Into
The Grey
Launch 6 September 2011 Irish Writers’ Centre
Robert Dunbar
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure to have been
asked to say a few words about Into The
Grey, this most fascinating book by Celine Kiernan, and I hope that what I
have to say about it will whet your reading appetites, and that you will leave
the room afterwards with at least one copy of it.
In January 1917, a young Englishman – he was in fact twenty-four years
of age – wrote to his mother from the trenches of World War . ‘I can see no
excuse,’ he said, ‘for deceiving you about these last four days. I have
suffered seventh hell ... We had a march of three miles over shelled road, then
nearly three along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had
been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was, of course, dark, too
dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking
clay, three, four, five feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water.’
As I’m sure many of you have recognised, the young soldier who wrote
these words and who was to die the following year, 1918, was Wilfred Owen, now
regarded as one of the major poets of the 20th century. The words
came back to me on several occasions as I read Celine’s book and, indeed, once
or twice I also heard echoes of some of his poems in her descriptions of what
was going on in those far-off battlefields.
One of Owen’s most famous comments on his own writing was, ‘All a poet
can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.’ And,
interestingly enough, there is a key chapter in Celine’s book simply called
‘The Truth’, in which the two principal strands of her narrative, although
hinted at earlier, finally come explicitly together.
So what are these two strands and what links them?
Very often, when I was teaching literature – children’s or adults’ – to
my third-level students I would challenge them when we had read a particular
poem or play or novel: ‘Now, tell me in one word – repeat, in one word – what
was that about?’ It is, of course, and absurdly reductionist way of looking at
any example of great literature, trying to encapsulate its complexities in one
word, but the approach has its merits in encouraging the reader to cut out all
the fripperies and decorations and get to the heart of the writer’s matter.
It sometimes happens, of course, that we do not have to read too far
into a novel before we begin to realise what its essential subject is going to
be. In the case of Celine’s Into The Grey
we have to proceed no further that its opening paragraph:
‘We were watching telly the night Nan burnt the house down. It
was March 1974, and I was fifteen years of age. I thought I lost everything in
that fire, but what did I know about loss? Nothing, that’s what. I would learn
soon enough.’
The key motif of
the novel is, as we might correctly guess, going to emerge as ‘loss’, a motif
which is going to go much deeper than the loss, through fire, of a family home
and its various bits and pieces. The fifteen-year-old boy whose opening words I
have just quoted is Pat Finnerty, who, with his parents, his paternal
grandmother Nan, his younger sister Dee and his twin brother Dominick,
constitute the main characters of the novel’s 1974 world. And just let me say
in passing how much I admire the subtlety and restraint with which that
particular period in is evoked. I always have difficulty with the sort of novel where
the writer, often in the name of ‘research’, has laboriously re-created a sense
of place and period, resulting in writing drowning in tedious detail. In
Celine’s case, by contrast, the detail (frequently alluding to the popular
music of the time) is sharp and always made relevant. Even ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’ is made
to have a function beyond its Eurovision origins.
At first sight,
the Finnerty household is one of Irish ordinariness, beset by indications of
the usual domestic and martial tensions, and characterised also by the
extremely close and playful relationship which would seem to pertain between
the fifteen-year-old twins, ‘stupid, happy ignorant boys’ as Pat refers to them
at one point. But everything in the Finnerty family is going to change when,
following the vividly described fire referred to in the book’s opening
paragraph, they have to move house, to Skerries in fact, to a dwelling they
have previously used as a holiday home. It is here, especially for the two
teenagers, that present and past worlds begin to coalesce, whether in the form
of dreams, nightmares, hauntings or strange (and quite frightening)
apparitions.
As I’ve already
implied, the principal focus of these ‘past worlds’ is on incidents from the
first World War and on how some of the participants in that dreadful conflict,
whether as survivors or as ghosts apparently rising from their graves, come to
impinge on the existences and personalities of Pat and Dominick. The strength
of the bond between the boys is going to be sorely tested when it becomes clear
that Dominick’s very life is threatened by the presences, long dormant, which
have now re-emerged: fraternal love and loyalties are explored here with great
poignancy and, when and where appropriated, with some humour.
‘Yesterday morning,’ Pat records, ‘I’d had a brother. I’d had a
best friend. He’d been fun. He’d been interesting: my slow-burn, articulate
counterweight. Now I was lopsided, a boat with one paddle, rowing frantically
and spinning in a slow, maddening circle around the space that should have been
him.’
In her tracing of
this ‘spinning’ and its ‘slow, maddening circle’, Celine’s storytelling skills
are given full, imaginative scope.
Central to her
technique is her obvious belief in the power of memory, a faculty which can
simultaneously comfort and disturb. There is one particularly telling phrase,
again in the chapter called ‘The Truth’, where the now elderly former Irish
soldier, James Hueston, is described by the twins’ mother as ‘walking the
private halls of his childhood’. Those episodes in Celine’s novel where various
of her characters do indeed revisit their ‘childhood halls’ and haunts elevate
her writing and its themes to a standard and give it a depth well beyond what
we have come to expect in run-of-the-mill Irish young adult fiction. And given
that this is a book full of ghosts or one sort or another, I feel I am using
the word ‘haunts’ appropriately. As he watches events and memories unravel, our
young narrator is, as he puts it, ‘freshly conscious of how utterly cruel life
was’ and adds:
‘So. That’s how it
happens. All the time. All over the world. People just fall away. There’s no
warning, and you can’t do anything about it. No matter how old you get. You
just lose people and lose people and lose them again,
and you never get them back.’
We return to the
‘loss’ of Celine’s opening paragraph. Ladies and gentlemen, the literacy skills
inherent in Celine’s first novel The
Poison Throne and fully enhanced by the two remaining novels of her
‘Moorehawke Trilogy’ have now been further enriched by what, in my opinion, is
her most impressive fiction to date. This is writing of an extremely high
order, eloquent in its imagination and warm in its empathetic humanity. It
evinces the author’s understanding of what has been the subject of great
literature since time immemorial, with what in another of his poems Wilfred
Owen called ‘the eternal reciprocity of tears’. I heartily recommend it to all
readers of 14 and well beyond, and I wish it every possible success.
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