the notes, where we see this trait from yet another angle.

That human character is shaped by past events is something we writers are obliged to agree to before we are granted our pens – it’s practically in our contract. But here Banville makes backstory the front-story, so to speak. The influence of the Graces comes not, it seems to me, from the traumatic end of that holiday which we eventually learn about, but rather from the very fact of Max’s getting to know them over the course of the work – the accumulation of experiences of another world which ultimately sends him on a life’s journey to escape the world he was born into.

Max is lower class, while the Graces occupy a higher stratum. In a way, that’s all there is to it. Max’s relationship with his quarrelling parents falls apart and resentment towards his uneducated mother grows; he becomes an art historian, ever the refuge for the aspiring un-bourgeois; he marries a woman, at least initially it seems, for the money her father has made; and later he breaks down his relationship with his daughter, Claire, when she prefers to pursue a life that sees her helping those in poverty rather than solidifying Max’s status via continuing his work in the field of art history. A sense of social inadequacy, once present, leads the entirety of Max’s life off course.

This initial encounter with class is complicated, made rich and fragrant in the man’s memory no doubt, by its association with first love and then second, as Max grows enamoured first with Mrs Grace and then with his own coeval, her daughter Chloe. Then there is a certain fairy-tale-like undercurrent to the text thanks to Chloe having a twin, Myles, who is mute. Not for nothing does Max refer to them as “the gods” at times – they seem from another world, and gloriously strange.

Referring to the twins as such, however, also suggests a persistent problem Max has – an inability to see, which we note with a certain ironic smile given his profession. Throughout the book, he seems to prefer to view the world through the lens of his favourite artist, Pierre Bonnard. Chloe, for example, looks “remarkably like the forehead of that ghostly figure seen in profile hovering at the edge of Bonnard’s Table in Front of the Window.” That even some fifty years later he continues to think of her perhaps suggests continued infatuation, but it certainly suggests a problem with accepting how things are.

Indeed, often we have to wait to the end of a given section before Max actually reveals some useful information, about himself or his life. Take this shocking, painful, and pained admission of his wife’s frailty, which comes as a standalone paragraph after several unrelated long paragraphs on the child Max’s habit of finding bird nests – “Anna leaning sideways from the hospital bed, vomiting on to the floor, her burning brow pressed in my palm, full and frail as an ostrich egg.” Obviously, we need what comes before to see how it leads Max back to his pain, and also to give additional heft to the image of the ostrich egg. But it does mean that we spend much of the book sifting through memories, waiting for the occasional pithy statements that sometimes do not land.

(I am also not sure how honest it is as an approach, from a writing perspective. It feels a bit cheap – as if Banville had this admittedly great image of the egg, then decided to create the backstory to bring us to it. This is the cheapness of musings and memory – because they don’t really connect to anything, we can make up whatever narrative or language or image demands.)

Evasion, unseeing – Max is an unreliable narrator. We know them by now. He writes of childhood or of eggs and really he’s writing about his grief or longing. He misinterprets overheard information and he’s a flawed character, hitting his dog as a child and spouting misogynist twaddle as an adult. He hides things too, primarily his alcoholism, but in a way that the careful reader notices. All this is fine – it’s what such narrators do.  

The problem is that Banville really does nothing with any of this. Unlike Stevens at Ishiguro’s novel’s closing moments, Max does not actually learn anything about his life. The story ends with a minor factual discovery, but not growth. He may have written his pain out onto the page, but he doesn’t seem to have overcome it, or changed, or anything. The conclusion of the novel basically sees Max forced to accept certain realities he was previously disinclined to, but that again is not growth. We do not say that the suspect taken away in handcuffs has grown because she has stopped resisting – nor can we say it here.

Reader, I go into novels looking for ideas and journeys – maybe that’s my problem, but as an approach it largely clears the ground to let me enjoy a variety of things. The Sea basically has no ideas except that grief is often only approachable through evasions and that class shame can last an awfully long time. Nor does it have any journey to speak of. The traumatic event at the end of the childhood holiday seems to have had far less influence on Max’s subsequent life than his experience of embarrassment about his parents’ financial situation. As a final revelation, it reveals nothing to us.

