Irish Fiction: 'Is it better to be born and damned than not to be born at all?" That conundrum runs through this book, a serious issue in a novel that alternates between humour and heartbreak.
The Captain with the Whiskers provides a realistic setting and a portrait of a community. We are given a vivid sense of locality, of its natural features, of the life and loves of real people, their personalities, their habits of mind and speech.
The Captain is a monster, a disciplinarian who drills his children, beats his sons and has a warped view of women. The result is that the children are stunted, their formation affected.
As one of them declares: "He was twisted and he twisted us."
The novel moves with an apparent casualness of manner, carried along by the narrator, Owen Rodgers, whose affection for his town and its surroundings is unmistakeable. That he moves from first person narrative to third person, from intimate revelation to objective assessment, is significant. We begin to realise that this novel is not only a loving recreation of place and people but a painful re- examination of the events that went into the making of Owen Rodgers. One theme is the narrator's coming of age, something that is deeply affected by his friendship with the authoritarian and puritanical Captain .
The Captain in this novel , first published in 1960, represents an Ireland in which fathers and sons did not get along, the one repressive and unyielding, the other struggling to get free of the nets thrown about him in childhood.
There is a tension between commemoration and lament, commemoration of a life and a place, lament about the forces of repression. Owen Rodgers experiences pain, loneliness, self-questioning, a succession of miserable relationships, and black despair ("Everything human rots and rots"). Drink, song, story, comedy temporarily displace the monster of repression, but are in themselves symptoms of its presence.
It is one of the most painful accounts of growing up that I know. The narrator is racked by "Irish misery". His story, which has an undercurrent of sexual repression and guilt, includes the lives of the Captain's thwarted children. "My sadness", one of them says, "is to look comic." Owen, by contrast, reminds himself: "I was the normal son of a normal man."
We must not underrate this novel or be taken in by its comedy. It balances humour and sadness in a movingly honest portrayal so that the conundrum "Is it better to be born and damned than not to be born?" has a tantalising, Beckettian force. Reissued in the early years of the 21st century - with an afterword by Thomas Kilroy - this novel still, decades later, provides a convincing portrait of the Ireland of its time. Kiely may be undervalued or rated for the wrong reasons. As his Collected Stories revealed and as this novel shows he is an intelligent artist, a master of narrative and a clear-eyed observer of human nature.
It is regrettable that in two places (pages 21-22 and pages 107-108) the pagination is out of order.
• Maurice Harmon is a literary critic and poet. He edited The Dolmen Press: A Celebration, which was published by Lilliput in 2001