Michaela Schrage-Früh

Foreigners Within: Identity, Belonging and the Migrant Other in Barry McCrea’s The First Verse and Sean O’Reilly’s The Swing of Things

Abstract

This chapter considers two novels that address the experience of loss of certainty in the Celtic Tiger period, where the promises of consumerism and prosperity are not matched by a tolerance or recognition of the intrin-sic otherness of Irishness itself. In Barry McCrea’s The First Verse and Sean O’Reilly’s The Swing of Things, we see different manifestations of a charac-ter’s sense of being an outsider in Dublin city. The chapter argues that, in different ways, both novels point to the need to disrupt the homogeneity of what it is to be considered Irish to allow for a true intercultural encounter.

During the Celtic Tiger years, lasting approximately from the early 1990s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, Ireland experienced an unprecedented economic boom and rapid transformation into one of the most globalized and economically thriving countries in the world. This newly gained, if short-lived, prosperity went hand in hand with significant cultural, social and demographic changes, which, if Roddy Doyle’s famous statement that ‘some time in the mid-90s[,] I went to bed in one coun-try and woke up in a different one’ is anything to go by, hit Irish society overnight.1 Arguably one of the most noteworthy changes was Ireland’s transition from a land of outward migration into one of inward migration. Ireland, a postcolonial country looking back on a long and painful history

1 Roddy Doyle, The Deportees (London: Vintage, 2008), xi.

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of emigration, for the first time in its history turned into a destination for ethnically diverse migrants, political refugees, asylum-seekers and guest workers from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Thus, in the period from 1995 to 2000, almost 250,000 non-Irish immigrants arrived in Ireland, visibly reshaping the ethnic landscape of a nation formerly perceived as comparatively monocultural.2

Throughout the 1990s Irish writers seemed hesitant to address and imaginatively explore Celtic Tiger Ireland in their works, presumably because the changes were too rapid and too recent. At least this is what Declan Kiberd suggests in his influential essay ‘The Celtic Tiger: A Cultural History’ (2003) when he points out that ‘it is never easy to take a clear photograph of a moving object, especially when you are up close to it’.3 More recently, Kiberd has commented on the ‘loss of a sure sense of identity among Irish people’ in the wake of the rapidly shifting Celtic Tiger reality as one possible reason why writers may have found it difficult to explore genuinely intercultural encounters in works that tend to feature migrants as ‘mere backdrop’.4 Another reason for the hesitant inclusion of migrant perspectives may well be that Irish writers wishing to reflect this new reality in their works inevitably walk a thin line between either appropriating and ventriloquizing the immigrants’ voices or presenting them from the Irish characters’ necessarily limited and biased points of view, thereby running the risk of patronizing or objectifying them as ‘Other’.

All the same, as Pilar Villar-Argáiz points out in her introduction to the timely essay collection Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature (2014), ‘the silence that Kiberd diagnosed over the decade of the 1990s on a whole range of issues seems to be overcome; we now begin to perceive, over the past few years, a gradual

2 Gavan Titley, Aphra Kerr and Rebecca King O’Rían, Broadcasting in the New Ireland: Mapping Cultural Diversity (Maynooth: National University of Ireland, 2010).

3 Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 276.

4 Declan Kiberd, ‘Foreword: The Worlding of Irish Writing’, Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Culture, ed. Pilar Villar-Argáiz (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014), xvi.

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moving away from themes of the past to Ireland’s multicultural reality in the twenty-first century’.5 This shift is most visible in works such as Chris Binchy’s Open-Handed (2008), Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees (2008) and Hugo Hamilton’s Hand in the Fire (2010), all of which offer a cultural cri-tique of Celtic Tiger Ireland filtered through the immigrant perspective. However, in the majority of literary texts set in Ireland’ multi-ethnic present and published in the first decade of the twenty-first century, immigrants tend to feature as minor characters, perceived through the eyes of native Irish protagonists struggling with their own uncertainties about identity, belonging and home. As Anne Fogarty astutely diagnoses with regard to contemporary Irish short stories, ‘the delineation of the immigrant is bound up with a complex constellation of themes and never an isolated motif. The self is unmoored and problematized in current Irish narratives that set out to envisage ethnic outsiders.’6 Some of these stories, however, seem to suggest a binary between a more or less homogeneous host culture and its encounters with ethnic outsiders, ‘outlawed and turned into racial Others’.7 While such works provide a necessary self-critique in bringing to light uncomfortable truths about the undeniable existence of xenophobic prejudice, racism and lack of empathy with the migrant ‘Other’, their ren-dering of the native Irish arguably tends towards a rather one-dimensional representation, underestimating the degree to which, during the increasingly secularized, globalized and consumerist Celtic Tiger years, many native Irish were struggling with their own ‘foreigner […] within’.8

5 Pilar Villar-Argáiz, ‘Introduction’, Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Culture, ed. Pilar Villar-Argáiz (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014), 5.

