The final part of Peter Cunningham's Waterford trilogy, Love in One Edition, was published a few weeks ago. If anything shows the craziness of the book-buying market, and the random injustice of how authors and their works are promoted, the failure of his latest work to make it into the best-sellers list does so admirably. For this is not merely a serious work, finely crafted, excellently plotted, and quite beautifully written, but it is the apt conclusion to a major literary undertaking.
Peter is the most critically under-rated author we have; but he is not modish, does not pander to the self-consciously arty coterie which still dominates the Irish literary world, and is too much his own man, to receive the acclaim he deserves. That he has not been nominated for any of the major literary awards says more for the way those awards work than it does for his quite marvellous novels.
Inhabitable world
Like all serious writers, Peter has created a real, inhabitable world, a Waterford of his invention which he has named Monument. It is a parallel of its model, true but not true, fictional but real. It is a town he knows well, one he grew up in, a real town with real people; yet it is a town which does not exist, with bogus streets and inhabitants of his own devising. Thus is he able to switch backwards and forwards between the parallel worlds, mixing fact with fable, drawing on the smells of the Waterford of his childhood, the quaysides and their vessels bound for the far side of the world, the small-town solicitor, the unctuous bank manager, the domineering newspaper editor, the minor scandals, the baffled teenage lust, all of it true and none of it.
It is well that Waterford's minute social hierarchy, its submission to all sorts of norms and expectations, has its scholar now, for it is vanishing beyond recall, and those who did not live through it would be unable to concoct its intricacies, its infinity of subtle snobberies, from within their own imagination. It is a world which Peter is able to guide us through, introducing us personally to each of the vast numbers of its inhabitants, whose astonishingly complex kinships he has mastered like some vast genome map.
All such worlds have dark and terrible secrets, all families have too, and this conclusion to the Waterford series is the gradual revelation of such a terrible secret; and more than one, for Original Sin is always followed by other sins, as one crime begets another, to dog the innocent and the unknowing down the years. This is a narrative truth which the ancients understood, and its antiquity merely confirms its moral authenticity. What lifts a work which depends on this traditional fictive device is the manner of exposition; and in Love in One Edition, this is simply breathtakingly brilliant.
Terrible event
It is not showy, but it is outrageously clever, as Peter takes us to re-examine a vital, terrible event in Monument's life, as observed from the different perspectives of various members of the Monument community, seen in different angles and at different times. As an example of story-telling, it is quite dazzling, complex but not confusing, intricate but not bewildering. Nobody is perfectly bad, no-one is perfectly good, nobody knows the whole truth, and some believe pure myth; but what unites so many of the characters, no matter how differently and sometimes despicably they behave, is their need for love.
We see the power of this love in the most dangerous man in the novel, Boss Pender, the all-powerful newspaper proprietor, whose devotion to his ailing son is captured in one extraordinarily powerful scene in which he bears him cross country to a magical pool at midnight, there to bathe him beneath Jupiter's benignant glow. "The love between father and son would buckle iron, as they say in Monument."
Which is what makes what follows over the coming years all the more terrible; for a vast dark tragedy lies at the heart of Love in One Edition, one that has been concealed over the decades. Only the indefatigable, enquiring zeal of a young woman, Jasmine, steadily, remorselessly lays bare Monument's terrible secret.
Waterford has been recreated in atmospheric and geographical detail and transubstantiated into the parallel fiction of Monument and the area around it - Eillne, Leire, Glane, Pig and Litter, Buttermilk - all captured and conveyed here with an almost cinematic lustre. Love in One Edition richly rewards patience and care; it is a novel to be savoured at length, its symphonic complexity felt and explored, but not read in a plane. Good the first time, better the second.
Literary scene
I have read - or attempted to read - many modern novels in recent years, novels which have won prizes and acclaim, perhaps largely for their turgidity and their laboured and multi-layered incomprehensibility. Other writers have worked the politics of the literary scene, studiedly networking and creating alliances that will ensure their books are well reviewed and are shortlisted for this and that.
Peter Cunningham has won no prizes, sought no mutually congratulatory alliances, won no prizes - merely the acclaim of a few, including that of the great Christopher MacLehose of Harvill publishing house. And in reality, his lack of fame doesn't matter, for he is a happy man, with a gorgeous family, and in time, I know, justice will be done him. Love in One Edition is the last of his fine trilogy, and it is the best; and that is some achievement.