Rory rides again. That could be a subtitle for The Whole Hog, the concluding volume of Aidan Higgins's remarkable autobiographical trilogy (Donkey's Years was the first, followed by Dog Days). Once more the reader is guided through the life and loves of Rory Hill - or Rory of the Hill, the landless one, the shaughraun, Higgins's thinly-disguised persona. Once more we are treated to his wanderings and ponderings in many lands. And a treat it is.
The bare bones of the story are known well enough by now. A comfortable childhood at Springfield House, near Celbridge, was followed by shades of the prison house (Clongowes), then family decline which, in retrospect, seems to have precipitated a commitment to restlessness. A tour of Europe with a puppet company led to a second tour, this time of southern Africa, where Higgins met his first wife, Coppera as she is called in The Whole Hog, though she doesn't emerge much more clearly here than she does elsewhere in his writing. There are sojourns in Spain, and then sorties from the family home in Muswell Hill to mistresses in Berlin, Denmark and London's unfair city (the last straw), with later on a trip to Mexico with his second wife for good measure.
Most of this is familiar, though in keeping with the book's title we get more of it than before (though less as well; nothing this time about his visit to the University of Texas at Austin). The repetition doesn't matter; new sidelights and highlights are added, fresh nuances and outspoken insights abound - the old rag-and-bone shop always has new lines on offer.
All of Higgins's fiction is revisited. Family life and early years, first broached in Scenes from a Receding Past, remain indelible, particularly with regard to Mumu, the author's mother - whose book The Whole Hog is said to be at one point. The original of Otto Beck, from Langrishe, Go Down, is identified. The material of Higgins's terribly underrated novel, Balcony of Europe (though the author describes it here as "broken-backed"), loses its langour while preserving its passion. There's a diffuse sort of rewrite, complete with endearing broken English, of matters pertaining to Bornholm Night Ferry, the infidelity in which now turns out to have been much more complicated than it previously seemed.
There's plenty for long-standing Higgins readers to enjoy, as they sort through the new perspectives and additional complications provided here. It would be quite wrong, though, to suggest that The Whole Hog is just an expert exercise in recycling. For one thing, it does live up to its billing as a sequel. New material includes notes on the death of one brother and estrangement from another. One of Higgins's three sons puts in an appearance in passing. There's a scaleddown, undramatic depiction of how his first marriage finally ends, culminating in a most abrupt eviction (his stuff is sent round in a taxi to his mistress's). All of a sudden, he finds himself with nothing. Here Seamus Heaney enters the picture briefly, to unsurprisingly generous effect. And although the book concludes with a necrology, and never mind that few writers have set their faces as sternly against sentimentality as Higgins has, there's a sense that ending up in Kinsale with Alannah is not too bad at all, thanks very much.
Then, for another thing, as is always the way with Higgins, it isn't only the material that's important, it's the way he tells it, or rather, the ways. That's not to dismiss or belittle the material, which has consistently aimed to look fundamentals - love, time, loss, decay - in the eye; not to stare them down but to take them in as fully as possible.
In The Whole Hog, there's no denying the pain, weakness, vanity, self-indulgence, just as there's no real glorying in the drive, the pleasure, the momentary daftness of the all-absorbing flesh. Higgins never blinks. He even sees through the Rory in himself, writing his history in as much a spirit of self-mockery as anything else, though that's not the whole story either. It's too simplistic to think of Rory as the heart and Higgins the head.
The whole story must include an awareness of the telling. And just as there are lots of stories here, there is a lot of different kinds of writing. There are lists, sketches, anecdotes, travelogue, diaries, bits of gossip, historical footnotes, elements of a soap-opera, letters, imaginative reconstructions (the Battle of Kinsale as a rugby match), and wonderfully subtle juxtapositions, as in the treatment of age in the section entitled "Borges and I", the thoughts on Kandinsky and the return to the Munich Olympics as one of the black marks of the age. About the only passages that go off at half-cock are the satirical jabs at the Celtic Tiger. No tales or narrative turn is given priority over the other. All have their place as currents and eddies in the unpredictably moving stream of the author's experience. And all the flowing and the to-ing and fro-ing add up, finally, to an image of the human that has the resonance of an archetype - the individual in the light of love and under the shadow of time. Higgins is no spoiled Proust, though; he's much too much himself, inimitable and impenitent.
And in The Whole Hog, though not for the first time, he's brought home the bacon. The world will always welcome lovers. As time goes by. Now, if only it were as hospitable to one-of-a-kind writers, Aidan Higgins would be on the pig's back, where his work entitles him to be.
George O'Brien's most recent book is Playing the Field: Irish Writers on Sport