6 Anne Fogarty, ‘Many and Terrible are the Roads to Home: Representations of the Immigrant in the Contemporary Irish Short Story’ in Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Culture, ed. Pilar Villar-Argáiz (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014), 121.

7 Fogarty, ‘Many and Terrible are the Roads to Home’, 130.8 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia

UP, 1991), 1.

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According to Julia Kristeva, it is essential that we recognize the ‘for-eigner […] within’ ourselves so that ‘we are spared detesting him in himself ’.9 Indeed, as the cultural philosopher Wolfgang Welsch claims, ‘the degree of internal foreignness forms a prerequisite for the acceptance of the external foreign. It is precisely when we no longer deny, but rather perceive, our inner transculturality, that we will become capable of dealing with outer transculturality.’10 The term ‘transculturality’ was coined by Welsch to replace the terms ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘interculturalism’ which, accord-ing to his argument, fail to adequately represent the hybridity of today’s cultures. Thus, far from being ‘clearly distinguished, in themselves homog-enous’ entities, contemporary identities at both the cultural and the indi-vidual level are constructed of ‘components of differing cultural origin’.11 In Welsch’s view, ‘work on one’s identity’ increasingly entails the attempt to integrate these heterogeneous aspects of the self.12 In view of the renego-tiation of Irishness in the wake of the Celtic Tiger, such a recognition and acceptance of internal Otherness might arguably lead to a more complex and inclusive understanding of what it means to be Irish. This is precisely what Kiberd, drawing from Kristeva, suggests in his The Irish Writer and the World (2005) when he writes that ‘[i]f everyone recognises his or her own strangeness, the very notion of the foreign dissolves, to be replaced by the strange.’13 With reference to Ireland’s history of colonization, Kiberd points out that the Irish may in fact be well equipped to relate to, empathize with and welcome ethnically diverse immigrants, ‘for the whole project of the British colonialism in Ireland throughout the nineteenth century was, in the words of Friedrich Engels, “to make the Irish feel like strangers in their own country”. That ordeal is something which even the stay-at-home Irish

9 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 1.10 Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Transculturality – The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, Spaces

of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London, Sage, 1999), 201.

11 Welsch, ‘Transculturality – The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, 196, 199.12 Welsch, ‘Transculturality – The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, 199.13 Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, 317.

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have in common with refugees and asylum seekers.’14 And yet, as the novels discussed in the following suggest, this is an insight precisely precluded by the rapid affluence, secularization and ‘loss of a sure sense of identity‘ resulting from the Celtic Tiger boom, which, rather than embracing the external ‘Other’, creates new ‘foreigners within’.15

This chapter will focus on two Celtic Tiger novels in which the theme of the ‘foreigner within’ is explored and the novels’ native Irish protagonists are juxtaposed with the migrant Other in multi-ethnic Dublin. While in Barry McCrea’s debut novel The First Verse (2005), migrants indeed feature as ‘mere backdrop‘, their presence reflecting the protagonist’s increasing sense of alienation, Sean O’Reilly’s The Swing of Things (2004) arguably provides a more complex and hybrid constellation of characters, at the heart of which is a Northern Irish protagonist who comes into contact with Dublin’s migrant subculture in various ways.16 As I will argue, both novels disrupt and complicate the notion of a homogenous host culture by exploring their Irish protagonists’ status as outsiders within and raising questions about identity and belonging in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

In Barry McCrea’s The First Verse, the young protagonist Niall exchanges his sheltered life in what he calls ‘the bourgeois suburbs on Dublin’s southern side’ (McCrea, 5) for the ‘closed granite city of Trinity’ (McCrea, 12), another sheltered place embedded in a city that, to him, seems ultimately foreign and threatening.17 Despite being a native Dubliner, several times in the novel he refers to himself as an ‘ex-pat‘ (McCrea, 18) or ‘expatriate‘ (McCrea, 20). Desperately seeking guidance, certainty and a sense of belonging, he joins a strange cult called sortes, practised by a junior student, Sarah, and her friend John, a young banker. Their pseudo-spiritual practices of seeking guidance, or what they refer to as ‘synchronicities’, in random book passages, or reading themselves into seemingly vision-ary trance states, at first seem like welcome alternatives to the superficial

14 Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, 317.15 Declan Kiberd, ‘Foreword: The Worlding of Irish Writing’, xvi.16 Declan Kiberd, ‘Foreword: The Worlding of Irish Writing’, xvi.17 Barry McCrea, The First Verse. (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005).

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friendships, student gossip, endless text messages, drinking bouts and uni-versity classes at Trinity. However, Niall remains an outsider even in the small circle called ‘Pour Mieux Vivre’: ‘They didn’t want me; John had ordered me to stay away. But this brief half-glimpse into their mysterious world had lit the flames of my curiosity again, and left me wishing that I, too, was consulting oracles while the rest of Dublin slept’ (McCrea, 92–3).