In the same way, when Max then learns as an adult that something he had overheard at a critical moment during the final moments of his holiday with the Graces was wrong, it offers no catharsis for him or for us because that overheard information would not have stopped the traumatic event from taking place – the truth replaces the falsehood but all the bother would still have happened. Everything is disconnected, unsatisfactory. Even the sea itself is underutilised as an image!

There are readers who can drift along for page after page, enjoying a good metaphor or digression. I am not one of them – sorry. (Readers shocked at this admission should consult the name of the blog.) I can enjoy beautiful prose, and The Sea is beautiful, with plenty of phrases underlinable, but that’s not enough. These phrases ought to be connected to something, some idea or development or existence. Instead, they are like beautiful drawings on the sand, waiting to be washed away by the tide, as the memory of this book may well be for me, as soon as I start the next one.

Ideas of Goodness in Small Things Like These and Foster

We can say, not unreasonably I think, that the concern at the heart of Irish writer Claire Keegan’s two brilliant novellas, Small Things Like These and Foster, is a religious one. It is a concern for goodness. We are all able to consider goodness, but here the opposition seems not so much between good and bad (a secular concern), nor even between good and evil, but between what is merely good enough and what is supernaturally, miraculously good.

That higher goodness is inevitably the thing most needful. Authentic goodness as opposed to the sham goodness of the fraud is not the main problem here either, though it crops up. Rather, it is true goodness against the merely good enough. From this, we can see that we also have a problem with language here. The philosophers have the word supererogatory – going beyond what is necessary – which we can use to describe the goodness these novellas contain. Maybe that is the better word, but still a wrong one, because such goodness should be everywhere; it just is not.

Both of these novellas centre around a single good deed, the saving of a soul. In Small Things Like These, the merchant Bill Furlong decides to rescue a woman trapped within a kind of domestic slavery under the Catholic Church at what were called the Magdalene Laundries. In Foster, meanwhile, the Kinsellas, husband and wife, decide to take on the daughter of a relative and treat her as they would their own child. What these novellas do is contrast these actions with a host of other actions and persons who are not given the same kind of goodness. In this way, Keegan shows how special the truly good are. She lets their goodness illuminate them against the murk of the everyday.

Foster

In Foster, our narrator is a young girl who is being passed on to relatives for the summer. Her voice lets us hear what another narrator might be unwilling to admit, so the initial pages are full of distances noticed between what is done or said, and the real situation the girl has left behind. On the first page, we have a reference to a cow, lost by her father while gambling. Then, when she and her father arrive at the Kinsellas’ home, we learn of the months of poor weather for farming that have passed. Then we also see how her father, prideful, pretends things are otherwise, saying the barn at home is full.

“I wonder why my father lies about the hay,” our narrator thinks. The Kinsellas themselves see through this, of course, providing him with extra food from their garden to take home. And he, for his part, “forgets” to give the girl her clothes when he leaves – she has many brothers and sisters at home. The scene is an elaborate performance that we see, as the narrator too sees, with sad confusion. These are the outward problems – the poverty of her family home. This is contrasted with the girl’s excitement and apprehension at the first hot bath of her life, for example. And the confused joy at so much food.

But there is another side to this, and here her own knowledge is lacking this time, or else not fully revealed. There is the way she wets her bed, a common sign of abuse, and the way she crouches in fear when expecting Kinsella to hit her. “I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on much like the one before.” The girl has overheard her mother and father discussing her before she left home in words they should not have dared use, the kind that makes her seem worthless to them.

Simply put, it is a bad home that our narrator escapes. And it is a good one that she enters. The Kinsellas feed her, buy her clothes, and give her money for snacks and books. I do not want to call this a novella of healing, because that seems to me trite and cliché, but certainly, it could be an appropriate term here. Our narrator learns to live without fear that summer. Eating Weetabix and having warm baths and helping outside and so many other moments of little joys are wondrously powerful through cumulative effect.

