At Swim, Two Boys (O'Neill)

At Swim, Two Boys 
Jamie O'Neill, 2001
Simon & Schuster
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743222952


Summary 
Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916—Ireland's brave but fractured revolt against British rule—At Swim, Two Boys is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O'Neill.

Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son—revolutionary and blasphemous—of Mr. Mack's old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves.

All the while Mr. Mack, who has grand plans for a corner shop empire, remains unaware of the depth of the boys' burgeoning friendship and of the changing landscape of a nation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—south of Dublin, Ireland, UK
• Education—Presentation College, Glasthule, County Dublin
• Currently—lives in County Galway, Ireland


Jamie O'Neill is an Irish author, who lived and worked in England for two decades; he now lives in Gortachalla, in County Galway, Ireland. His critically-acclaimed novel, At Swim, Two Boys (2001) earned him the highest advance ever paid for an Irish novel and frequent claims that he was the natural successor to James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett.

O'Neill was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1962 and was educated at Presentation College, Glasthule, County Dublin, run by the Presentation Brothers, and (in his words) "the city streets of London, the beaches of Greece." He was raised in a home without books, and first discovered that books "could be fun" when he read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. O'Neill was unhappy at home; he had a very difficult relationship with his father and ran away from home at age 17.

O’Neill met Russell Harty in 1982, during a two-week holiday in London. They became a couple and lived together in London and at Rose Cottage, Harty's home in Giggleswick, Yorkshire. Harty encouraged O'Neill's writing and read his manuscripts; he even mailed manuscripts of early novels to publishers without O'Neill's consent or knowledge, and a book deal was agreed with Weidenfeld. Soon after that, in 1988, Russell Harty died of Hepatitis. Hounded by the tabloid press, O'Neill's nude photograph was splashed across the front of the Sunday Mirror; the picture was taken shortly after his arrival in London when he earned some money as a model. He turned down offers of up to £50,000 for interviews about his private life with Russell Harty.

This newspaper coverage was how O'Neill's parents in Ireland discovered that their son was gay. This event would have been traumatising enough; his distress was deepened when members of the Harty family threw him out of the cottage, burned his clothes and left him homeless. They did, however, allow him to take the couple's pet dog, Paddy; even though they did want it.

After Russell Harty's death, O'Neill sought therapeutic help. The following year, O'Neill's first novel, Disturbance, was published; Kilbrack followed in 1990. Both novels had been mostly finished while Harty was alive. But then, grieving for Harty and alone in London, O'Neill struggled to write, parted company with both his agent and publisher, and took the job as a night porter at the Cassell Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Surrey from 1990 up to 2000.

Two years after Russell Harty's death, Paddy was to accidentally introduce O'Neill to his future partner. O'Neill was in a London pub when he noticed the dog was missing. Paddy had been found by a ballet dancer named Julien Joly. They began a relationship and Joly was instrumental in helping O'Neill put his life back together. During the ten years that followed, O'Neill wrote At Swim, Two Boys, which was published in 2001. Its official launch at Somerset House in London was abandoned on the day—it was September 11, 2001. (From Wikipedia.)

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• I was reading in Toronto last year, in the big library there (I should say now that At Swim, Two Boys culminates in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916). Well, there was a big crowd, appreciative audience, curious, listening. We had a great Q & A afterwards, with intelligent, searching questions. After an hour and a half of this, I began to think we had my book nicely wrapped up. Then, just at the end, this hesitant hand pokes up at the back. "I was just wondering," says its owner, ‘what is this Rising thing anyway?' And everyone turns and says, ‘Yeah, I was wondering about that too.' And you realize how small, how insignificant is your tiny country's big history.

• But my most favoured memory is of a reading at Concordia University in Montreal. I stood on the podium and looked out on the faces. Generations of Irish faces, the high complexion of the men, that particular kink of the women's hair (those are some genes, I tell you). In the front row sat a priest, suited and collared. On his left, a lesbian couple. On his right, two gay men growing old together. Students, teachers; the university GLBT society. And I thought to myself, what a privilege to have brought such unlikely people together. What a very great privilege it is."

• When asked what book tht most influenced his life, this is what he answered:

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott. I come from a home that had no books. Shelves we had, wide sweeps of shelves, with capidamonte roses, holiday china, objets not so much d'art as d'artifice. But no books. And the only reading was the local evening newspaper, read out loud at tea-table, religiously, column after column of the classified ads. Even at school I never read, leastways I never finished, the books on the English syllabus. I took my exams, even, without reading them. I don't know why, but those books were chosen specifically to dampen teenage spirits. It wasn't that life was too interesting. Life was already dull enough without being further wearied by dried-up withered prose.