It is certainly no coincidence that John, Niall’s fellow disciple, is a young banker who, due to his increasing obsession with sortes, will come to lose his job and apartment in the course of the novel. While in one scene Niall watches John ‘as he moved around the room, transforming himself slowly from the wild adept of a mystic reading system into a smooth young Celtic Tiger banker’ (McCrea 154), at a later point he has:

a vision of John as he might have been had he not met Sarah, a laid-back, ambitious young man in a suit. Watching him now, I saw that potential Celtic Tiger citizen – the diligent young banker living and working in the Financial Services Center complex, [...] – totally transformed into an unrecognisable being with chaotic hair and wild eyes, feverishly consulting books from a bag. (McCrea, 200)

It is no coincidence either that one of the visions witnessed by the three ‘disciples’ of the cult is of the statues of angels and men on the roof of the Bank of Ireland, which ‘standing white and rocky against the blank dark of Dublin, had left their proud stone poses and were moving. Slowly, like figures in a Swiss clock, their heads turned mechanically from side to side, arms jerkily raising swords and shields. They moved separately, without interacting, painful machinelike gestures like the Christmas puppets in Switzer’s window’ (McCrea, 153–4). At one level, this description aptly reflects the three disciples’ own increasingly mechanical, alienated and detached way of life. At another level, this passage inevitably brings to mind the recurrently reported visions of moving Marian Statues in Ireland throughout the 1980s. While the consultation of random books and the vision of moving statues seem like a grotesque parody of Catholic reliance on scripture and visionary spectacle, it might thus also suggest the desper-ate need to fill up the spiritual void left in what Jody Allen-Randolph aptly

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describes as a ‘post-Tiger, post-Catholic Irish society in which identities are in flux and answers remain elusive’.18

This search for spiritual meaning and guidance, however, is continually undermined and ironized. Both the visions and the answers from random book passages remain spiritually empty and meaningless, which becomes obvious when, for instance, Niall finds himself ‘mastering the ability to divine meanings and directions from bus-tickets, advertisements, and dis-carded crisp-packets’ (McCrea, 166). Eventually, Niall’s evident need for guidance, belonging and meaning turns into an addiction that makes it impossible for him to move about freely, as the following passage suggests: ‘We were like seventeenth-century sailors, and the sortes were our stars, without which we were lost, purposeless, incapable of coherent movement or action’ (McCrea, 203).

Besides the ultimately destructive sortes cult, there is a mysterious guide who appears at various critical moments in Niall’s life. Introducing himself as ‘Pablo Virgomare’ (the name, of course, resonating with all sorts of religious connotations as well as evoking the term ‘nightmare’), the mys-terious caller appears outside his window on Niall’s first night at Trinity, enigmatically singing the first verse of the children’s rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons Say the Bells of Saint Clements’ (McCrea, 9) and offering him his future help before disappearing into the night. His elusive and ambiguous figure will be glimpsed repeatedly throughout the novel, leading Niall to previously uncharted territory such as a gay bar, where he, who has so far kept his homosexuality a secret, experiences what he calls an ‘accelerated and rather lonely sexual awakening’ (McCrea, 32). Pablo thus initiates Niall into the gay night-time world of Dublin, offering him a succession of awk-ward one-night stands that render a coming-out to his family and friends even less likely. While Celtic Tiger Dublin thus facilitates Niall’s sexual awakening, the recurrent references to Catholicism, deeply ingrained in him from his earliest childhood and onwards, hint at the reason for both his secrecy and his sense of guilt connected to his sexual orientation. What

18 Jody Allen-Randolph, Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010), 10.

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is more, the children’s verse about Saint Clements significantly conflates the spiritual value suggested by church bells with monetary concerns, as the bells argue about an unpaid debt of five farthings and the vague hope for future prosperity. The spiritual void left by the advent of the Celtic Tiger and inadequately filled by consumerism and economic prosperity is strikingly captured in this children’s rhyme that comes to haunt Niall throughout the novel.

Niall’s relatively small world does not encompass the migrant popu-lation of Dublin. In fact, it is precisely the absence of migrants that is bemoaned by his maternal friend Paula, who feels that, for all the Celtic Tiger changes, Dublin is still a small, isolated and regressive place:

‘Where are the light-rail systems, the metros, the pavement cafes, the city-centre apartment blocks, where are the public parks, the bicycle lanes, the open-air markets, the gays out in their finery like peacocks, the Jewish bakeries, the Chinese wholesale outlets with the old fellas playing checkers outside on a little table, the lesbians run-ning a centre with free tampons and coriander soup, where are the Arabs playing dice or whatever it is […] where are all the beautiful people? I mean, Niall, look, look at them, where are they? Where are they?’ (McCrea, 115)

It is Paula who encourages Niall to spend time abroad, possibly in Paris, and strikingly, one of Niall’s elusive encounters with Pablo transports him into an alternative spatial dimension, in which he experiences a vision-ary glimpse of an openly lived gay partnership on a Parisian, rather than Dublin, street: ‘As I looked right before crossing the road, in a spinning, faint-headed sensation I saw a Paris streetname in the afternoon sun, rue de la Croix or something, and two men with closely-cropped hair, white T-shirts, and jeans walked by me hand in hand, smiling at one another and looking in the window of a shop on the corner’ (McCrea, 136). While Niall’s coming-out remains restricted to a few gay night-time bars, this vision provides him with a glimpse of possibilities ostensibly not open to him in a place like Dublin, where earlier on in the novel he is punched for being identified as gay (cf. McCrea, 21). Significantly, it is only after spending several months in Paris that Niall’s identity crisis is eventually resolved. In many ways, then, Niall shows traces of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, an impres-sion reinforced by quotations from Ulysses occurring in the book (cf. 54).

