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jedusorI read "At Swim, Two Boys" for the first time when I was seventeen, because Kit told me to. I absolutely loved it--I actually typed out one scene that was more than two thousand words long because I wanted to be able to come back and reread it after I returned the library book. I still have that file on my computer. This past Christmas, Kit and I agreed to buy used copies for each other (I think the one I got her was a dollar and eight cents on Amazon) and I just finished rereading it.
The plot is great, and the development and the overarching themes and all that, but what I truly love about this book is the writing style. It seems dense at first, but then it draws me in and makes me forget that it should be hard to read, because it flows so beautifully. While I was reading it, I had to keep a notebook nearby because I kept finding bits I wanted to write down and think about later. It's really amazing, how engaging it is. I read an interview with the author, Jamie O'Neill, in which he says he never read as a child, not even his schoolbooks, didn't finish a single book until he was seventeen. He spent all his time swimming off the coast of Ireland, where he grew up. I guess that's as strong an argument as any for "write what you know."
This isn't a review or a recommendation. I do recommend it, definitely, but I'm not sure I'd be able to convey my love for this book if I tried. This is just a brain-dump of the quotes I scribbled down while I was reading, along with some informal and generally incoherent notes about them. It's mainly for my own benefit, both to organize my thoughts this time around and for the benefit of my future self, since reading this book at 20 was very different from reading it at 17 and I'm sure my perspective will be different again next time. None of this will make a whole lot of sense unless you've read the book. (Which means Kit is basically the only person on my flist who cares, but I suspect she's going to play in this entry like a sandbox, so I'm posting it anyway.)
Warning: long, spoilery, and textually NSFW.
I'll start with Eveline, because Eveline is a BAMF and a half. I think I have a crush on her.
He advised a revolver. "Yes," she agreed. "But that would mean bribing an officer, which would never do. I shall have to get one in liquor. Then he may mislay the thing."
"You are supposed to be what you are: a MacMurrough leading the young to their duty. No one has asked you to be artistic about it. Please don't smoke."
"If I am not deceived, my nephew will offer to accompany me."
"Should you like me to accompany you, Aunt Eva?"
"That would be most acceptable."
She's just like, bitch, this is how I say it and this is how it is.
Her hat was hopelessly démodé but the fashion was too ridiculous: she refused to wear flower-pots, and would have nothing to do with feathery things she had not shot herself.
Even here the modern style seemed hit upon by negligence. Or perhaps not negligence but nonchalance, a supremacy over style born of conviction. His aunt was certain of her standing, in history and in place. Anything she touched, ergo, was... à la mode.
And yeah, she gets to be boss because she's rich and privileged, but she gets that. She acknowledges it, and she works it like a stripper works her booty.
"Aunt Eva, can you truly believe any society would want me now?"
"I want you. I am society."
The book doesn't talk about feminism a whole lot, but it definitely touches on it, mostly in the context of Eveline. Because if she were a dude, you know she'd be a general in the Irish Volunteers. Fuck Connolly, she'd be running the revolution. As it is, she just does her best to pull the puppet strings. It's got to be frustrating, but she just takes it in stride and uses what she's got.
Twins, she the elder by half an hour, he the winner by the unalterable right of male succession.
He regarded women as practical, she told him, because he never saw the sex but it was tending to his needs: bringing his tea, making his fire, paying his cigarist's bills.
"One does not wish oneself changed. One wishes the world changed to accommodate one. Such is suffragism. Such is all emancipation."
I like the contrast between Eveline and Mr. Mack, especially with regards to their attitudes toward convention and social rules. Eveline toys around with society, with her parties and her car and her charitable donations--she uses the rules to manipulate people and to maintain the social standing she already has. Whereas Mr. Mack sees convention as something to obey, because he thinks that if he sticks to people's expectations enough then he'll get to climb up the social ladder. And everything he does relates to that. The parts of the book that are from his point of view are all about what people think of him, whether he's making a donkey of himself, like that's the worst thing that could happen. To him, it is.
Mr. Mack shook his head in what he conceived was not too negative a fashion.
Poor old Mr. Mack. He has it harder than any of us, I sometimes think. There he is with his heart all set on being a gent. Will he never learn 'tis the mark of a gent, not that hats are lifted to him, but that he lifts his hat to others?
