FICTION: Truth or FictionBy Jennifer Johnston Headline, 152pp. £14.99
EARLIER THIS YEAR William Trevor, now in his 80s, published his 20th novel, Love and Summer.Jennifer Johnston is close to 80, and this is her 16th. These events are a cause for celebration, because they indicate that the Irish novel, that once delicate child, often teetering on the edge of life and death, has not just matured but reached a ripe old age. Any country in a state of vigorous literary health tends to have a core group of writers who publish novels on a regular, predictable basis and so build up a substantial oeuvre. Until relatively recently, though, Irish novelists of quality tended to publish one or two great novels – or, as Declan Kiberd has dubbed them, "experiments". The problem is summed up in a witty comment attributed to the playwright Hugh Leonard: "What we
need are fewer great Irish novels and more good ones.” Trevor, Johnston and Edna O’Brien, to mention a few of our senior novelists, paved the way and have established Ireland as a good novel-writing country rather than a culture that slumbers, erupting erratically with the occasional fiery work of genius.
The heroine of Johnston’s intriguing novel is a literary journalist with the familiar-sounding name of Caroline Wallace. She, the classic outsider, viewing us with a pair of fresh London eyes, comes from Notting Hill to interview a forgotten writer, Desmond Fitzmaurice, of Dalkey. (The old suburbs of south coastal Dublin have become Johnstonian literary landscape). “No one reads his books any more, no one puts on his plays, no one in fact knows his name.”
Caroline doesn’t succeed in finding out much about his literary achievement, either – and even the titles of his works are scarcely mentioned. What we do learn about is the playwright’s personal and family life. The family is Johnston’s preferred theme – her last novel was a masterly delineation of a modern dysfunctional extended Irish family in all its messy complexity.
Fitzmaurice’s is equally messy, mainly thanks to his habit of falling in love with more than one woman at a time. Old and shaky on his feet, he has lost confidence in his writing and his literary reputation but not in his ability to attract women. The lessons Caroline learns from observing the way he treats women are useful to her in her own personal life, which centres on a writer who is devoted to his own needs but casually indifferent to hers.
The novel, written in Johnston’s typically vivacious and dramatic style, unfolds the story of Fitzmaurice’s turbulent sexual life. It is not giving away too much to reveal that by the time her few days in Dalkey are up Caroline is shouting: “All I have to say is f**k the lot of you! . . . F**k your books and your plays and all eccentric Irish people.”
The biographical basis of the novel has been the subject of a recent article in this newspaper that claimed the character Desmond Fitzmaurice is based on Denis Johnston, Jennifer Johnston’s father. There seems little doubt that this is so, although the game Truth or Fiction, of perennial interest to readers, is played with skill and humour throughout the novel – the final chapter may contain an encrypted reference to the title of Denis Johnston’s most famous play. Her fictional portrait is not flattering but neither is it devastating. Johnston is compassionate, possibly more so than she could be in a memoir. Fitzmaurice she paints in a nuanced blend of dark and pale tones. In the final analysis he is vulnerable and pathetic – a foolish mortal. Indeed, the clear-eyed, amused but sympathetic depiction of the problem of old age, its inescapable illnesses and accidents and dependencies, is one of the novel’s great strengths.
The book is dedicated “to the third and fourth generations, with love and high hopes”. No doubt this is a personal dedication, but it could be interpreted as a blessing for the younger generations of writers, who have such an excellent role model – of industry, polished skill, of ever-maturing talent – in the wise and irrepressible Jennifer Johnston.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer. She teaches creative writing at University College Dublin and for the Faber Academy of Writing