But it is a little later where this question of goodness truly comes into the fore – when we meet the ordinary Irishmen and women of the area. On a trip to town, our narrator is asked “whose child I am, who I am belonging to?”, and Mrs Kinsella quickly ends the conversation. “God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon,” she says later in a rare moment of negativity.

Then, following a man’s death, a woman from the village offers to take the narrator home while the Kinsellas stay to help. What appears a good deed is soon revealed to be motivated by cynicism and a desire for gossip – the narrator is pelted with questions, and eventually discovers the truth about the Kinsellas – that they lost their own child in an accident.

Yet what the novella goes on to show is that this fact is of no importance to the Kinsellas’ treatment of our narrator. She is their daughter because they love her, not because she fills a space left empty by death. They care for her not as a replacement – at first she wears their son’s old clothes, before getting her own – but as a person in herself. In a moment of real beauty, Mr Kinsella and the girl go for a walk at night on the beach, and we experience the kind of tenderness that we might have foolishly believed is possible only between parents and children. But it is not limited in this way. This is a thing we see in Small Things Like These too – that there are no real limits to human goodness except those set by the hardness of a human heart.

The Kinsellas are not special. The man gambles too, albeit moderately, and his wife is too trusting. But unlike the other characters we briefly encounter in the novella, they allow their inner kindness to place a barrier before curiosity and all thoughts of difference. They simply love the girl. That for them is enough.

Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These is longer than Foster, and seems in many ways the deserving kin to Joyce’s novella The Dead, sharing a Christmas setting and state-of-the-nation sweep. Bill Furlong is another fostered child, in his way. His mother is rejected by her family after she falls pregnant while in the service of a Protestant widow and landowner, Mrs Wilson, but the child and mother are taken care of by the old woman, rather than cast out. A single kindness helps shape his life.

Furlong grows to become a coal and timber merchant with many workers in his employ. He marries and has five daughters. Life is, as it is for Ivan Ilyich, “pleasant and respectable.” Yet Furlong is aware that something might be missing in it. He has his moments of introspection while driving or sitting by the stove at home, when he wonders at his life and its course. When he comes to speak of this, he discovers he is more alone than he had thought:

“But aren’t we all right?”

“Money-wise, do you mean? Didn’t we have a good year?”

…

“I’m not sure what I mean, Eileen.” Furlong sighed. “I’m just a bit weary tonight, is all. Pay no heed.”

But the next thing he thinks, the very next line, pays heed indeed. “What was it all for? Furlong wondered.”

Furlong’s introspection is not a total rejection of his life, but it comes and goes like the tide. It worsens when he has his first encounter with the nuns of the laundry where he has his family’s things washed. Arriving too early, he discovers the girls imprisoned there in shabby dresses and suffering. They ask him to help, but his instinctive response is to excuse himself: “Haven’t I five girls and a wife at home?” But how pathetic is this compared to the response: “Well, I‘ve nobody – and all I want to do is drown meself.” The respectability of family against the void. Fortunately, Furlong is rescued when a nun arrives and swiftly deals with him.

At home, he asks his wife about what he saw but receives a run-on sentence of excuses in turn, the gist of which is that he should not meddle. “What do such things have to do with us? Aren’t all our girls well, and minded?” So, for Furlong the choice is clearly stated – a care that limits itself to family, and should be satisfied. Or a more expansive care, whose limits he cannot apprehend, but which seems more true to his inner spirit.

Not long later he comes across one of the poor laundry girls hiding in the laundry’s coal shed, but rather than helping her, he returns her to the nuns. This time the pain of his decision is obvious, and it sets Furlong up for the novella’s finale. Here he runs into the same girl in the shed again, but this time he takes her home with him. Going down the street with the limping child, he willingly submits to the gaze of respectable members of Irish society, letting himself be an example of an alternative way of being, which in the context of Christmas seems overwhelmingly the one that society supposedly supports, but in reality, turns its back on.

