It’s 1941, and on a mailboat bound for neutral Ireland is an English psychiatrist – or, as he prefers it, psychoanalyst – called Dr Fairfax. Fairfax has his own reasons for turning his back on bomb-blasted London and travelling to Dublin to take up a post as senior doctor at Grangegorman mental hospital on the outskirts of the city. His long-term homosexual partner Charles Willoughby has died in the blitz in the arms of an Irish labourer, and Fairfax is having difficulty in processing what he can only view as a betrayal, alongside the need for suppression and subterfuge in an utterly unreconstructed society.
Betrayal – of trust, of comradeship, of ideals – is a subsidiary theme of Hide Away, but the novel’s main drift is to underscore the harm done to individuals complicit in violent acts, in slaughter and destruction and executions in the night. Among Fairfax’s patients at the asylum is Francis Dillon, a one-time protégé of Michael Collins, a colonel in the Free State Army at 19, and currently in the grip of a powerful delusion. He believes a detachment of Irregulars from Civil War days is out for his blood, coming armed with rifles or constructing a gallows from which to hang him. At the root of Dillon’s paranoia is a single incident: the killing of three teenage boys, anti-Treaty activists, at a place called the Red Cow – a name running through Dermot Bolger’s unsettling narrative like an emblem of dread.
Along with Fairfax and Dillon, two others, inmate Jimmy Nolan and enigmatic, articulate asylum assistant Gus, come centre stage. The back stories of these four, and their interactions, afford the author a way into every awful aspect of Ireland’s past, from poverty and misogyny (though women do not get much of a showing) to church dominance, bloodshed and trauma. The whole nation, you might think, is in need of psychiatric treatment to cope with its burden of lies and secrets, distortions, denials and disabilities: all the badness hidden away. It’s a bleak subject, treated here with the sharpest awareness of historical troubles and taboos. Hide Away, against the odds, makes an invigorating read, for all its encapsulation of a broken world.
Patricia Craig is a critic
