FICTION: The Rule of War,by Aoife Feeney, Somerville Press, 271pp. €13.99
AOIFE FEENEY’S debut novel is set in a dystopian Ireland of the near future. A group of artists and intellectuals prepare a festival called Summer 2016, intended to serve as a public-relations exercise for Ireland. The story opens in 2011 and unfolds forwards in time, in a satisfying technical conceit that creates narrative freedom and provides plenty of scope for the exploration of social and political themes.
The Ireland presented is not a radical departure from our current state, thus retaining an unhappy credibility, with social unrest and resentment of “foreigners”. A surge of nationalism is represente d by a new political movement called Daonnacht, the Irish for humanity. An undiagnosed virus is causing illness and death, the transmission of which is being blamed on immigrants. Certain shops bestow loyalty cards on their chosen customer base, a ploy designed to keep undesirables out. Freak weather occurs: icy winters with frozen canals, unexplained wave surges and major floods in urban centres call to mind recent extreme meteorological events.
The novel revolves around two couples. There are the successful Roycrofts, Rosanne and William, she an Irish-language poet, he an academic, both of them enthusiasts for the Daonnacht movement. And there are Miriam and Finn Daly, she a fledgling poet, he a gifted novelist. Rosanne is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of arts and letters, and dangles the power this gives her in front of Finn, always assuring him that she is going to propose him for membership at the “next meeting”. The impoverished novelist Finn, an out-of-control alcoholic egomaniac, lurches through life, causing chaos in pursuit of his “art”. The Dalys have an “open marriage”, and initially it’s more open on his part than on hers: “If you’re not availing of it, what use is it? It puts that Catholic guilt thing on me.”
In due course the beautiful Miriam develops a number of sexual relationships, one with the man who runs the small printing house that proposes to publish her slim volume of poems, another with the wealthy man for whom her husband works as an editor on a vanity memoir. The line between prostitution and desire is frequently crossed in these ambiguous patroni relationships full of sexual and creative degradation. Miriam also has a lesbian encounter with Tina, a painter in their circle. The characters’ libidinous carnality is a reminder of how chaste Irish fiction is generally.
Finn Daly is researching and writing a novel about his family background, and discovers that his grandfather was sexually abusing his aunts. He dramatises this in his novel, in what his horrified wife terms “a hymn to child abuse”. The ambitious Rosanne, who hankers after becoming the youngest-ever saoi – an elder in Aosdána – sees the Summer 2016 festival as an opportunity for self-advancement, though her confidence is undermined by a shadowy woman who threatens to expose her as a plagiarist.
The lives of these creative types unfold against a background of impending apocalypse. The moral centre of the novel, a journalist named Paul Ryan, who lost his job in Europe because he took a principled stand against the new nationalism, refers to the rest of the characters as “monsters . . . so blinded by their ghastly ambitions that they can see nothing”. When he is put in charge of the Summer 2016 festival it sets him on a collision course with Rosanne.
This is a fascinating debut, engaging with the current crisis in Irish life, when phrases such as “monetising the arts” are bandied about the airwaves and culture is seen as a rescue dog for our economic plight. It is an interesting depiction of how professionalised and competitive the arts world has become, with individuals competing for advantage like traders on the floor of the stock exchange.
It is now more important than ever that writers give some creative thought to what the disturbing implications may be when the arts are harnessed to a project of national regeneration, and to what rough beasts (as another apocalyptic visionary, William Butler Yeats, put it) might emerge.
Katy Hayes is a novelist, playwright and columnist. Her play
The Sun Always Rises
, recently produced and broadcast by RTÉ, can be heard at rte.ie/radio1/drama