This is Furlong’s supernatural good deed. He saves a soul. Like the Kinsellas he is not perfect. Many of the women in the laundry were those who had become pregnant out of wedlock and been cast out. There is an interesting scene in the middle of the story where Furlong himself encounters an attractive young woman and notices her breast. He too, is a human being, not immune to the same desires that have filled the convent, desires which in fact led to his own birth. But unlike the others in the story, he does a good deed that breaks the evil of the laundry and challenges the world’s hypocrisy. He does not solve the problems, but he makes them visible. That, for now, must be enough.

He also solves his problems. For although in the paragraph above I said he saved a soul, this is surely a mistake. He has saved two souls – the girl’s, and his own. For life is not about those dull repetitions, year after year, that he rightly comes to mistrust. It is about the kind of goodness that redeems and answers such a life by putting it in touch with the infinite. And that goodness is what he discovers and makes his own.

In essence, those are the shapes of the two novellas.

Doubling and Standing for All

In any story where there is a contrast, we can expect to see doublings. In any story where there is change, there is always the shadow image of the world left behind, which could still have been born. In both novellas, too, I have come to see doubling and its counterpoint – the refusal to differentiate – as a key part of their moral argument.

Both Foster and Small Things Like These make use of mirror images to emphasise their dynamics, with it being most obviousin Small Things Like These. Furlong is divided in two, with his outward person obliged to family and respectability, and his inner one striving towards a “something more” which only becomes clear when he encounters the girl in the coal shed. We know that because suddenly we see two Furlongs after this, when the mother superior has him in for a cup of tea to smooth matters over. “In some of the hanging pots Furlong glimpsed a version of himself, passing.” This builds upon a distinction made a few pages earlier, between “the ordinary part of him” and the part of him that wants to do the right thing. The laundry is located next to a girl’s school, providing an actual mirroring of circumstances as well.

If doubling is a reflection, providing a contrast, then its opposite is when everyone stands in for every other. And this is part of Furlong’s development, that he comes to see things like this. “But what if it was one of ours?” Furlong asks Eileen, his wife. Just as he realises that he could be any of the men responsible for a girl ending up in the laundries, he realises that any young woman could be his daughter. By taking the girl home, he is effectively adopting her. As he walks with her down the main street, people stop to talk to him, assuming he is out with one of his daughters, but when they come closer and see the girl’s rags they realise this is not the case and retreat in disgust. But Furlong himself no longer sees this distinction – for him, the girl is his daughter. He has broken through the view that he must care mostly or only for his family, and instead now has a willingness to aid all.

In Foster, we also see a doubling dynamic. For one, there are two sets of parents, the one cold and uncaring, and the other warm and open, and two sets of houses. What is remarkable is the loosening of expectations, where what is “home” is the uncomfortable, secretive place, so that we see with the narrator that home is a moveable concept that might go against what society would claim to be the case. The narrator fetches water from a well, and sees her own reflection in it – and thereby the difference between what she was, and what in the loving Kinsella home she is becoming. It is the central image of the story.

Doubling and unrecognising differences also play into the treatment of goodness here, as it does in Small Things Like These. Just as goodness in the other novella was ultimately about refusing to see a distinction in humanity, so too here is Kinsella’s goodness in refusing to see a distinction between the child they lose and the child they gain. Both receive love; both deserve nothing less.

The Language of Goodness

Keegan is an Irish writer, and so she has a second language to draw upon in her writing about her homeland in the way that we poor Brits generally do not. In fact, the film of Foster, The Quiet Girl / An Cailín Ciúin, is shot mostly in Irish. Thankfully for us, Foster and Small Things Like These use only a single word, but it is perfect. The word is “leanbh”, which I took to be “dear”, but is more correctly “child” and is used in a way that either would be a good translation. Furlong uses it with one of his own daughters when she is scared of Santa, but he also uses it with the girl in the coal shed. It is an almost secret word for when true tenderness is needed, rather than just ordinary care.

