K.D. Absolutely's Reviews > At Swim, Two Boys

If Russia has Leo Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, Ireland has Jamie O’Neill and At Swim, Two Boys. The milieu of Anna was Russia few decades before the Russian Revolution in 1917 that abolished the Tsarist autocracy and installed Soviet Union. O’Neill’s milieu was that of Ireland during the 1916 Easter Rising whose aim was to end the British rule and establish the Irish Republic.

The comparison does not end there. If Tolstoy has Anna and Levin as characters to illustrate or witness the transformation of Russian from that of traditional Asian to modern Western, O’Neill has two or three gay men, lovers Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle and the Oscar Wilde clone, Anthony MacMurrough to depict how political turmoil can seep through the lives of Irish people regardless of their sexuality. The way O’Neill used gay men to drive home this point is something that I thought to be truly commendable. Only gifted writers would think of taking this risk. I’ve read a number of good novels (Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, etc) with homosexuality as its main motif but most of them play on the emotional aspect of being gay as if being a homosexual is something that is an aberration that needs to be examined or gawked at so it must be highlighted to delight or catch the interest of the readers.

O’Neill’s portrayal of the lives of the three gay men was honest and not pretentious. The characters were open but were not attention-getter. There was no big fuss about their sexuality as if being gay was widely accepted in Ireland (predominantly a Roman Catholic country) during that time 1916-1917. Not sure what O’Neill’s intent was but the way homosexuality was depicted here was like how Gertrude Stein did it in The Autobiography of Alice Toklas where hers and Toklas’s homosexual love was just like a heterosexual one. When in fact it should have been an issue since homosexuality during those times was not yet as open as it is now. Example of this treatment was the subtle depiction Evelyn Waugh did in his opus Brideshead Revisited or Christopher Isherwood in his seminal work Goodbye to Berlin. You know that there are same-sex lovers in the story but you have to read between the lines and pay close attention to the narration to be able to detect it.

At Swim, Two Boys (2001) is about two 16-y/o Irish boys who love each other and they make a pact to swim across a sea from a nudist beach to a distant island that they want to claim for themselves as proof of their love for each other. Although it sounds cheesy, the morning they swim to the island is what they call the 1916 Easter Rising when a group of Irish soldiers raise arms against the British government to demand for their nation’s independence. The young lovers, Jim and Doyler, are sons of old-time friends who together had fought in WWI. Now, their sons are supposed to be men who will soon be fighting for their countries as well.

The writing is typical of Irish novels. It reminded me of my two attempts to read my waterloo book Ulysses by James Joyce – a book that I twice tried to read only to put it back to my tbr pile. I just could not understand what it was trying to tell me. However, it was good that I have a friend here in GR who said that I just have to go with the flow and let the message come to me naturally. I did and it worked. It was like magic. There were many spoken Irish and Latin terms phrases and I just ignored them. Not sure if how much of the book I missed in doing that but I thought I got the gist of what the book was.

Overall, not an easy read but a worthwhile one. I learned so much about Ireland during that time and this book reminded me of my favorite Irish works like those of Joyce James in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Kellman’s Kieron Smith, boy, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (oh, I have to read his ’Tis and Teacher Man someday soon!) and even the 2000 movie Billy Elliot. Ah, of course, Oscar Wilde was very much alive in the character of the third gay in the story McEmm who was the most interesting character in terms of being in the gray area: he was neither good nor bad. There are other minor gay characters like Dick and Scroties whose names remind me of the male genital parts and make their characters oh soo gay.

Good job for O’Neill in his successful effort to put male homosexuality in its right perspective: it is neither to be flaunted nor hidden. It is what it is: nothing different from a man-woman heterosexual love.