Of novels and pomes and porter

Continued my Irish History Month reading with one of the few remaining volumes out of the Katrine Fitzgerald Memorial Collection, i.e. the books I picked out of some big storage bins full of my aunt’s literary possessions. I have very distinct memories of sitting on my dad’s back deck picking out all the most interesting-looking Irish literature from the bins. Despite the name of this collection of books in my head, my aunt was still alive at the time; we were going through the possessions that were being offloaded as she had to downsize to move from her house into an assisted living facility, which was 2015 or earlier because I brought some of the books from this collection with me when we went to Ireland for Easter 2016, and my aunt did not pass away until the following November, ten days before my thirtieth birthday. All this is to say I tend to have some big feelings around actually reading the books I inherited from my aunt because I will feel bad if I don’t like them.

To that end, now that I had found myself assured by multiple parties that Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds was a justified classic and a very funny satire, and also because it was short enough that I figured I could read it in less than a week, I was after nearly ten years of it taking up a whole quarter-inch of precious shelf space finally ready to read it. So I did.

At Swim-Two-Birds is about, and from the point of view of, an insufferably pretentious and lazy college student who writes a novel in part to keep himself mentally occupied and also in part to avoid having to either do work at college or interact with his uncle, whose house he lives in. The students’ other main pastime for avoiding his responsibilities and family is to go out with one or another of his college buddies and drink entirely too much porter, as has been the custom of college boys since colleges were invented, or thereabouts.

The college student’s novel is about a weird old guy who lives in a hotel and is writing a novel. All the characters in his novel come to life for the purposes of being in the novel, and have to live in the hotel with him. A few of the characters are original but most are hired out from other works of literature. They are in general displeased with their assigned roles in the novel, especially the guy who is supposed to be the villain, a Mr. Furriskey. The characters discover that their author can only control the while he’s awake, so they begin drugging him so that he’s asleep most of the time, and they have plenty of time to plot their revenge, and also to sit around in the hotel telling each other stories and reciting poetry and generally being chatty old guys. At some point there is a pooka whose wife is probably not a kangaroo. There is also a good fairy whose name is Good Fairy, and he is an arsehole.

I’m not very good at reviewing modernist experimental stuff and this is definitely that. The book has three different beginnings and several layers of metafiction going on. It’s the sort of book that doesn’t use any quotation marks, which is something I tend to find too self-consciously literary, but when done well does give everything an extra layer of disorientation, and here it’s done well. The voices of the different characters writing or speaking at different times are usually pretty distinct; the shifts in style when the author or speaker or, sometimes, subject of a scene changes are very effective. There is no even remotely rational “straight man” to be the readers’ cipher; the college student seems to believe he is reasonably normal (if somewhat better than everyone else), but his prose style feels like injecting high-octane autism directly into your eyeballs. Every character appears to be under the delusion that they are perfectly normal except occasionally Mad King Sweeny. The actual sanest character is probably the pooka MacPhellimey, who is literally a devil, but takes on the role of occasionally trying to keep the other characters somewhat on track with what they are supposed to be doing.

The book is extremely funny and I am sure I do not get all the jokes just as much as I know I do not get all the literary references. It for sure contains one of the funniest portrayals of Learned Discourse as written by an idiot that I have ever seen, consisting essentially of random facts culled from a series of out-of-date, moralizing encyclopedias that the unnamed frame-story student has in his bedroom. It also contains the line “My name is the Good Fairy, said the Good Fairy. I am a good fairy” which I found inordinately funny. There is some very goofy poetry that I am sure someone has since set to music. The looping, long-winded, daft-old-man dialogue of various stripes was often funny in the way that Uncle Colm in Derry Girls is funny, where the characters are being insufferable and boring but the reader is far from bored. The book made me really want to dig into much of the older Irish poetry and folklore that O’Brien is satirizing, although it did not particularly inspire any desire to read any of the Westerns parodied that have American-West-style cow-punchers plying their trade in urban Dublin, guns bouncing.

I think this book was good for my brain because afterward I had the brain equivalent of sore hamstrings. It definitely makes me more excited about possibly reading more difficult Irish literature, like Joyce or weird ancient poetry, which tends to be stuff that I feel I ought to read more than stuff I am excited about reading. We shall see if that feeling wears off after a bit or not.