'An Evening of Long Goodbyes': This Man Is an Island
By Stephen Amidon
September 5, 2004
AN EVENING OF LONG GOODBYES By Paul Murray. 424 pp. Random House. $24.95.
The economic boom that has transformed the long-stagnant Irish economy into one of the world's most productive is not without its detractors. The Celtic Tiger (as this upswing is grandiosely known) might be good news for tech entrepreneurs and real estate brokers, but the prospect of lattes by the Liffey and cellphone towers on Ben Bulben is driving many traditional Irishmen to distraction.
Charles Hythloday, the bibulous, buttonholing narrator of Paul Murray's first novel, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes," is just such a malcontent. Marooned in Amaurot, his family's seaside manor outside of Dublin, this 24-year-old gentleman of leisure casts a cold eye on the encroaching modern world. For Charles, even the briefest sortie into the "encircling suburbs" can prove a descent into hell. "The shopping center frightened me, the alien, prefabricated meanness of it: the cut-rate hair salon, the boutiques of bleak pastel frocks, the newsagent's whose staff were in a state of perpetual regression." Far better to stay at home, draining his recently deceased father's wine collection, feeding his pet peacocks and doting on his beloved sister, Bel, a would-be actress with a turbulent emotional history. He sees himself as living by the Renaissance code of sprezzatura, which dictates that every action (or, in Charles's case, inaction) must be carried out with effortless grace. Attention should be paid to beauty rather than results. "Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully."
It is, of course, an idyll doomed to failure. If there is anything the modern world disdains more than grace, it is a lack of results. Charles's nemeses are legion, and they all seem intent on driving him from Amaurot. First and foremost is Frank, the loutish "architectural salvage" specialist currently wooing Bel. There are also the Bosnian refugees squatting in the Folly, an extravagant but useless edifice that Charles is having built on the estate's grounds, as well as Charles's alcoholic mother, who returns unexpectedly from the upscale institution where she has been drying out. Rounding off this roster of tormentors is Harry, the social realist playwright who wants Bel to star in his latest work, "Ramp," a sublimely po-faced drama about the disabled.
These early scenes, in which Charles tries in vain to protect the sanctity of his ancestral home, are the novel's best. As long as he stays at Amaurot, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" succeeds as a spirited howl against so-called progress. Once Murray casts his hero out into the world, however, the narrator begins to lose his voice. Charles's long, improbable residency with Frank in a Dublin slum lacks the sparkle of the Amaurot sequences, as does his servitude in a "bread factory" in the Cherry Orchard industrial park. (Murray has a rookie's weakness for literary allusion -- the telephone company that threatens to buy out Amaurot from the dithering, Hamlet-esque Charles and his Ophelia-like sister is named Telsinor). Since there is no doubt that Charles's foray into modern Ireland will turn out to be a disaster, his encounters with Dublin's drug lords and yuppie go-getters soon feel redundant. Murray also tends to rely on crude, knockabout humor to move his narrative along. The result is a novel whose 400-plus pages begin to weigh on the reader not long after the midpoint. Only when Charles straggles home, considerably worse for wear, does the author regain his deft touch.
If plotting is a difficulty for Murray, prose style most certainly is not. He writes with the cunning and confidence of a seasoned pro. Memorable images are frequently conjured, such as when Charles's father, a famous inventor of cosmetics, tries to mask the ravages of his fatal illness with his art: "And so the makeup was caked on with trembling fingers, layer upon layer; he lay in the half darkness like a sad, syphilitic Pierrot, his gaunt cheeks stained concavely with rouge." Charles's lacerating, hilarious voice proves as effective a weapon against creeping globalism as any smoke bomb or human blockade. The arriviste house hunters who are snatching up
the land around Amaurot are dismissed as "new people: pale and crepuscular from days and nights holed up in their towers of cuboid offices, crawling down the narrow, winding roads in BMW's or hulking Jeeps, scouting for property like toothless anemic sharks." Charles's caustic snobbery, which Bel calls his "feudal outlook," is oddly endearing, especially when it comes up against characters like Gemma from "Sirius Recruitment, Ireland's leading premium specialist in I.T., multimedia and e-business solutions NOW," whom a penniless, job-seeking Charles unwisely visits in a "slightly foxed" dinner jacket and "gaudy" waistcoat.
While Charles proves an acute commentator on the outside world, he is considerably less reliable about his inner landscape, opening a further comic dimension for the reader to savor. His project to save Amaurot as a haven "unlike the shifting, unstable world outside" is clearly doomed, especially once the chairman of Telsinor announces his plans to transform it into a corporate "Center for the Arts." Charles's relationship with his sister is even more deeply self-deceptive -- though he thinks he is simply protecting her from unsuitable suitors, he is clearly in love with her, an incestuous obsession that took root during their languid, cloistered childhood. The novel achieves an unexpected poignancy as it becomes clear that Charles's paralytic attachment to the past has as much to do with this impossible love for the fragile Bel as it does for ancient Ireland.
The story's key moment comes when its hero, quite literally, goes to the dogs. Before returning home for his final showdown with Amaurot's interlopers, Charles visits a greyhound racetrack in a desperate attempt to raise money. Championing a clapped-out old hound with the unlikely name of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, he manages to come up a winner, even after his dog is savaged by a brute called Celtic Tiger. At this moment of triumph, Charles is visited by the ghost of W. B. Yeats, who compliments him on his sprezzatura, then quotes Oscar Wilde, another Irishman who would have little time for the brave new nation around them: "In a good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat." It is a risky scene, but Murray's gamble pays off, placing his alienated narrator squarely in his nation's best traditions. In a contest between the aristocratic Charles and the egalitarian representatives of new Ireland, I suspect that many readers will be inclined to give Charles their votes.
Stephen Amidon's novels include "The New City" and "Thirst." His new novel, "Human Capital," will be published in October.
No comments:
Post a Comment