It came to my final exams and, the way schoolboys do, I thought to cram 13 years of idled study into the last two weeks of term. I cleared all distractions from my room—music, games, everything. The last thing on my shelf was an old crusty copy of Ivanhoe. It had been given me by a mean-minded aunt (as I had thought) some years before, and had been gathering dust on my shelf ever since. There's no point throwing that out, I thought—I'm never going to be reading that. Well, of course, it's all I did those two weeks, read Ivanhoe. Read it two, three times. It was a revelation to me. Books can be fun, they can be entertaining, you can learn things out of books—a book can be interesting. Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott. Whoever would have thought? (Interview from Barnes & Noble.com.)

Book Reviews
Jamie O'Neill's wonderful novel At Swim, Two Boys is built on such risks—on the hazards of love, heroism, history and tenderness.... Such elements could easily be drawn together into an excess of the worst sort of stage Irishness, not to mention a sexual politics that could seem anachronistic—and that's before you begin to consider the ticklish business of celebrating under-age lovers and a grown man's entanglement with them both. But O'Neill's writing has such authority and life that you consider these questions only afterward; none of it matters as you're tugged along on the tides of the book.... A dangerous, glorious book: the kind that is likely to make absolutely anyone cry and laugh in public places.
New York Times


In exquisitely sculpted prose, Jamie O'Neill...achieves a kind of richness of scope and ambition that makes one reluctant to come to its tragic and inevitable close.
Robin Hemley - Chicago Tribune


Dublin burned, British troops and Irish separatists exchanged gunfire and artillery shells, and about two hundred and thirty civilians were killed during Easter week in Ireland in 1916. As Tim Pat Coogan writes in 1916: The Easter Rising, the rebel leader James Connolly, injured and confined to the Irish Volunteer headquarters after a few days of bloody fighting, passed the time reading a detective novel. During a rare quiet moment, Connolly dryly remarked, "A book like this, plenty of rest and an insurrection—all at the same time. This certainly is revolution de luxe." Out in the streets, his militia battled to take the city, fighting with a bravery that has been repeatedly eulogized since. Within a week, the group was forced to surrender, and, like most of the leaders of the rebellion, Connolly himself was executed. Into this turbulent landscape Jamie O'Neill casts the heroes of his historical novel, At Swim, Two Boys, whose title is a play on the title of Flann O'Brien's landmark Irish comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds. This story takes place in the year leading up to the Easter Rising and investigates the complicated weave of alliances in Ireland; the two Dublin boys struggle not only with their political affiliations but with their religious and sexual identities. W. B. Yeats spoke to Ireland's scars of strife, famously noting in "Easter, 1916" that, after the Rising, "All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born." 
Lauren Porcaro - The New Yorker


(Starred review.) This powerful debut novel, which took Irishman O'Neill 10 years to write, has a truly exhilarating style as the author rhythmically bends language that is, at times, of his own making.... Over the many pages of his novel, O'Neill creates a stunningly vivid world ("a strange land of rainshine and sunpour") in a language all his own. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist


Published... in Great Britain, this novel has been compared to works by James Joyce (or Flann O'Brien, whose At Swim-Two-Birds the title plays on), but it has more in common with the film Chariots of Fire in its painterly depiction of male athleticism and relationships. The sheltered son of a pro-British shopkeeper, 16-year-old Jim develops a doting and eventually homosexual relationship with Doyler, a bright boy from an impoverished family, as the two train for an ambitious swim across Dublin Bay on Easter 1916, a date that happens to coincide with a planned Republican uprising. Both become entangled with McMurrough, scion of wealthy Irish gentry, who is back in Dublin following imprisonment in England for indecent behavior. Jim is too naive and Doyler too politically sophisticated for their years, while McMurrough is typecast as an Oscar Wilde figure. Still, these are rich characterizations, and together with the playfully rendered Irish dialect they outweigh the book's imperfections. O'Neill also offers gorgeous descriptions of the Dublin environs and remarkable details of the period. Recommended for most fiction collections. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA.
Library Journal