"Oh, Mr. Mack, I wouldn't doubt you a minute. I stick up for you desperate in the streets, I do. I let them know that Mr. Mack is a gentleman. He wouldn't break the peace if he dropped it."
"Socialism, well well." He rubbed his hands. "What it is primarily is, what it is is wrong."
"But why's it wrong?"
"Do they not teach you these things at the college?"
"No."
"Well it's, basically it's, what it is is greed. Oh yes, there's greed there. Greed and envy. A heap of envy involved. Then there's pride. Greed, envy, pride--sloth. Sloth there, too. Oh, all the sins. Every man-jack of them. The entire boiling, the hopping-pot, the whole kit and caboodle."
The socialism thing is funny, because none of them really know what it is. I don't think Doyler even knows, although he knows enough for his revolutionary purposes.
Doyler was a socialist. Jim liked the way he pronounced the word, without the expected sh sound, but he still had only the muzziest idea what it stood for.
Jim's constant musings on language are awesome. I loved that one scene when Doyler was talking about the political implications of English being spoken in Ireland and Latin being taught in schools, but Gaelic being reserved for prayers, and he uses an example of a word he knows in Gaelic that he bets Jim doesn't know in Latin. He's trying to get across this whole point about control and oppression, and it's just flying over Jim's head while Jim sits there wondering, huh, what IS that word in Latin? I get you, Jim. Nerd solidarity.
But small the harm in Erse and I'll be happy for Jim to take classes. So long as it wouldn't interfere with the Latin.
I like the synecdochal thing with the languages representing the political and cultural forces at work.
He did not, most definitely not, what did MacMurrough take him for, he had no fear of the dark whatsoever, guaranteed.
"Why," he asked, "why would I want," he demanded, "what would I want going to Pres for anyway?"
Aw, Doyler. That last line kind of broke my heart, especially knowing about what happened with the scholarship and his dad and his leg. The dialogue tags really worked well there to emphasize the doth-protest-too-much of it. O'Neill is good at that, at phrasing things well. He clearly likes to mess around with words, in an academic way through Jim and in a more playful way through MacMurrough.
"Doyling, if you didn't know, is that brazen discourteous vain-glorious smirk which commonly distorts your face: the giving of it." And he clipped once more the boy's rubious conk.
MacMurrough, man. He doesn't even really show up until a hundred pages in, and I didn't pay a lot of attention to him the first time I read this book, but now I think he might be an even more important character than Jim and Doyler. I understood him better this time through than I did when I was 17, that's for sure.
He did not know why and he had given up wondering, but just on that threshold before thought or action his sense of himself was of a burgeoning youth. He was on the verge of manhood, always the verge. So persistent was this notion that strangers he encountered, ontologically his junior, he would often consider his psychological senior.
...yeah. Okay, I don't actually know how old MacMurrough is supposed to be. Somewhere in his thirties, maybe? But his entire character makes so much more sense with that passage in mind. He's kind of pervy, macking on sixteen-year-olds all the time, but he doesn't think of it like that because he's their age in his head. I know people like this. They tend to be a little creepstery. As is MacMurrough.
He could only marvel at the boy's mastery of the world--that same world which tossed MacMurrough, upped sided and downed him, and over which he had no more influence than the choosing of the socks he wore while it tossed.
He looks up to Jim, while Jim is simultaneously looking up to him. It's a weird dynamic. Jim doesn't get it, not at all. He gets that MacMurrough has a crush on him--I'm not sure when exactly Jim figures that out, but it's pretty clear by the climax of the novel that he has. But he doesn't get what's going on in MacMurrough's head.
What's going on in MacMurrough's head is... well, basically playing. Where Eveline manipulates the rules, and Mr. Mack follows them to the letter, and Doyler flouts them loudly, MacMurrough barely notices that they exist. He has this whole world in his mind, with various aspects of his personality represented by characters, and (at least until he meets Jim and Doyler) he's pretty much content to live there. His POV is packed full of random tangents and musings. He's immature, he acknowledges that cheerfully, but he's also smart as hell.
Sometimes I wonder does anything in the world exist for me at all, beyond the horizontal refreshment.
See, he says stuff like that, but then he spends hours debating the nature of virtue with his own head. Speaking of which, his multiple personalities are fantastic. Scrotes is my favorite, but Dick is pretty great too.
