Back on the balcony

IN his novel Balcony of Europe, Aidan Higgins says of a character: “He was a tall guy but I gave him the name of a small bird.” The remark gives some idea of the tweaking Higgins employs in what is becoming, on its second appearance, even more of a cult novel than on its first. He is a writer addicted to disguise and complexity, taking his stories and his personalities into twists of geography and of time in a process which, it has to be said, sometimes leaves the reader way behind. But there is a pleasure in catching up, especially when, as in this fascinating novel, the reward is crisp and rational prose, containing no tricks yet packed with surprise. For the reader, the clue is simply to read, accepting the arbitrary chapters or even more arbitrary paragraphs for what they contain in themselves rather than in the expectation that they form a perceptible narrative chain. They do, they do, but it is an imaginative perception, the links in the chain obvious yet somehow evanescent. However, in the case of this reissue by Dalkey Archive Press, there has been considerable reworking with the result that what appeared in 1972 as an Irish-Spanish book is now calmly positioned within the framework of an Andalusian background and a community of exiles from other lands..

Aidan Higgins has never pretended that his fiction is not fact. Critics have become increasingly adamant that his novels are autobiographical and the writer himself doesn’t object. If anything, as in the interview with Neil Donnelly quoted above and published in Aidan Higgins: the Fragility of Form (Dalkey Archive), he admits to inventing “almost nothing”. That doesn’t mean that his characters are immediately recognisable or anything other than composite creations of people he has known or observed, or that the events or adventures in which they are engaged will be recognised by anyone not there at the time. It just means that he was there at the time, saw and remembered. It could be said that all his work is an investigation of memory, and when this is said about his first novel, Langrishe Go Down (1966) it’s hard to argue to the contrary. That book — I remember it as the book that everyone in Ireland had to read when it was published — is about the decline of a family, the influence or impact of love, the immutability of human nature. Its three-part structure was the unmistakable hint of the writer’s engagement with form, but in a way this was masked by the lyricism of the prose and the strength of the implied invitation to identify with the place, the time and the characters.

Balcony of Europe moved into a wider world, although again its main character is Irish, a painter living in Spain, reflecting on international issues, catching up with history and indulging in a love affair with someone else’s wife. Spain however is only part of it, although the title of the book is the name of a favourite bar. In Higgins’ work a location can infuse the action like ink in water, colour and flavour released in a slow tinted current under the prose. This becomes particularly powerful in scenes of sexual desire or fulfilment when the sea, the shoreline plants, the scent and waftings of the air all add to the feeling and the fervour of the moment.

But reading this book now is to engage with Higgins in a very different way to the involvement on its first appearance. Higgins himself has disowned the book for years; the critic Neil Murphy says, in the afterword published with the novel, that this is a revised version of the original, “radically reconstituted” and therefore coming much closer to the author’s vision of a successful formal shape “than the version which he refused to allow back into print”.

Obviously Higgins hasn’t been idle during the 30-odd years separating the two versions (the first, incidentally, was transposed as a television drama with a script by Harold Pinter and performances from Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons). Balcony was followed by Scenes from a Receding Past — which, again, he disowned until this was republished by Dalkey Archive in 2005 with a note from Higgins stating that the main character is based on himself and that the Co Sligo locations are really those of the Co Kildare of his own childhood. That’s putting it up to us: where does recollection end and fiction begin? The answer to that question, in this case, is another question — does it matter?

For the fourth novel is Bornholm Night Ferry (1983) — again an arrival in the Irish canon which seemed, at the time, an obligatory reading experience and which remains an important landmark in the territory of Irish fiction and the literary career of Aidan Higgins.

In between and right up to now there have been all the other books; the novel Lions of the Grunewald (1993), episodes drawn from his experiences in Africa, Europe and America (although these filter down into episodes in the novels as well); two volumes of short stories, from his first publication Felo de Se (1960) to his collected stories in Flotsam and Jetsam (1996). There have been radio plays for BBC 3 and 4 and for RTÉ, essays and reviews and, to the great delight of many readers, three volumes of autobiography titled, with the writer’s gift for wry commentary, Donkey’s Years (1996), Dog Days (1998) and The Whole Hog (2000), all gathered under the hopefully inappropriate A Bestiary (2004).

It’s interesting now to discern the ways in which Aidan Higgins explores the psychology of human need and its relationship with truth or with the actual. A novel can disguise such fundamental questioning but Higgins prefers to reveal it, or even to exploit it. This layering of theme, character and memory, the restless placing and replacing of dream, is challenging but also exhilarating. Here in The Balcony of Europe is a book reborn, a publication which a whole new generation of readers should welcome and celebrate.