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While Paula bemoans the lack of multi-ethnic ‘beautiful people’ (McCrea, 115) in Dublin, there is a faint irony involved in the fact that these people actually exist. They simply do not inhabit the parts of town that middle-class Dubliners like Paula or Niall, with their homes on ‘Dublin’s Riviera’ (McCrea, 40), would frequent. Nevertheless, as Niall’s life unrav-els due to his growing addiction to the cult, it is fitting that he prefers to wander among ‘the babel of asylum-seekers and refugees, the shabby slip-on shoes and torn jackets of the Rumanians outside the GPO on O’Connell Street, the coloured dresses of the west African women buying fruit and vegetables from Molly Malone’s descendants on Moore Street, the seri-ous quick discussions of the Chinese on Parnell Square, past the pub that serves Nigerian Guinness’ (McCrea, 113). To Niall, the ‘asylum-seekers forbidden to work’, ‘the dislocated Nigerians and Romanians on Moore Street’ are ‘more human sorts of drifters’ (McCrea, 182) to whom he feels attracted precisely because they reflect his own sense of displacement and lack of belonging. Ironically enough, however, Niall is an outsider to their community as well, and the very fact that the immigrants are referred to in the plural and depicted as members of diasporic communities renders Niall’s status as an outsider within even more palpable.

Despite hinting at the possibilities of exploring Niall’s outsider status in conjunction with that of Dublin’s migrant population, the novel pre-sents this sub-culture as an evocative backdrop illustrative of the city’s changed urban landscape, avoiding to bring the protagonist into actual contact with individual immigrants and their stories. In contrast to this, Sean O’Reilly’s The Swing of Things explores the interconnected themes of home, migration and (un)belonging in arguably more intricate ways. It tells the story of Noel Boyle, an ex-paramilitary from Derry, who, after serving eight years in prison, has come to Dublin to start a new life and escape what Maeve Davey aptly calls ‘his post-jail paranoia’.19 Having enrolled in

19 Maeve Davey, ‘“The Strange Heart Beating”: Bird Imagery, Masculinities and the Northern Irish Postcolonial Gothic in the Novels of Sean O’Reilly and Peter Hollywood’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 5 (2008). <http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/Thevault.html>.

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a course of philosophy at Trinity College, determined to ‘take his life into his own hands and make something’, wanting to ‘revive himself ’, he soon finds that he has brought his own demons and haunted memories to the city he anachronistically refers to as capital of the ‘Free State’.20 Alienated and trapped by both his past and his idealistic notions about Dublin, he fails to get into ‘the swing of things’and be assimilated by the busy, buzzing city that turns out to differ in almost every respect from the place he had imagined it to be. O’Reilly himself has commented in an interview about the role of Dublin and his protagonist’s misconceptions about the city. As he points out, ‘Any new city is a dream. It is made of glass so we project ourselves on to it. It does nothing but reflect.’ In Boyle’s case, ‘what he finds is a heavily commercialised racially diverse modern city. He gets lost in the reflections. His failure to find his feet there, so to speak, is his own failure, not Dublin’s. The failure of his own mythology about the place. The Free State. Dublin has moved on.’21 O’Reilly’s novel, then, effectively disrupts the binary between host culture and migrant culture by introduc-ing a Northern Irish perspective on Celtic Tiger Dublin: the perspective of an outsider within.

That Dublin is to a great extent a projection screen for Boyle’s own moods and feelings is brought home to the reader by means of various meta-phoric descriptions suggesting that the city reflects an internal labyrinth of his own making: ‘Infinite paths inside him that led nowhere, back to the skin surface and touch and cravings and eyes that vomited it all out instead of seeing. […] He had come down to Dublin and nothing had happened.’22 The novel, moreover, contains many atmospheric descriptions which paint the city almost as a living creature reflecting Boyle’s own moods, anxieties and fears, for instance when the narrator refers to ‘the cranes [that] were stuck in the city like acupuncture pins in secret stress points’.23 Boyle,

20 Sean O’Reilly, The Swing of Things (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 73, 3.21 Shane Barry, ‘Showing the Bones – Sean O’Reilly in Interview’, Three

Monkeys Online, <http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/showing-the-bones- sean-oreilly-in-interview/>.

22 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 103.23 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 36.