--That blackguard would need a good thrashing, ordained the chaplain. And MacMurrough smiled when Dick volunteered his rod for the task.
*giggles*
"Pavvo beware," blarnied MacMurrough.
"Listen to you. It's you is supposed to rub off on me."
--If there is any god, said Dick.
*giggles more*
--Dick? By which you intend your membrum virile and the wayward cerebrations that command it?
Scrotes, though, he's interesting. He's basically the embodiment of MacMurrough's cynicism. He knows he's a figment of MacMurrough's imagination, and moreover, he refuses to let MacMurrough forget it. I can't get enough of those interactions.
--Remind me, said Scrotes: which are these lofty principles you quake to disavow? The world I'm sure trembles to hear.
MacMurrough smirked. Very clever, Scrotes. And it may be true that I don't believe in anything much. But I believe I ought to believe, which is something.
And then MacMurrough's awesomeness crests with this:
"Now, this fellow here, he fucked me last night. Isn't he the handsome rake? Yes, he fucked me something divine, then after he fetched up my arse, he turned me over and brought me off in his mouth. Glorious, constable, words cannot describe, you'd want to try it yourself. Or perhaps you have? In the meantime, you'll be so good as to lend me your bike for I find we're running late for the revolution."
AND THEN I DIED ♥
"Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?"
"If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes."
"I felt I might belong. I might, God help me, be"--irrational, irrepressible, irresponsible, iron-brained, irascible, irksome, entirely irresistible--"might be Irish," he said.
There's this metaphor throughout the book of Ireland being a boy. I'd think it would get old, but he keeps coming up with interesting enough ways to say it that it doesn't.
--You know, he said to Scrotes, if Ireland might be a boy instead of a blowsy old cow, I'd be all for Ireland, I would.
--Ah, said Scrotes, but which is his country? It is scarcely the tired old hag of the songs, nor yet the beautiful woman of the prophecies.
No, thought MacMurrough, that is not his Ireland.
--See, said Scrotes, his Ireland is on the stage.
Yes, there it was in the boys, those gossamery boys who thumped the stage.
"I don't hate the English and I don't know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I'm sure of that now. And he's my country."
Irish nationalism is personified as a boy in general and as Doyler in particular, which is depressing given the ending. But I guess the rising was quashed in the end, at least for a while, so it's appropriate.
What do I care about this war? Whoever the victor, they'll still despise me.
That's MacMurrough earlier in the book, before he figures out that Ireland is worth fighting for as long as it's represented by a couple sexy teenagers.
--You know, he continued, they make it so damned difficult. They make a thing so deeply wrong that no morality can afterward apply. It doesn't matter how we go about it, kindly or coldly. No good is so good as to mitigate; all further wrong is a feather's weight on the deed itself. See it in the newspaper reports. One can be a gentleman thief. One can be a love-struck murderer. We're just unspeakable, we're sods.
"You asked me earlier were there many of us about. The question for my friend was, were there any of us at all. The world would say that we did not exist, that only our actions, our habits, were real, which the world had called our crimes or our sins. But Scrotes began to think that we did indeed exist. That we had a nature our own, which was not another's perverted or turned to sin."
There's a lot of this love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name stuff, and there's a lot of Wilde references, enough that I kinda want to watch the Stephen Fry movie again. Basically, the church doesn't even acknowledge homosexuality, to the point where poor Jim is trying his damndest to confess to the priest that he had sex with a dude and the priest doesn't understand him. The thread is wrapped up nicely when Jim and Doyler finally make it to the Muglins.
"I don't know what it's called. Will you do it with me?"
Lovely line.
"You make a democracy of virtue."
"If it is to be anything, it is to be an aristocracy," she replied. "For some have the say of thousands, whereas many have no say at all."
There's Eveline being awesome again.
Scrotes, as was his use, delved to the root of the word and expounded its meaning as that which befits a man. As such, he said, virtue in its original was unavailable to women. Whereupon MacMurrough introduced a lighter note, to wit, nowadays the reverse held true, virtue being most commonly construed an instinct, proper in girls, to preserve their virginity, and in women to nurture the results of its loss.
