Irish Fiction: A similar mood of nostalgia pervades the second narrative strand, in which the adult narrator communes with his younger displaced self.
Jack Harte's first novel was commissioned by Sligo County Council under the Per Cent for Art Scheme, a government-sponsored initiative designed to create works that will engage a wide public. In a self-reflexive twist, the circumstances that led to its commissioning are depicted in the final chapter, where the narrator is invited to write on the theme of "unravelling developments" by a Sligo arts officer. This prompts him to reflect on the nature of memory and mutability, and to consider the theme that is at the heart of the novel: the relationship between the changing material world and the inner, unchanging landscapes of "the child we once were".
Harte elaborates this theme through two interwoven narratives, one set in the 1950s, the other in the present. The main narrative traces the fortunes of the Dowd family, who move from Killeenduff in Sligo to Ballyclare in the Midlands, attracted by the opportunities created by the industrial development of the bogs. Here they join other economic migrants who toil in the shadow of the baggers, the "insatiable" peat-harvesting machines that traverse the boggy earth. The sight of these mechanical monsters repulses young Robbie Dowd, through whose eyes the family's uprooting is seen, and deepens his preternatural longing for the pastoral simplicities of his former home.
The unassuaged ache of separation from his birthplace means that he is stuck in a backward-looking mode, unable to reconcile himself to a modern, post-mythical landscape: "Sometimes I feel like one of those forlorn figures we see on television scraping the ruins of a landscape after an earthquake for fragments of what was". Return journeys to Killeenduff reinforce his refusal of modernity by transporting him to an Edenic realm of rootedness and social harmony.
Like much autobiographical fiction, In the Wake of the Bagger wills the unity of its subject. Its double-voiced narration represents the protagonist's attempt to recover psychic wholeness by integrating his past and present selves.
Harte's short, meditative chapters effectively interrogate the power of memory to give the remembering subject access to a preserved past, and explore the patina of elegiac affection that settles upon that which is irretrievably remote. His over-extended emphasis on young Robbie's pining for Sligo is much less convincing, however, not least because it fails to credit children's capacity to adapt quickly to changed circumstances. This points up the basic flaw of the book: Harte's uncritical affection for his hero and self-indulgent pity for his plight. These qualities rob the novel of any real tension or drama and stifle the enlivening potential of the various subplots. Fiction may be the only truth, as the narrator claims, but its insights must provide potent compost for the imagination.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester
In the Wake of the Bagger By Jack Harte Scotus Press, 190 pp. €9.95