Novels get new lease of life after long time on the shelf

Brendan Kennelly

A&A Farmar, €12.99

Review: Billy O’Callaghan

Since breaching the literary scene more than half a century ago, Brendan Kennelly has enjoyed a highly acclaimed career as a bard of the people. Eschewing the intellectual pretension that many consider has come to dominate the poetry world, he has spent a lifetime distilling the colloquial to its universal core. Such dedication has seen him amass a body of work which is large, varied and, in its most heightened moments, almost elemental in its wisdom and beauty.

Two largely forgotten gems among this vast canon are the short novels, The Crooked Cross, and The Florentines, from 1963 and 1967, respectively. Both have languished out of print for far too long, but with their collective reissuing by the Dublin Press, A&A Farmar, in a volume entitled The Young Are Desperate, this situation has thankfully been rectified.

The Crooked Cross spins the captivating yarn of Deevna, a small crossroads village in the south-west that suffers several months of drought. A long hot summer is traced through such colourful characters as Goddy O’Girl, a frustrated publican and put-upon husband; the beautiful gypsy fortune teller, Sheila Dark; the drunken One-Eye Palestine and his brute of a son, Mosheen; the invisible but benevolent Naked Cully; Sailor, the old, crippled storyteller; and All-or-nothin’, a boastful but good-hearted man whose sexual appetites flout both law and Church.

In an approach reminiscent of VS Naipaul’s Miguel Street, each chapter focuses on a different character and reads almost as a short story, yet a larger cohesion is preserved by the inescapable premise. The result is broadly comic, which only heightens the sudden ruptures of pathos, and examines such eternal themes as love, death, compassion, emigration, and the ability of mankind to endure.

But in typical Kennelly fashion, it leaves its most essential question unanswered: “If a village died, could an entire country die as well?”

From here, we slip into The Florentines, a coming-of-age novel that charts the thrills and turbulence of a young man named Gulliver Stone who has left Ireland to study mythology at a Yorkshire university. The plot is less concrete but the narrative focus more absolute. Gulliver is here to learn, but the lessons he absorbs are human ones. He drinks, fights, awakens to the notion and cruelties of class divide, and befriends a small but again wonderfully imagined cast such as Black Belt, a judo obsessive; the hippy protester Saint Peter of Liverpool; Dick Laird, the blind Scot; the lovely, serious Jane Robson, who snags his heart but who is devoted to a drunken lout; and, first and last, a flighty and beguiling Dubliner named Concepta MacGillicuddy.

The combined novels of The Young Are Desperate display evidence of a fast-maturing talent. The prose is gentle, the sentences wonderfully measured, but what impresses most are the writer’s sense of society and the assurance of his subtle explorations. The Crooked Cross and The Florentines are, at their core, stories about people, and the value of a life lived. Based on these offerings, we can only wonder what might have been had Kennelly persevered in exploring the novel’s form.