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purposelessly roaming the streets of the city, is ‘sure he was seeing the same frightened faces wherever he went as if there was a small frantic coterie who had nowhere to go, who suddenly felt themselves exposed’.24 Boyle’s alienation is thus projected not only on to the city itself but also onto its mostly anonymous inhabitants, the phantasmagoria of ‘the same fright-ened faces’ he encounters on his wanderings. While he may be alienated by the reflections flung back to him of a ‘heavily commercialised racially diverse modern city’, he at the same time seeks out the company of those migrant Others that serve to underline his own sense of alienation and homelessness. This is the case, for instance, at crucial moments in the novel, such as the following scene in which Boyle is waiting to board a coach to take him back to Derry for the weekend – a plan averted by the sudden appearance of an old acquaintance from the past, his fellow prison inmate Snowy. Shortly before Snowy’s arrival, Boyle leaves the building to smoke a cigarette. Looking around he notices that ‘[t]his part of town was bleak and rundown, and even that seemed deliberate. A Dart train was stalled between two buildings high above his head. Taxi-men sat in their cars, a Romanian woman and child begged below the broken cash machine, and barrels were being dropped into the cellar of a bar across the road.’25 In this description, the reference to the Romanian woman and her child is more than an atmospheric detail. It can be read both as a scathing com-ment on the failure of Celtic Tiger Ireland to economically provide for all its residents (the cash machine is ‘broken’; the Romanian mother and her child are reduced to begging below it) as well as on Boyle’s own failure to be ‘nourished’ by the city he has sought to find refuge in; the woman, in this latter reading, is a reflection of his own outsider status, his lasting sense of not fitting in.

Boyle’s perceived outsider status is thus reflected back to him especially through the ubiquitous presence of migrants in the city. Despite being a native Irishman, he, too, is an outsider, who, taking stock, realizes that ‘he had been in Dublin for eight or nine months and he didn’t know a person

24 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 209.25 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 136.

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he could call and talk into a pint’.26 The novel, then, is about Boyle’s demise, his failure to find his feet, to let go off the past, and his resultant sense of alienation. In many ways he, too, is an immigrant, a refugee, even though this status is not immediately recognizable. Thus, at one point he tries to explain to a young Russian woman that he is from Derry rather than Dublin, only to find that ‘the difference didn’t register with her’.27 In this sense, O’Reilly effectively highlights internal differences, unmasking the myth of Irish homogeneity by exploring Dublin through the eyes of his Northern Irish protagonist, whom he ‘posits […] as an insider / outsider’.28

Boyle’s plan to return to Derry so as to be ‘among his own’ never mate-rializes.29 One reason for his staying away may well be the realization that he is at least as alienated from his native Derry as he is from Dublin. Thus, when his Russian neighbour Victor asks him whether Northern Ireland is his home, Boyle answers as follows: ‘Was. I don’t know anymore.’30 In fact, his recollections of the time after his eight-year imprisonment suggest that Boyle never managed to settle back in with his former community: ‘He was a ghost on the streets of his own city. […] People saw him like that, they saw it in his humiliated eyes, in the way he was continually getting in their way on the shopping streets, like a man with a hangover who can’t bear the noise of an ordinary day, out of sync, easily started.’31 However, if Boyle was ‘out of sync’ in post-Good-Friday-Agreement-Derry, he like-wise never succeeds in getting into ‘the swing of things’ in Celtic Tiger Dublin: ‘The swills of ablaze faces were like masks for an emotion Boyle didn’t know the name of: desire, glut, need, revulsion, bliss, rage? Nothing fitted. It was impossible to tell what was real. […] Some eyes seemed to identify him as traitor and others grinned in wanton conspiracy.’32 When

26 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 36.27 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 70.28 Gerardine Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation

(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010), 16.29 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 114.30 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 71.31 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 105.32 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 45.

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he talks to his old Derry childhood friend on the phone, explaining that he feels out of place in Dublin, Dainty responds with sarcasm: ‘You see that’s your problem Noel. I’ve told you before. You’re panicking now at being part of the state. There you are right at the heart of it. They’ve welcomed you in. They let you into the libraries and classrooms and give you a wee identity card. You’ve never had to face that before. You can’t cope with it. You’re just the same as everybody else now.’33 Yet Boyle’s IRA background undoubtedly sets him apart from his fellow students, as becomes obvious when he opens up about his past to a young female student he refers to as ‘the Dove’. While initially the girl is hurt that he seems to judge her by her middle-class background and youthful inexperience, her reaction to his story to some extent proves him right: ‘Maybe you chose the wrong person, she said then. I don’t know. I just need some time to think about it. I don’t want violence in my life. It’s so ugly.’34

