Oh , Ireland
Johnson, Lucy
Oh, Ireland The Red and the Green, by Iris Murdoch. The Viking Press. 311 pp. $5. The Emperor of Ige-Cream, by Brian Moore. The Viking Press. 250 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson Oh,...
...Iris Murdoch tells of the week before the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 through concepts, and she creates some entertaining figures to embody them...
...She was a slut, not exactly a woman, but a kind of degraded boy...
...an enemy, a victim, a quarry...
...And no one cares or even sees...
...There was some coldness, some shivering, shrewd thinness in Christopher . . . which clung to her as to a source of warmth and life...
...Instead of pigeon-holing, just read it for delight and rediscovery and a bit of revelation...
...She is the spirit of Ireland, and her principal slaves are two of her brothers-in-law and two of her nephews...
...Events seem to wander on aimlessly, as undirected as Gavin's life, with the war mumbling away in the distance like a thunderstorm on the other side of a mountain...
...The coming-of-age novel is the great literary cliche of the last fifty years and I hate to call The Emperor of Ice-Cream one of the long line...
...Iris Murdoch is so clever at presenting in a phrase or a paragraph or a longer passage the attitude of mind which sums up a character that the reader is willing to be tolerant of her creaky and often quite arbitrary wrenching around of the plot and the narrative line...
...Brian Moore has written a lovely novel...
...And since he is seventeen, there are a girl and other girls, drinking, friends, and parties, which sometimes push aside, sometimes contribute to his adolescent despair...
...In The Red and the Green, a flirtatious, castrating mother Ireland robs her symbolic sons and lovers of their manhood as she urges them on to heroic death...
...Suddenly she calls out "Freeze," and everybody is caught in one of those wild Murdochian set pieces that combine the ridiculous and the pathetic in a hilariously telling tableau...
...His father thinks Franco a saint who should be canonized and looks forward to the quick defeat of England by Hitler...
...In the end the idea of the novel—the idea of taking some heatedly complicated relationships and a useless and bloody bit of heroism and seeing it all in quotation marks, at a distance—is better than the novel itself...
...Because "she respects no one, she does not see where another person begins," they are fit for nothing but to die—yet "1916 was wonderful," although it was hard to see what good it did, and "they were inconceivably brave men...
...It explodes in the final fifty pages of the book in a sustained description of totally senseless destruction and violence as war comes to Belfast and Gavin faces himself...
...The Red and the Green is High Camp, a witty, sophisticated spoof of the mythic qualities of Ireland's history...
...He wondered why all men were not in love with her, and soon began to suspect that they were...
...But "Yeats was wrong in '16 . . . Ireland free was Ireland dead...
...Each turns to her in a moment of despair, and she fails each one in a climax of bedroom farce...
...And his cousin, Pat, the Irish Volunteer, the romantic fascist, "demanded violence...
...Barney, whom she had wooed away from the Church and then left to fend for himself, "found this absolutely pure-hearted wickedness quite irresistible...
...But there has been a tension which Brian Moore tightens every now and then...
...Andrew, a young British officer suddenly aware of his emptiness, goes to her "simply in order to have some action, something, to fill up the void...
...The question emerges from both novels: has the idea of a free Ireland shackled her people hopelessly...
...We are told more than we need to know about many things, probably for amusement's sake alone...
...Air Raid Precautions), which was, in those phony war days in Belfast, the home of failures and drifters—old men, drunks, housewives at loose ends with their husbands away in the army...
...Brian Moore, in what might be an ironic epilogue to Miss Murdoch's narrative, tells of the months of the phony war period of World War II in Belfast in terms of people, and particularly through the maturing effects of events on one seventeen-year-old boy...
...Middle class morality hangs over everything like smog...
...Flunking out of school, Gavin joins the A.R.P...
...The terrible beauty was born aborted...
...And now and then the suspicion crosses the mind that perhaps the novel is an elaborate illustrative exercise in existential philosophy...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson Oh, Ireland, what sins have you committed in the name of freedom...
...Choosing the moment when, after centuries of fighting for freedom, liberty was just around the corner, Miss Murdoch takes a group of intricately related Anglo-Irish and starts them juggling among themselves such concepts as Honor, Love, Loyalty, Bravery...
...People only nag at him to be a good boy and study for his exams...
...Taking the British shilling and wearing the hated uniform, he settles in to learn first-aid and stretcher-bearing under a bully and to wait in boredom with odd companions for the air raid they expect will never come...
...In The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Ireland is a sanctimonious nagger with lace-curtains in her narrow windows...
...Gavin, struggling against family and social pressures to conform, is threatened with failure, wavers between thinking himself unhealthily frustrated and completely degenerate, finds himself purposeless and, embarrassingly, spineless, and comforts himself with modern poets— Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Wallace Stevens, and Yeats...
...Millie, Lady Kinnard of Rathblane, is widowed, childless, and utterly fascinating to men of all ages and styles...
...More than twenty years later, in Brian Moore's novel, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, poor Gavin Burke, touching and funny, lives in an Ireland homesick for the romance, excitement, violence, and purpose of 1916...
Vol. 30 • April 1966 • No. 4
