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.