Uncomfortable with both his fellow students, whom he disparag-ingly refers to as ‘[r]ich kids’, and with the touristy aspects of Trinity, as exemplified by tourist guides ‘turning it all into anecdote’, Boyle finds appropriate night-time employment in a telephone-call shop in Temple Bar.35 This shop is frequented mainly by immigrants looking to ‘make cheap calls around the world’.36 In a review of the novel, David Butler refers to this setting as ‘an entirely new space in Irish fiction, and […] one, moreover, which allows the author to locate Boyle with great economy in the dark heart of a sub-culture of refugees, loners and asylum seekers’.37 Boyle clearly prefers the company of these ethnically diverse people that mirror his sense of being an outsider but also provide him with a notion of ‘belonging’, of having a central role to play in this haphazard, unstable ‘community’. At the same time the setting and the service provided by Boyle are replete with irony, as illustrated by the following description combining

33 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 113.34 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 149.35 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 112, 9.36 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 40.37 David Butler, ‘Reviewed: The Swing of Things by Sean O’Reilly’, The Stinging Fly 18.1,

<http://stingingfly.org/sample/reviewed-swing-things-sean-oreilly>.

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Boyle’s longing for a spiritual purpose with the mundane reality of the money-making business: ‘All night the aching voices went out to the tundra and the mountain, harbour and slum, to the deserted and the waiting in the frozen tower blocks or merciless shanty noon and Boyle, their priest, their shaman, pressed the buttons and stacked the coins.’38 Tellingly, his customers for the most part remain anonymous and nameless, their stories unknown to him. They may be talking down the ‘wires to bombed-out vil-lages, African bars and apartments in suburban Korea’, but on the whole they remain vague, generalized presences, more often than not referred to in passing as ‘the stunned plaintive eyes of some refugee counting out the coins into Boyle’s hands’.39 Those attempting to approach Boyle, such as ‘a woman from Argentina who came in almost every night after her shift in a restaurant down the street’, are deliberately kept at a distance, cut short and ultimately discouraged from telling their stories.40 Their function in the novel is merely anecdotal; they do not really develop into full-fledged characters or contribute to the plot.

Another example of such a character is Boyle’s Russian neighbour Victor, who turns out to have been a soldier and with whom Boyle can share a companionable silence on all matters related to the past. Rather tellingly, Boyle believes that ‘silence’ is the ‘foundation of their friend-ship’ and accordingly the chance of a true interpersonal and intercultural exchange initially passes him by: ‘Boyle wanted to ask about the exact significance of those [Russian] dolls but it would mean opening up the subject of home and country and why Victor had left and come to Ireland, or who had forced him to leave. Both men seemed to have agreed to leave those topics alone; the past was something they couldn’t share or pretend to understand about each other in any language.’41 Though tempted to ask whether Victor has ‘his papers’ and is thus legally permitted to stay in Ireland, he decides that ‘it was none of his business; if Victor wanted to talk

38 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 41.39 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 43, 41.40 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 43.41 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 68.

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about it he would bring it up himself ’.42 In the course of the novel Boyle is opening up to Victor, establishing what might be called a friendship, only to be severely disappointed in the end. While it is not at all clear whether Victor’s betrayal of Boyle in his hour of need is real or imagined on Boyle’s part, the novel contains a number of hints suggesting that Victor may be involved in organized crime. Thus, at a party with Victor’s Russian friends, Victor cautions him not to communicate with anyone individually, a warn-ing that Boyle disregards when a young, sad-looking Russian girl catches his attention: ‘I do not like it here, she said. The Russian people…you can’t even imagine.’43 It is not before the end of the novel, when Victor, despite sheltering Boyle from the police, presumably betrays him that the reasons for Victor’s warning begin to dawn on Boyle. His realization that Victor may be involved in illegal human trafficking, and possibly in the death of a young Russian woman, opens up more sinister possibilities about Victor’s seemingly amiable character and motives.

The most significant immigrant presence in the novel is really an absence represented by the eyeless death mask of precisely the young deceased Russian woman whose image haunts Boyle throughout the novel. At the beginning we encounter him inspecting a bouquet of flowers left at the railings of the bridge where the woman, whom he had heard about on the radio the night before, apparently drowned herself. Shortly afterwards he comes across her image, and reads about her story, in the newspaper:

[A] woman had been found drowned in the Liffey. The Guards believed she had been dead no longer than twenty-four hours but they were having trouble identifying her. Although she did not appear to have been the victim of any physical attack, they were keeping an open mind until the results of the autopsy were finalised. The article also hinted the woman was not Irish. Alongside was printed a photograph which showed a mask of a woman’s face, a death mask in smooth white plaster. The mask was eyeless and stopped squarely at the hairline and narrowed sharply along the jaw to the chin. The ears were missing also but it was a good bet they were in proportion to the face which had strong sloping cheekbones and large oval eye sockets. Boyle imagined she would have been tall and broad across the shoulders, with a heavy chest, what might

42 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 69.43 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 70.