This is from that 2000-word scene I transcribed in its entirety. It's an extended conversation between MacMurrough and Scrotes about virtue, ending with MacMurrough being crushed by the reality that Scrotes is dead, and it's fucking amazing. I kind of want to just paste the whole thing here, but I don't think I'm supposed to do that, and it's better in context anyway.
"I'm just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me--my neck, say, or my knee--and I'd carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn't lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We'd come so close, do you see, that I wouldn't be surprised out of myself every time you touched."
Ow, god, my HEART.
For maybe it was true that no man is an island; but he believed that two very well might be.
I really want Jim and Doyler to live happily ever after. I'm not much for love stories in general, but the slow progression of their relationship and the way they interact really makes me believe in them. And then, ugh ugh ugh. It's not a bad ending, it works, but it destroys me.
Some more quotes that I liked, just for the way the words flow:
Hopefully he threw a rug over the boxes. They looked like three boxes of rifles with a rug on top.
What need had the Castle of spies and informers? In Ireland, if you would know was a rising due, look no farther than the Saturday confessions.
She strode ahead to quiz the gardener, who shuffled his feet, bowing his head. MacMurrough imagined the mumbling response, his seeking to stumble his words lest expertise should offend.
Not sure why, now, possibly to humiliate, probably to goad, I asked did he love his friend. Well, no boy loves his chum, or no boy says he does. But he answered, I do.
I do, he answered, as in some preposterous dissenting nuptial.
The girls were all sleeping still on their shakedown in the corner. Like the leaves of a cabbage they lay, each leaf enfolding the next one down. Eleven, nine, seven, five: the same face told in tripping years.
God knows, there's little enough joy in the world, and precious little for free.
Something with the door to the tomb, mechanism had jammed. Savior hasn't quite risen yet, but we're working on it. We'll keep you informed. In the meantime, let us, um, pray.
Male hairy, bull of grace, the lard is with thee.
"Shower of mermaids, the load of yous," said John Mary Cruise and his towel flecked the blubber of buttocks. In due course the pimpled skin and sinewy limbs were restored to their clothy dignity, and the talk too put on its collar and tie.
The people shall further be graded according to wealth, and--humorous touch this--the more obviously a man labor, the more stinting shall be his reward; the more he work in the out-of-doors, the thinner his clothing shall be; the more his labor filthy him, the less water shall he have to wash.
So spake Scrotes, and having spoke he smole a smile and home to raven regions lonely stole.
The plot is great, and the development and the overarching themes and all that, but what I truly love about this book is the writing style. It seems dense at first, but then it draws me in and makes me forget that it should be hard to read, because it flows so beautifully. While I was reading it, I had to keep a notebook nearby because I kept finding bits I wanted to write down and think about later. It's really amazing, how engaging it is. I read an interview with the author, Jamie O'Neill, in which he says he never read as a child, not even his schoolbooks, didn't finish a single book until he was seventeen. He spent all his time swimming off the coast of Ireland, where he grew up. I guess that's as strong an argument as any for "write what you know."
This isn't a review or a recommendation. I do recommend it, definitely, but I'm not sure I'd be able to convey my love for this book if I tried. This is just a brain-dump of the quotes I scribbled down while I was reading, along with some informal and generally incoherent notes about them. It's mainly for my own benefit, both to organize my thoughts this time around and for the benefit of my future self, since reading this book at 20 was very different from reading it at 17 and I'm sure my perspective will be different again next time. None of this will make a whole lot of sense unless you've read the book. (Which means Kit is basically the only person on my flist who cares, but I suspect she's going to play in this entry like a sandbox, so I'm posting it anyway.)
Warning: long, spoilery, and textually NSFW.
I'll start with Eveline, because Eveline is a BAMF and a half. I think I have a crush on her.
He advised a revolver. "Yes," she agreed. "But that would mean bribing an officer, which would never do. I shall have to get one in liquor. Then he may mislay the thing."
"You are supposed to be what you are: a MacMurrough leading the young to their duty. No one has asked you to be artistic about it. Please don't smoke."
"If I am not deceived, my nephew will offer to accompany me."
"Should you like me to accompany you, Aunt Eva?"
"That would be most acceptable."
She's just like, bitch, this is how I say it and this is how it is.
Her hat was hopelessly démodé but the fashion was too ridiculous: she refused to wear flower-pots, and would have nothing to do with feathery things she had not shot herself.
