"He dressed quickly and went outside to catch the sun rising out of the sea, the ball of red fire reaching across the surface of the still ocean, spreading crimson, scarlet, vermillion, stirring the birds on the rocky cliffs feathered monks in their cathedral choir. He sketched, in pencil pagans at matins heralding the christ sun."
One of the two major characters at the center of this ambitious novel is a painter named Lloyd. Part of what makes the novel so ambitious is that it not only tells an eclectic story, but the structural components used to tell it are equally eclectic. The passage quoted above presents one example of the idiosyncratic methodology behind its use of language. Also worth noting is that language itself is very central to the storyline. Lloyd is an English painter who has to the small remote Irish island on which the story is set because he fancies himself as an artist in the mold of Paul Gauguin: a sophisticate dedicated to using his talents to portray the natural beauty of the savages. Since this story takes place in 1979 during one of the heights of the outbreaks of violence associated with “the Troubles” between the Irish and the British, this perspective is both aesthetically romanticized and politically colonialized. In this particular moment, Lloyd can bask in the aestheticism of his outsider presence on the island, but the arrival of French linguists to come to the island to study a language left to die by British invaders inevitably forces him to confront the politics of his romantic idealism.
"It is difficult to be certain when the Irish language first arrived in Ireland, but the oldest physical remains date back to monuments from the 5th and 6th centuries known as Ogham stones, boulders marked with lines and notches representing the Latin alphabet. Most of these stones carry inscriptions of people’s names and scholastic writings, and it is believed that the language remained mainly unchanged until the Viking invasion of Ireland between 900 and 1200. The language survived that conquest, but adapted and acclimatized, as language does, by absorbing Norse words."
The French linguist has come to the Irish island to conduct research into how languages go extinct. His findings and analysis are in the form of a handwritten rough draft. This passage is taken from that writing and presents another example of the eclecticism of the style in which the novel is written. The text throughout has been stripped of all but the most necessary punctuation makes that serves to avoid complete confusion: things like commas and periods. While the example above is a more explicit example of the experimental nature of the composition of the narrative, this except Masson’s handwritten study is actually another. There is nothing that sets the extended excerpt from Masson’s study apart from any other sections of the novel to indicate its position as the specific thoughts of a character rather than as a description narrative by the author. The only way this determination can be made is with the short introductory paragraph which is the narrative voice of the author describing Masson looking at his handwriting before resuming the process of writing. The link between the more experimental qualities of the composition of the novel and Masson’s observations about how the Irish language developed and evolved as a result of influences by foreign cultures only becomes clear as a result of reading the narrative and witnessing this process being replicated on a considerably smaller scale in the way language is used within the text.
"Alexander Gore is a full-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment standing outside his barracks on Belfast’s Malone Road just after eleven on Wednesday morning, June 6th. He is twenty-three years of age, Protestant and has been married for four months. His nineteen-year-old wife is pregnant with their first child.
A truck drives down the Malone Road towards the barracks. Two IRA men in the truck open fire and kill Alexander Gore."
While the center of the conflict in the narrative itself is that which erupts between the English painter and the French linguist, it all takes place against the historical backdrop of the eruption of hostilities between the opposing sides in the ongoing conflict metonymically known as “the Troubles.” The mid-to-late 1970s was one of the deadliest periods in this ongoing civil war. The novel is set in the year notorious for becoming the moment that violence actually reached all the way inside the British Royal Family when an IRA bomb explosion killed Lord Mountbatten, cousin to the Queen. Two years later, Bobby Sands would be his legendary 66-day hunger strike which would only come to an end as the result of the inevitable tragic consequences of going that long without food. The remoteness of the island setting makes it virtually immune to the violence of the civil war, but its presence is inescapable no matter where one called home in Ireland at this time. The emotionally dry reportage style of presenting the acts of violence which do occur elsewhere—such as the horrific end for Alexander Gore—is an essential quality of its intrusion into the story. By this point in the long-running hostilities, the violence itself has not reached a state producing emotional immunity, but like mass shootings in American schools, the very predictability of the violence had drained the events of a certain amount of their previous power to shock. It had simply become something bad that everybody knew was eventually going to happen to somebody somewhere.