136 Michaela Schrage-Früh

be called statuesque. Her hair would have been bountiful and long. The mouth was big, the thick lips caught forever in a smile of serene fulfilment.44

Boyle becomes increasingly obsessed with this story as well as enraged by the various media and public reactions triggered by the woman’s death. These include predictable xenophobic comments such as the following one uttered by a waitress: ‘One of those foreigners probably, she said. Drowned was she? We’ll probably have to pay for the funeral now as well. Who knows what she was involved in?’45 Boyle is also furious that the unknown woman is given an Irish-sounding name despite the fact that she seems to have been a foreigner: ‘You can’t even die in peace any more, Boyle said, without the Guards standing over your corpse making up names. How’s they come up with Catriona I wonder? Some redneck’s mother. Some wee teacher from the Gaeltacht.’46 Finally, he is upset by what can only be described as the commodification of the dead woman’s fate/face. Thus, the woman’s death mask, fashioned by a young Irish artist, is sold by a charity institu-tion ostensibly to honour her remembrance. This discovery causes Boyle to overturn a sales stall displaying the masks, and it is hardly a coincidence that the young man killed and thrown into the Liffey by Boyle towards the end of the novel happens to be the very artist who designed them. ‘Catriona’ is thus an elusive yet persistent presence/absence in the novel, highly suggestive of the untold migrant stories submerged underneath the novel’s surface, with the death mask hinting at the sinister connotations of a voyeuristic, consumerist culture commodifying art, death and humanity.

Gerardine Meaney has rightly drawn attention to the novel’s Joycean reverberations, suggesting that ‘Bloom as outsider and Dedalus as errant son of the city are combined in the figure of Boyle’.47 Like Bloom, Boyle is wandering through the city, never fully integrated, never fully at home; like Stephen Dedalus, he in vain hopes to awaken from the nightmare of history,

44 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 11.45 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 7.46 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 37–8.47 Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation, 150.

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being ‘a man who has had enough of the past’.48 The various epiphanies he experiences in the course of the novel boil down to little more than the insight that he cannot get away from the past: ‘Boyle decided that he was a fool to think there was anything more than these moments of illumina-tion, brief aching glimpses into his own freedom, or the loss of it. That he was only fighting against himself. That he couldn’t escape from his past just by packing his bag and getting on a bus.’49

If Boyle bears traces of both Bloom and Dedalus, then his ‘antago-nist’ Fada, through whose consciousness part of the novel is filtered, must certainly be viewed as both his alter ego and his nemesis. As Meaney puts it, ‘Boyle, The Swing of Thing’s [sic] new Bloom, is shadowed by a portrait of the artist as mad peddler’.50 Indeed, the street performer Fada, though an indigenous Dubliner whose name gestures towards the Irish language, can be described as a social misfit. According to Boyle, ‘[a] character like Fada was part of Dublin, he would not have been created in the North, he wouldn’t have survived anywhere else.’51 Yet what Boyle fails to register is that in many ways Fada seems like a relic from the past or, in some ways even more accurately, a parody of the past compromised by the present – part of precisely the nightmare of history in which Boyle is trapped. Whenever Fada, drug-addict and unlikely womanizer, is not looking for sexual relief, he tries to sell poetry in the city centre. In Meaney’s apt words, he ‘busks Irish literature on Grafton Street, reciting for money and scavenging for coins to support his precarious existence. […] As Fada sells/tells it, literary tradition ceases to be a luxury that can deny its own status as commodity, may even be just another shoddy souvenir.’52 Fada is thus part of the tour-ist/heritage industry that Boyle abhors because it demeans and possibly reveals all that is phoney about his own ideals of nationhood. As Fada puts it, ‘[s]ome love too little and some too strong, some sell and others buy,

48 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 5.49 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 114.50 Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation, 151.51 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 136.52 Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation, 151.

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my dark Rosaleen, do not sigh do not weep’.53 In Fada´s ventriloquism, Irish literature turns into a meaningless medley: trivial, out of context and ruthlessly commodified:

Poetry on tap, the great classics of Irish literature. Joyce and his chamber pots. Wilde and his twilight balconies. Yeats and his randy ghosts. I’ll take you turf cutting with Heaney or onion eating with Jonathan Swift, lamenting the earls with O’Leary, into the monasteries and out on the misty hills, I’ve got ballads of the Easter Rising and odes to autumnal hussies, Sam the merciless, and brawling Behan, poets from the North and the South, Bobby Sands and Lady Gregory, […] for the yawning refugees and pale-faced gunmen, the new Spanish armada and the Russian gangsters, your mammy in heaven and your daddy in bed all the lifelong day.54

While this commercialized litany is part of Fada’s well-studied public per-formance, intended to draw attention from the various tourists and passers-by, in the course of the novel Fada is increasingly taken over by the Other, internalizing and ventriloquizing a myriad of different voices and person-alities that come to life through him, even when he is not performing for money. Initially he is still able to control the voices to a certain degree, as in the following description of a private performance for one of his female ‘patrons’: ‘Fata would perform his lewd oratorical office, manically extem-porising from lines of poetry across a range of voices, Dublin lads selling gear, Estonian men looking to sell their daughters to pervert priests, Spanish tourists complaining about the weather to farmers to Northern politicians to bored horny housewives.’55 What becomes obvious here is that Fada’s repertoire is shifting from poetry to a broad range of everyday characters and types. However, after a night of excessive drug consumption and physi-cal violence, Fada, all but turning into some kind of medium, threatens to break down under the weight of competing voices

that seemed to be on the verge of taking him over, some of them new voices that Boyle had never heard before: a London black voice in search of his Irish mother,

53 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 187.54 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 17.55 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 124.