The hunger for liberation—political, emotional, and sexual— gnaws at the big heart of this young Irish writer's engrossing, often very moving debut. The title, of course, alludes to "Flann O'Brien's" subversive comic masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds. But O'Neill's real influences appear to be James Joyce's Ulysses and James Plunkett's Strumpet City, a romantic-epic portrayal of Dublin beset by the Troubles. O'Neill focuses initially on Arthur Mack, a widowed Dublin shopkeeper and Boer War veteran whose stubborn loyalty to Britain conflicts with the swirling energies of incipient rebellion against "foreign" rule that capture his neighbors. If Mack is a dreamy, distracted Leopold Bloom, his 16-year-old son James, a model youth seemingly destined for the priesthood or a teaching career, is a kind of Stephen Dedalus—a passive, well-meaning boy whose life changes under the charismatic influence of his pal Doyler Doyle, a rebel with several causes who draws James into a plan to swim to a nearby island and plant a green flag (symbolizing Ireland's independence). The rapidly growing love the boys share is interrupted when Doyler is imprisoned for "sedition," then absorbed in his duties as a Volunteer soldier—and is consummated, with bitter irony, when the Dublin streets become a blood-soaked "nighttown." O'Neill's replete characterizations of the aforementioned are deepened by the complex relationships each forms with such other figures as Jim's stoical, quietly perceptive Aunt Sawney, aristocratic Irish nationalist Eveline MacMurrough, and the latter's adult nephew Anthony, a sardonic homosexual (formerly convicted of "indecency") whose imaginary "conversations" with his deceased cellmate explore both Anthony's reluctant involvement with the Volunteers and his conflicted (and, really, rather contrived) dealings with both Doyler and James. Excess and overstatement do crop up, but O'Neill's warm empathy with his characters, stinging dialogue, and authentic tragic vision more than compensate: altogether, his first the best literary news out of Ireland since the maturity of Roddy Doyle.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Irish have long been a storytelling people, and Jamie O'Neill is certainly no exception. He brings to life the Irish struggle for independence with an intensity and an honesty that is staggering. In what ways do you find O'Neill's writing to be reminiscent of that of other great Irish authors, both contemporary and classic? What techniques may O'Neill have borrowed from authors such as James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Oscar Wilde, and even Frank McCourt?

2. Language, both in the narrative and, especially, in the dialogue between characters, makes this a rich and sometimes challenging read, but it also pulls us into the world of Ireland in a way that nothing else could. Why is language so significant in this novel? Discuss the ways that O'Neill wields words to shed light on individual characters and to illuminate the underlying forces that shape the tumultuous Ireland of the early 1900s.

3. Focusing on Aunt Eva, Aunt Sawney, Nancy, and even MacMurrough's Nanny Tremble, look at the different things women stand for in this novel. In what ways do their representational roles—as church, as Ireland, as universal mother—clash? Do they ever exist outside of these compart-mentalized spheres? Also, does the novel suggest that women are above the weakness of the flesh, or that they are saintly beings? Is the author toying with the ideal of the Christian woman (holy and untawdried)?

4. Passion, lust, and love manifest themselves in very interesting ways in this story. While Jim and Doyler share a free and beautiful passion for one another, Brother Polycarp and MacMurrough are at times like sexual predators; one could almost say that they fall perfectly into the stereotypical homosexual deviant role that society perpetuates. To what extent do you think MacMurrough's predatorial behavior is a fulfillment of the expectations that society has for him as a gay man? Discuss the ways in which his love and desire for other men become subverted into lust and carnal desire though the lens of society's eye.

5. MacMurrough compartmentalizes his desires, his intellect, and his feelings of sympathy, empathy, and love in the voices of Dick, Scrotes, and Nanny, respectively. Are we to believe that he is literally schizophrenic? Or do these voices (and the way that they seem to meld into one voice by the end) point to larger themes?

6. Similarly, what instigates the transformation that MacMurrough undergoes throughout the course of the novel? Why does he seem, at least by the end, somehow freed from his self-hatred and ready to experience love again in the most selfless form? How much of this change can be attributed to Jim, who has a great capacity for love?

7. Symbols play a role of great importance in this story, and whether it is a flag, a stripe, a medal, or a religious emblem, the sacredness of these objects divides and unites the characters time and time again. What is it about the nature of symbols that makes them so powerful to these people—and to all people, for that matter? Why, for instance, does Doyler's red badge mean so much to him? Do you think symbol worship in this novel verges on idolatry? Is it dangerous?

8. By the end of the novel, Jim seems set on more fighting. How do you feel about his choice to continue the fight? Are you left with a feeling of disillusionment? Do you think the author is making an overarching statement about war?

9. This novel, like some other covertly or overtly gay novels written in the twentieth century (The Well of Loneliness, Maurice, Giovanni's Room), ends in tragedy. Is this simply the plight of the gay character in modern literature? Is the reunion between Jim and Doyler in the last pages of the novel enough of a happy ending to make At Swim, Two Boys a novel of triumph rather than tragedy?

10. We watch as the characters in this novel struggle with their feelings of desire in a society that will not even recognize it. (Think back to the scene in which Jim tries to confess to the priest.) Discuss the ways in which Jim, Doyler, and MacMurrough try to rediscover a hidden history through the stories they tell one another about the Spartans. Why is having this history so significant to them? How does the notion of queer sexuality recycle, revise, and challenge traditional perceptions of gender in this novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)