FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews John the RevelatorBy Peter Murphy Faber, 254pp, £12.99
JOHN THE NARRATOR sees everything and remembers most of it. His memory is that bit sharper than those of his peers; he has his reasons – he is the child of Lily Devine, a mother who defies the ordinary. The fact that she can do this is in itself impressive. Here is a woman for whom life has been hard, cleaning other people’s houses, washing their clothes; yet simple reality has dented neither her vision nor her optimism.
John knows he was born during a storm because his mother told him. “The thunder,” he recalls her saying, “was so loud she flinched when it struck, strobes of lightning and slam-dancing winds and volleys of rain for hours until it blew itself out like a spent beast.” Directly from the opening paragraph, Peter Murphy’s exuberantly candid first novel draws the reader. If the mother is no ordinary character, nor is the sympathetic, somewhat bewildered John a standard creation. Growing up in small town anywhere is never all that easy and small-town Ireland brings a specific array of difficulties. These problems have been well chronicled in the past yet Murphy succeeds in making his lively, evocative story that bit different, thanks to an assured narrative voice and an ability to detect the bizarre ever lurking within the commonplace.
Religion plays its part but not in the traditional Irish way. For once, there is less of the guilt and more of the sheer wonder. For John, the Bible is part of the ongoing story his mother has to tell, and tell it she does: “When she got started on this, it could go on for hours.” So having spent the first part of his infancy living in a caravan, he and his mother moved to the damp house her parents left her. John quickly wins the reader: “Every day after school I dragged my schoolbag home like it was a younger brother.”
From his early days he lives with the fear of losing his mother. Alone in the house waiting for her to return from work, he would begin to fret. “I’d start to worry that she’d been taken, and I’d be sent to an orphanage or made to live with her friend Mrs Nagle or someone else old.”
Murphy convincingly evokes a child’s response to life. For John as a boy, his mother Lily is nothing short of a chain smoking magician with a liking for reading Westerns. One night he asked her if the book she was reading was any good. Mother’s reply shoots out between puffs of smoke: “Too many descriptions. I know what a tree looks like.” It is as if we are all there, sitting in the little house, counting the minutes as they limp by in slow motion. John becomes interested in worms, so interested it later earns him his first major public embarrassment. For all the stories and the brilliant images such as the sight of this mother, fag in mouth, busily planting a little garden, Murphy is really telling the story of a single mother battling the odds in a small town.
THE MOTHER-SON relationship inhabits the heart of the book; it is never sentimental. Often it is funny but above all, Murphy, who sustains the narrative as John Devine moves from boyhood to the more demanding teenage years and on to manhood, while the larger-than-life mother shrinks through illness, evokes the profundity of an intense relationship. This novel continually surprises as Murphy never becomes too clever. The only false move is an entirely unbelievable seduction sequence in which a young female teacher, having taken a career break, stops her car to give the narrator more than a lift.
Murphy conveys the mother’s sadness as her boy’s independence grows and with it emerges his developing secret life, something to which she is not privy. The arrival of Jamey Corboy, a floppy-haired, literary rich kid with a preference for Rimbaud – “Brainy bugger. Revolutionised poetry by the time he was twenty-nine, then jacked it all in and bunked off to Africa” – not only heralds trouble, it suggests a bow to John Banville, out of whose earlier work this character may well have sauntered.
But Murphy has his own voice. There are moments of violence and throughout the book John Devine is subjected to shocking, quasi-Joycean dreams. This may be a story of relatively recent contemporary Irish life, but Murphy also conveys a sense of the Ireland that went into making John’s world, a place in which the Bible and folklore walked hand in hand.
Lily Devine is defiant, broken only by her body, with more than a little help from all the smoking. A character such as her needs an equally memorable foil. Murphy provides this in Mrs Nagle, who ˜comes complete with her smells, hoards her chocolates, and looks after John when Lily goes to hospital. “The food was the same, but it tasted different, slightly burnt. Plus, she left the door open when she used the toilet, and I could see her old lady tights puddled around her veiny ankles and thick brown brogues.” There are no tricks and no easy foul language. Murphy manages to avoid the obvious while looking at the ordinary. Neither rebel nor rogue, John Devine is Everyman trying to make sense of life and loss with the help of a little magic inspired by a mother who seems to have solved most of the questions.
- Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times