Even here the modern style seemed hit upon by negligence. Or perhaps not negligence but nonchalance, a supremacy over style born of conviction. His aunt was certain of her standing, in history and in place. Anything she touched, ergo, was... à la mode.
And yeah, she gets to be boss because she's rich and privileged, but she gets that. She acknowledges it, and she works it like a stripper works her booty.
"Aunt Eva, can you truly believe any society would want me now?"
"I want you. I am society."
The book doesn't talk about feminism a whole lot, but it definitely touches on it, mostly in the context of Eveline. Because if she were a dude, you know she'd be a general in the Irish Volunteers. Fuck Connolly, she'd be running the revolution. As it is, she just does her best to pull the puppet strings. It's got to be frustrating, but she just takes it in stride and uses what she's got.
Twins, she the elder by half an hour, he the winner by the unalterable right of male succession.
He regarded women as practical, she told him, because he never saw the sex but it was tending to his needs: bringing his tea, making his fire, paying his cigarist's bills.
"One does not wish oneself changed. One wishes the world changed to accommodate one. Such is suffragism. Such is all emancipation."
I like the contrast between Eveline and Mr. Mack, especially with regards to their attitudes toward convention and social rules. Eveline toys around with society, with her parties and her car and her charitable donations--she uses the rules to manipulate people and to maintain the social standing she already has. Whereas Mr. Mack sees convention as something to obey, because he thinks that if he sticks to people's expectations enough then he'll get to climb up the social ladder. And everything he does relates to that. The parts of the book that are from his point of view are all about what people think of him, whether he's making a donkey of himself, like that's the worst thing that could happen. To him, it is.
Mr. Mack shook his head in what he conceived was not too negative a fashion.
Poor old Mr. Mack. He has it harder than any of us, I sometimes think. There he is with his heart all set on being a gent. Will he never learn 'tis the mark of a gent, not that hats are lifted to him, but that he lifts his hat to others?
"Oh, Mr. Mack, I wouldn't doubt you a minute. I stick up for you desperate in the streets, I do. I let them know that Mr. Mack is a gentleman. He wouldn't break the peace if he dropped it."
"Socialism, well well." He rubbed his hands. "What it is primarily is, what it is is wrong."
"But why's it wrong?"
"Do they not teach you these things at the college?"
"No."
"Well it's, basically it's, what it is is greed. Oh yes, there's greed there. Greed and envy. A heap of envy involved. Then there's pride. Greed, envy, pride--sloth. Sloth there, too. Oh, all the sins. Every man-jack of them. The entire boiling, the hopping-pot, the whole kit and caboodle."
The socialism thing is funny, because none of them really know what it is. I don't think Doyler even knows, although he knows enough for his revolutionary purposes.
Doyler was a socialist. Jim liked the way he pronounced the word, without the expected sh sound, but he still had only the muzziest idea what it stood for.
Jim's constant musings on language are awesome. I loved that one scene when Doyler was talking about the political implications of English being spoken in Ireland and Latin being taught in schools, but Gaelic being reserved for prayers, and he uses an example of a word he knows in Gaelic that he bets Jim doesn't know in Latin. He's trying to get across this whole point about control and oppression, and it's just flying over Jim's head while Jim sits there wondering, huh, what IS that word in Latin? I get you, Jim. Nerd solidarity.
But small the harm in Erse and I'll be happy for Jim to take classes. So long as it wouldn't interfere with the Latin.
I like the synecdochal thing with the languages representing the political and cultural forces at work.
He did not, most definitely not, what did MacMurrough take him for, he had no fear of the dark whatsoever, guaranteed.
"Why," he asked, "why would I want," he demanded, "what would I want going to Pres for anyway?"
Aw, Doyler. That last line kind of broke my heart, especially knowing about what happened with the scholarship and his dad and his leg. The dialogue tags really worked well there to emphasize the doth-protest-too-much of it. O'Neill is good at that, at phrasing things well. He clearly likes to mess around with words, in an academic way through Jim and in a more playful way through MacMurrough.
"Doyling, if you didn't know, is that brazen discourteous vain-glorious smirk which commonly distorts your face: the giving of it." And he clipped once more the boy's rubious conk.