Meanwhile, in Foster, the word is used just once, by Mrs Kinsella when she invites the narrator into her home. It marks the beginning of the kindness that she will receive –the first tender word she will hear in the place that will become her home. It contrasts with the coldness of the language of her family as she remembers overhearing it, as they talk about what to do with her: “can’t they keep her as long as they like?” Mrs Kinsella also calls her “girleen”, another sweetly Irish way of showing her affection for the girl. The conclusion we can draw is that these moments of Irish come out for the truest of good human feelings, where English for the characters simply won’t do.

The Conspiracy of Silence in Small Things Like These

In Small Things Like These we have a constant sense of society in a way that Foster does not. At the beginning of chapter 2, when we learn about Furlong’s past, it is presented thus: “Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say.” This word “some” is key for establishing society’s presence as a regulator. Where Foster’s badness is an unkind family and thoughtless strangers, in Small Things Like These we have an entire society engaged in a conspiracy of silence, concealing the evil in their midst. This is most obvious when we are introduced to the convent and laundry when the narrative voice itself reflects these assumptions and their unquestionability:

the laundry had a good reputation: restaurants and guesthouses, the nursing home and the hospital and all the priests and well-off households sent their washing there. Reports were that everything that was sent in, whether it be a raft of bedlinen or just a dozen handkerchiefs, came back same as new.

There was other talk, too, about the place. Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night. The local nurse had told that she’d been called out to treat a fifteen-year-old with varicose veins from standing so long at the wash tubs. Others claimed that it was the nuns themselves who worked their fingers to the bone, knitting Aran jumpers and threading rosary beads for export, that they had hearts of gold and problems with their eyes, and weren’t allowed to speak, only to pray, that some were fed no more than bread and butter for half the day but were allowed a hot dinner in the evenings, once their work was done. Others swore the place was no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth, saying it was their own people who had put them in there after their illegitimates had been adopted out to rich Americans, or sent off to Australia, that the nuns got good money by placing these babies out foreign, that it was an industry they had going.

But people said lots of things – and a good half of what was said could not be believed; never was there any shortage of idle minds or gossips about town.

What is interesting about this extract is that the truth is there, sandwiched between reports. The local nurse has a real experience of the conditions the girls are subjected to, but she is drowned out by so many idle speculations that we would overlook her on our first reading of the story. Then comes the next paragraph, where all is dismissed. We see, in short, society self-regulating to remove any sense that there is something wrong – because then there is something that would need to be done.

Our sense of the wrongness of society in Small Things Like These grows after Furlong starts asking questions, and we get a sense of just how deep the rot is. Mentions of the Gardai (Irish police) by the mother superior made me think of a story like The Wicker Man, where we initially misread the world we enter, expecting traditional sources of goodness, or at least justice, to be the same as they are elsewhere. It is unlikely the police would be of much use to Furlong, and the book’s note at the back indicates just how challenging it was to get any kind of justice for the victims of the laundries.

Whoever he talks to, whether wife or friend, they all give him no ear. And they suggest that in asking questions he is already harming his business and his daughters’ futures – schools in Ireland then were controlled by the clergy.

Limits to Goodness

Furlong saves the girl from the laundry, as do the Kinsellas the narrator of Foster. Yet it’s hard not to notice that in both good deeds, there is something not entirely satisfactory. One daughter is saved among many people living in the narrator’s old home, just as only one of the girls from the laundry gets to leave. The novellas are illuminated by their moral spirit, but they are also the records of the limitations of such goodness. We cannot individually save everyone. But if nobody saves anyone, we cannot get close to this. That seems to be the message these books put forward.

In life, we want a simple and fast solution. We wish for Furlong to save everyone at the convent, just as we wish the Kinsellas could adopt the narrator’s entire family in Foster, but it doesn’t work like that. Even to save one person is really hard. Furlong will take the girl home, and it is hard to assess whether even this will be the right action, taken alone. His children will struggle in life, his family will be cast out. He will certainly lose business. But it’s the only way to begin the process of bringing justice into the world.

We can only wish that we ourselves might be so brave.