The Ireland we know and love
Auberon Waugh
The Gates Jennifer Johnston (Hamish Hamilton £2.00) By great kindness of the publishers, I am allowed to review Miss Johnston's second novel this week, although it does not actually appear until January 18. I must apologise for the mix-up over dates, which often seems to happen at this time of year, but it should give people a chance to order the book in advance.
Like her first novel, The Captain and the Kings, this one deals with the decline and decay of a once-great Irish estate. The Major lives on in the big house, with his memories of the Great War and riding to hounds, drinking himself furtively into oblivion. He is looked after by a scolding housekeeper called Ivy while the garden goes to pieces under the eye of Kelly, a violent drunkard, his feckless slut of a wife and their eight dirty, dishonest children. All the peasants who have not been expropriated at the turn of the century or shot and burned each other to death during the Troubles have emigrated, one by one, to Liverpool or America. Those who survive are either hopelessly old and decrepit or only waiting until they can cheat or steal their passage to England. This is the Ireland we all know and love, its people charmless and poor, without even the cunning to hide their dishonesty. It is the place to which our thoughts wistfully turn whenever English politicians promise yet another economic miracle, with still more prosperity for the British people. Whether it still corresponds to the truth, or whether it is now no more than a literary convention, I for one am in no position to judge. Northern English writers still describe the societies of Stoke-onTrent and Cumberland in the same way but this, alas, we know to be no more than selfindulgent nostalgia. I suspect in fact, that the Kellys would long ago have been employed by Gesselschaft Bundeschtinck at the Donegal Kamembert factory, that the last drunken major who rode to hounds before the Great War has long since died after numerous boring appearances on Telefis Eireann as a Great Irish Character. But I may well be wrong, and it detracts nothing from the atmosphere which Miss Johnston conjures if one chooses to treat it as an historical novel.
To this haven of a settled, decaying social order comes Minnie, sixteen-year-old, wholesome, modern niece of the Major. She is the orphan of a Communist younger brother killed not — thank the Lord — in Spain but in an aeroplane accident with his colleen wife who had never been accepted by the family. Minnie has a slightly irritating habit of conducting an internal dialogue with herself even when she is talking to other people which can be confusing for the reader. She also tends to jump in and out of the first person singular in the narrative, which is often an ominous sign in novels, portending an early nervous breakdown. But she is a likeable, level-headed girl for all that, and one can easily ascribe these minor failings to her extreme youth.
She forms an attachment of sorts to Kevin, oldest of the Kelly boys. Although he is the only lad of her own age around, we see this as quite heroically modern of her as Kevin is not only feckless and dis honest but also clumsy, unattractive and extremely dirty. There is a very good scene when Kevin takes her to the local cinema and they are embarrassed by his younger brother, Cormac, making obscene noises behind them. Miss Gillian Tindall's heroines smugly admit to fancying body odour on their men, but Minnie is less sophisticated than that.
Kevin admits to a "terrible need for money" and Minnie somewhat innocently promises to find £100 to put the kitchen garden on a commercial footing and keep him in Ireland. Fortuitously, some prepos terous Irish-Americans turn up to visit the pile of stones from which their family was evicted by the Major's father, and offer £100 for the gates of the drive. The Major in dignantly refuses the offer — froin the picture on the cover I should say the gates were worth at least £450, but that is not the point — and Minnie arranges to steal them with Kevin. She gets a quick hug and a peck on the cheek from Kevin as her reward before he scarpers with the money, as anybody reading the book could have told her he would.
It would be tempting to talk of Miss Johnston's second novel as showing a dev elopment from her first — certainly, the narrative moves faster — but one might be walking into a trap as there is considerable internal evidence that The Gates was written some time ago. Currency is still undecimalised; $300 is equated with £100; more mysteriously, cigarettes can be bought for a shilling. The only serious weakness in the book concerns the Americans, who are stock comic figures of the 'fifties. Obviously, there are still American tourists in Europe who say to each other,, "Milk doesn't suit my constitution "; "If I I was President of Europe, or whatever, the first thing I'd do would be to pull down all the dirty old buildings and build new ones "; " Aw, honey" — and things like that. There may even be real-life Americans who still bite off the ends of their cigars and spit them, "with unerring aim," into the fireplace.
My criticism of these characters is not on grounds of truth but on grounds of their entertainment value. Again, it can reasonably be argued that there is nothing like a really old joke to set the people who actually read novels laughing — retired people, for the most part, with limited accommodation in their crowded minds for unfamiliar ideas or jokes. It is a sad aspect of the modern novelist's predicament that the best jokes are always in advance of their audience's ability to accept them, and nobody draws attention to novels which are ten years old.
Nevertheless there is too much that is bold and startling in Miss Johnston's perception for her to hope that she will ever capture the Butlin's market, and she ought to have worked a little harder on her Americans. She might reasonably say that it is a grand old literary tradition to portray American tourists as philistine goons, and most of them are, anyway, but even the grandest old traditions require development and innovation if they are to retain vitality. In this sort of field — unlike thriller, or straight romantic fiction, or erotic or even political writing — one can either be a good novelist or a successful novelist but not both, and the sooner Miss Johnston resigns herself to the sad fact that she was born to be a good novelist the sooner she will produce the masterpiece which her talents promise us.
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