MacMurrough, man. He doesn't even really show up until a hundred pages in, and I didn't pay a lot of attention to him the first time I read this book, but now I think he might be an even more important character than Jim and Doyler. I understood him better this time through than I did when I was 17, that's for sure.
He did not know why and he had given up wondering, but just on that threshold before thought or action his sense of himself was of a burgeoning youth. He was on the verge of manhood, always the verge. So persistent was this notion that strangers he encountered, ontologically his junior, he would often consider his psychological senior.
...yeah. Okay, I don't actually know how old MacMurrough is supposed to be. Somewhere in his thirties, maybe? But his entire character makes so much more sense with that passage in mind. He's kind of pervy, macking on sixteen-year-olds all the time, but he doesn't think of it like that because he's their age in his head. I know people like this. They tend to be a little creepstery. As is MacMurrough.
He could only marvel at the boy's mastery of the world--that same world which tossed MacMurrough, upped sided and downed him, and over which he had no more influence than the choosing of the socks he wore while it tossed.
He looks up to Jim, while Jim is simultaneously looking up to him. It's a weird dynamic. Jim doesn't get it, not at all. He gets that MacMurrough has a crush on him--I'm not sure when exactly Jim figures that out, but it's pretty clear by the climax of the novel that he has. But he doesn't get what's going on in MacMurrough's head.
What's going on in MacMurrough's head is... well, basically playing. Where Eveline manipulates the rules, and Mr. Mack follows them to the letter, and Doyler flouts them loudly, MacMurrough barely notices that they exist. He has this whole world in his mind, with various aspects of his personality represented by characters, and (at least until he meets Jim and Doyler) he's pretty much content to live there. His POV is packed full of random tangents and musings. He's immature, he acknowledges that cheerfully, but he's also smart as hell.
Sometimes I wonder does anything in the world exist for me at all, beyond the horizontal refreshment.
See, he says stuff like that, but then he spends hours debating the nature of virtue with his own head. Speaking of which, his multiple personalities are fantastic. Scrotes is my favorite, but Dick is pretty great too.
--That blackguard would need a good thrashing, ordained the chaplain. And MacMurrough smiled when Dick volunteered his rod for the task.
*giggles*
"Pavvo beware," blarnied MacMurrough.
"Listen to you. It's you is supposed to rub off on me."
--If there is any god, said Dick.
*giggles more*
--Dick? By which you intend your membrum virile and the wayward cerebrations that command it?
Scrotes, though, he's interesting. He's basically the embodiment of MacMurrough's cynicism. He knows he's a figment of MacMurrough's imagination, and moreover, he refuses to let MacMurrough forget it. I can't get enough of those interactions.
--Remind me, said Scrotes: which are these lofty principles you quake to disavow? The world I'm sure trembles to hear.
MacMurrough smirked. Very clever, Scrotes. And it may be true that I don't believe in anything much. But I believe I ought to believe, which is something.
And then MacMurrough's awesomeness crests with this:
"Now, this fellow here, he fucked me last night. Isn't he the handsome rake? Yes, he fucked me something divine, then after he fetched up my arse, he turned me over and brought me off in his mouth. Glorious, constable, words cannot describe, you'd want to try it yourself. Or perhaps you have? In the meantime, you'll be so good as to lend me your bike for I find we're running late for the revolution."
AND THEN I DIED ♥
"Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?"
"If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes."
"I felt I might belong. I might, God help me, be"--irrational, irrepressible, irresponsible, iron-brained, irascible, irksome, entirely irresistible--"might be Irish," he said.
There's this metaphor throughout the book of Ireland being a boy. I'd think it would get old, but he keeps coming up with interesting enough ways to say it that it doesn't.
--You know, he said to Scrotes, if Ireland might be a boy instead of a blowsy old cow, I'd be all for Ireland, I would.
--Ah, said Scrotes, but which is his country? It is scarcely the tired old hag of the songs, nor yet the beautiful woman of the prophecies.
No, thought MacMurrough, that is not his Ireland.
--See, said Scrotes, his Ireland is on the stage.
Yes, there it was in the boys, those gossamery boys who thumped the stage.
"I don't hate the English and I don't know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I'm sure of that now. And he's my country."
Irish nationalism is personified as a boy in general and as Doyler in particular, which is depressing given the ending. But I guess the rising was quashed in the end, at least for a while, so it's appropriate.
