THE likeable narrator of this engaging account of a day in the life of a Co Cork family during the early 1970s describes himself early on as a "somewhat rash Icarus" in his project of writing this book. The description is apt enough for this 17 year old whose narration of a long day of harvesting with his father, brother and uncle is an exercise in skills that he seems unsure of; but its more precise significance is in the book's concern with humans, nature, technology and how they interact in a certain part of Cork at a certain moment in history.
His account ranges from a diary like recording of his innermost feelings to a consideration of the effects of technology on rural culture. A good example of the way these extremes are handled is in the treatment of the narrator's perception of the moon. We learn that during his childhood the moon featured as a powerful and somehow menacing presence, but by the time of narration it has been tamed and made more comprehensible by the recent moon landings, which still occupy his imagination.
Late in the book, the narrator watches a total eclipse of the moon and is deeply struck by how puny and insignificant it looks while it is in the earth's shadow. Such a conquest of the power of nature is quite unfashionable in these days of revising our attitude to how technology and technical knowledge affect the world and our relation to it - refreshingly, the narrator trumpets his family's constant desire to modernise, mechanise, and make more efficient every aspect of their farm and home life.
What distinguishes him from Icarus is his awareness that such human arrogance in the face of nature is doomed unless it is tempered by an attempt to find in it a mystery or magic of some sort. He does this by finding in sexual attraction, in familial relations and in bodily pleasures and sensations a source of wonder untouched by technology and unknowable to the rational mind.
ALL of this makes a good case for deeming this to be a novel about the post modern condition of Western, and specifically Irish, life. It features an enthusiasm for the benefits of modernity coupled with an effort to recentre the body and the sensual in human affairs, both of which modernity shunts aside. More than that, it is a proud statement of the significance of a locality and of the nuances of social relationships within it, which can be known only by someone who is part of them.
I hope that I have not condemned this novel to obscurity by handicapping it with the "post modern" label, a frequently misunderstood and even more frequently abhorred term. But it is, I feel, the appropriate one for a novel that probes that ambiguous inheritance of modernity without resorting either to a nostalgic lament for things past or to a naive ushering in of modernisation at the cost of all else.
Murphy has set this novel in the early 1970s, at the moment when the modernisation of the Lemass era was about to be accelerated by Irish membership of the EEC and, by extension, of the global economy of the last quarter century. Like an Icarus who already knows what his fate will be, Murphy has grafted preoccupations of the present on to a character for whom, 25 years ago, the future would not happen quickly enough.