Irish Fiction/George O'Brien: If all Peter Woods had written was the unvarnished account of Irish labourers at work and play in England and Germany which gives Hard Shoulder its pretext and momentum, he would still have written a terrific novel.
Honourably, and indeed memorably, as this terrain has been gone over by Patrick MacGill and Dónal Mac Amhlaigh, no other treatment enters into the heart and soul of it as fully and as revealingly.
It's all here: the texture of the building site, the pub, the lodgings; the rawness of early morning cold, of doing the dirty work, of loneliness and disaffection; the complicated homosocial rituals and tensions, the turf battles on the job, the habits real and imagined of Kerrymen and Donegalers. There are some superb set-pieces of the job's dangers, as well as of its absurdities and waste - human and material. And, for good measure, there's a great cast of characters, from the subbie (subcontractor) Yeller Dunne to Lonesome Tom, the canny father figure, from Road-Kill and his Spanish doxy to "Feeney, they call me the Piranha" (with good reason, as it turns out), and not forgetting Breslin the jumped-up entrepeneur in "pin-stripe as subtle as a zebra-crossing".
The action opens with the narrator, MacBride, newly arrived in London. He has the Leaving Cert, but that's more figment than fig-leaf, since what he identifies with is the rough-and-ready life of the casual labourer - the spalpeen's road, as he recognises later, in one of the numerous thoughtful asides that help to make the book no commonplace chronicle. The year is 1977, and the decline and fall of old Labour is evident in the leaking bags of rubbish that bestrew the streets. The novel ends in 1982 in the first flush of Thatcher triumphalism with MacBride being offered the managership of an Islington pub ripe for renovation. Not that Hard Shoulder is a historical novel, except in the general way that all novels are historical, one way or another. Rather, it tells the story of the men who are without history to just about the same degree as they are without property, though true to its time, these turn out to be not only the Irish, but Turks and Croats and English too - ex-steelworkers with brand new toolkits totally at a loss in Germany. Wood's backlighting of MacBride's freewheeling, casualty-littered way of life with flashes of context is very deft. When newly-elected Helmut Kohl cracks down on workers without papers, for example, the narrator finds himself at odds with his German girlfriend. And even more delicate and pleasurable are the resonances suggesting that demolition and construction not only denote the labourer's life-cycle but also the ups and downs of the advanced democracies. All this is conveyed in a style as sound and steady and economical as the rhythm MacBride generates with his shovel.
So far, so very good. But Woods does more than document these "circumvented lives". The heart of the book is the working man, but its soul is the emigrant's soul - first the cold shoulder, then the hard. Here again, what goes through the emigrant's mind as he digs for meaning in his homeless status is portrayed in the light of the two versions of home available back then. One version is supplied by the implausible, incomprehensible promise of the 1977 election, which has no appeal at all. The other by the impossible, inconceivable challenge of the hunger strikers, which for all its emotionalism represents a dead end. The first makes staying put untenable; the second makes staying in England unsettling - in a book full of strongly-written scenes, one of the strongest details the nightmare of being in police custody. The emigrant has his history handed to him. It's not something that he can make for himself. He remains unreconstructed.
Yet the emigrant here is no facile ikon of loss. On a stop-over in Dublin, MacBride has a drink with a fellow-emigrant, with Moving Hearts on fire in the background: "If we all stayed," she said, "what would they do then?" Answering that question would answer a lot of others, some of them political, as MacBride reflects. Of course, it's an answer that is denied practical shape and substance. But the question is an affirmation of the emigrant as a source of potential, an image of an alternative, a pointer towards roads that remain to be taken, a citizen of a nation-in-waiting. One measure of Peter Woods's accomplishment in Hard Shoulder is that he's able to let the thought hit home while keeping both feet firmly on the narrative ground. Another is that he tells the story plump and plain, without adornment and without sensation: he is free enough to do that. And a third is the admirable and entirely unsentimental faith that's kept with the ethos of tenacity, improvisation, endurance, not-to-be-bested independence exemplified by the very nature of these men at this work. Who could ask for anything more? It's hard to think of a recent novel as absorbing and rewarding - and yes, as entertaining, too - as Hard Shoulder.
George O'Brien teaches in the Department of English of Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Hard Shoulder By Peter Woods. New Island, 310pp. €12.99