What do I care about this war? Whoever the victor, they'll still despise me.
That's MacMurrough earlier in the book, before he figures out that Ireland is worth fighting for as long as it's represented by a couple sexy teenagers.
--You know, he continued, they make it so damned difficult. They make a thing so deeply wrong that no morality can afterward apply. It doesn't matter how we go about it, kindly or coldly. No good is so good as to mitigate; all further wrong is a feather's weight on the deed itself. See it in the newspaper reports. One can be a gentleman thief. One can be a love-struck murderer. We're just unspeakable, we're sods.
"You asked me earlier were there many of us about. The question for my friend was, were there any of us at all. The world would say that we did not exist, that only our actions, our habits, were real, which the world had called our crimes or our sins. But Scrotes began to think that we did indeed exist. That we had a nature our own, which was not another's perverted or turned to sin."
There's a lot of this love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name stuff, and there's a lot of Wilde references, enough that I kinda want to watch the Stephen Fry movie again. Basically, the church doesn't even acknowledge homosexuality, to the point where poor Jim is trying his damndest to confess to the priest that he had sex with a dude and the priest doesn't understand him. The thread is wrapped up nicely when Jim and Doyler finally make it to the Muglins.
"I don't know what it's called. Will you do it with me?"
Lovely line.
"You make a democracy of virtue."
"If it is to be anything, it is to be an aristocracy," she replied. "For some have the say of thousands, whereas many have no say at all."
There's Eveline being awesome again.
Scrotes, as was his use, delved to the root of the word and expounded its meaning as that which befits a man. As such, he said, virtue in its original was unavailable to women. Whereupon MacMurrough introduced a lighter note, to wit, nowadays the reverse held true, virtue being most commonly construed an instinct, proper in girls, to preserve their virginity, and in women to nurture the results of its loss.
This is from that 2000-word scene I transcribed in its entirety. It's an extended conversation between MacMurrough and Scrotes about virtue, ending with MacMurrough being crushed by the reality that Scrotes is dead, and it's fucking amazing. I kind of want to just paste the whole thing here, but I don't think I'm supposed to do that, and it's better in context anyway.
"I'm just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me--my neck, say, or my knee--and I'd carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn't lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We'd come so close, do you see, that I wouldn't be surprised out of myself every time you touched."
Ow, god, my HEART.
For maybe it was true that no man is an island; but he believed that two very well might be.
I really want Jim and Doyler to live happily ever after. I'm not much for love stories in general, but the slow progression of their relationship and the way they interact really makes me believe in them. And then, ugh ugh ugh. It's not a bad ending, it works, but it destroys me.
Some more quotes that I liked, just for the way the words flow:
Hopefully he threw a rug over the boxes. They looked like three boxes of rifles with a rug on top.
What need had the Castle of spies and informers? In Ireland, if you would know was a rising due, look no farther than the Saturday confessions.
She strode ahead to quiz the gardener, who shuffled his feet, bowing his head. MacMurrough imagined the mumbling response, his seeking to stumble his words lest expertise should offend.
Not sure why, now, possibly to humiliate, probably to goad, I asked did he love his friend. Well, no boy loves his chum, or no boy says he does. But he answered, I do.
I do, he answered, as in some preposterous dissenting nuptial.
The girls were all sleeping still on their shakedown in the corner. Like the leaves of a cabbage they lay, each leaf enfolding the next one down. Eleven, nine, seven, five: the same face told in tripping years.
God knows, there's little enough joy in the world, and precious little for free.
Something with the door to the tomb, mechanism had jammed. Savior hasn't quite risen yet, but we're working on it. We'll keep you informed. In the meantime, let us, um, pray.
Male hairy, bull of grace, the lard is with thee.
"Shower of mermaids, the load of yous," said John Mary Cruise and his towel flecked the blubber of buttocks. In due course the pimpled skin and sinewy limbs were restored to their clothy dignity, and the talk too put on its collar and tie.
The people shall further be graded according to wealth, and--humorous touch this--the more obviously a man labor, the more stinting shall be his reward; the more he work in the out-of-doors, the thinner his clothing shall be; the more his labor filthy him, the less water shall he have to wash.
So spake Scrotes, and having spoke he smole a smile and home to raven regions lonely stole.