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a Frenchman just off the plane in the wrong city, a pantomime serial killer with a woman’s hand inside his pocket, a delusional Northern rent boy on the run from the forces that be not, and an old Dublin man who had forgotten where he lived.56

Fada thus turns into a vessel for the voices of the marginalized and outcast, while at the same time the personae impersonated by him come to represent his own outsider status, his homelessness, his lack of control and ultimately his biggest fear of ending up, yet again, in a locked hospital room. Tellingly, Fada, in a travesty of Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’, is convinced of having been raped by a swan, the evocation of Yeats’s poem providing, in Maeve Davey’s words, a ‘clear example of postcolonial anxiety in the novel’.57 In this reading, Fada represents the emasculated ‘Irish male psyche‘, and thus constitutes both a reminder of, and a relic from, the past that is seemingly at odds with Celtic Tiger Dublin.58 Ironically enough, Fada will be the one to bring about Boyle’s final downfall after witnessing his friend kill the young artist who fashioned the drowned woman’s death mask. As Meaney points out, ‘The Swing of Things invokes the very Joycean trope of betrayal in the end, casting the reciter of others’ words as a teller of tales too com-pellingly terrible to be disbelieved when he condemns Boyle by turning a fight gone wrong into a tall tale of willful murder.’59 In a sense, then, it is Boyle’s inability to shake free from the past that seals his fate.

The choice which Boyle faces at the end of the novel is either to hand himself over to the police, to risk death at the hands of his former IRA peers or, alternatively, to settle for life on the run:

[a]n exile within himself […], packed off to outer London or Birmingham or Swindon where Max and that lot were stuck for years, shifting boxes around in a factory, never able to come home, no, go home. Home? The word will never be spoken. Home will

56 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 224.57 Davey, ‘“The Strange Heart Beating”: Bird Imagery, Masculinities and the Northern

Irish Postcolonial Gothic in the Novels of Sean O’Reilly and Peter Hollywood’, n.p.58 Davey, ‘“The Strange Heart Beating”: Bird Imagery, Masculinities and the Northern

Irish Postcolonial Gothic in the Novels of Sean O’Reilly and Peter Hollywood’, n.p.59 Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation, 152.

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be the gap between himself and the world, between the word and the thing, the void separating his tongue from words, his fingerprints from the touch of the tarmac.60

In contrast to Niall, who gets on a bus home to his family at the end of The First Verse, home, for Boyle, will remain forever out of reach. Celtic Tiger Dublin has failed to absorb him, partly because his own expectations about the capital of the ‘Free State‘ have been illusionary; there seems to be no space for his idealistic notions in a city he experiences as primarily consumerist and commercialized. As his friend Dainty puts it, roaming the city at the end of the novel in an attempt to come to terms with his friend’s death: ‘The street with all the people scurrying and carrying and nibbling like they’re insect at a carcass. Buddha Boyle where are you now?’61

To conclude, both Barry McCrea’s The First Verse and Sean O’Reilly’s The Swing of Things present their readers with native Irish protagonists struggling to find their place in Celtic Tiger Dublin, a city that fails to respond to their expectations, aspirations and needs. While McCrea’s char-acter Niall has grown up in the Dublin suburbs, he still feels like an exile in Dublin’s inner city, dreading his coming-out in a society that, though ostensibly post-Catholic and secular, still seems restricted and parochial in many ways. He also tries to fill the spiritual void left by the Celtic Tiger, his growing addiction to the sortes cult rendering him an outsider within, a feeling aptly reflected by the immigrants he meets on his wanderings north of the Liffey. Loosely modelled on Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Niall, too, leaves Dublin for ‘exile’ in Paris in order to be able to return home again. This option is not open to O’Reilly’s character Boyle, whose notions about the ‘Free States’ are at odds with Celtic Tiger reality and who remains trapped in his own republican past. His outsider status puts him in touch with various non-Irish immigrants, highlighting questions about belonging, identity and home. One crucial achievement in both novels is that they disrupt binary notions of Irish homogeneity versus the migrant Other by exploring the ‘foreigner within’. In both novels, the Migrant Other is a pres-ence/absence submerged just underneath the shiny Celtic Tiger surface,

60 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 267.61 O’Reilly, The Swing of Things, 287.

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full of potential stories that remain untold and encounters that fail to happen. Arguably, however, by turning the Irish protagonists themselves into ‘foreigners within’, these novels reinforce the notion that, for truly intercultural encounters to happen, the host culture’s transculturality first needs to be acknowledged and explored.