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Small-town debut is a revelation
Sunday, February 15, 2009 Reviewed by Val Nolan
John the Revelator

By Peter Murphy

Faber & Faber, €14

Observant, insecure and especially obsessed with worms, maggots and the like, he is the classic outsider adolescent. The only child of the chain-smoking, Bible-misquoting Lily Devine, he grows up on the outskirts of a small Co Wexford village with only Harper’s Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts as a friend.

All this changes with the arrival, fully realised, of Jamey Corboy, the engine of the novel’s misadventures and a kind of Rimbaud to John’s Verlaine. Charismatic and conniving, yet with a streak of vulnerability, Jamey is one of the great creations of recent Irish fiction.

More than the comedy Joycean that his wiry glasses, thin nose and sheafs of stories might suggest, John’s new ally keeps one ear to the underground and one to the hum of life itself.

A posturing teen as pretentious as he is portentous, Jamey’s overconfidence mires John in a world of crombie coats and petty criminals until the pair have every county-town crook and parochial mind set square against them, a brilliantly rendered supporting cast of three-dimensional characters, each deconstructing one village idiot cliché or another.

In terms of depth and menace, however, none can match the Pat McCabe-esque, passive-aggressive horror-show that is Mrs Nagle, who comes to oversee the Devine household as Lily’s health deteriorates.

A ‘‘mannish woman with a loud hee-haw of a voice’’, the grotesque Mrs Nagle comes straight from the pages of Jamey’s brutally honest small-town fictions. But the boy’s yarns, and the secrets they may or may not hold, are merely one trick in Murphy’s toolbox.

The author weaves letters, newspaper reports and his characters’ own imaginings into the fabric of the narrative, blurring the distinction between fact and fantasy in the process. As Jamey says: ‘‘People don’t care if a story is real or not, all that matters is if they believe it.”

While the narrator’s relationship with his dying mother is genuinely moving, John the Revelator is also frequently hilarious, its humour coloured with ‘‘a bad feeling, squalid and muggy’’, as when John and Jamey fight a fast-moving cripple offended by their indifference to the national anthem.

Elsewhere, the writing betrays a ghoulishness on par with Mike McCormack’s early stories, or nods towards fellow Wexford man John Banville’s more baroque excursions into the decrepit - Birchwood, for example, or Mefisto - though the resulting novel is something new entirely.

Murphy’s light touch lends contemporary Ireland a surprising sense of timelessness, allowing past pieties to be fondly (and sometimes viciously) needled. Asylum seekers and African shops compete for space with pub snugs and evening masses; an unexpected sexual encounter is watched over by a plastic Jesus whose ‘‘palms were turned upward in what was probably intended as a gesture of compassion, but in the context looked as though he was saying what can you do?”.

Skilfully plotted with seldom a wasted character or opportunity, nothing irrelevant exists in Murphy’s lean prose, from Gunter, the village thug who ‘‘moved like a man who’d spent time inventing a whole new type of walking’’ to the loose English teacher Miss Ross, of a piece with the rumour mill of any boy’s secondary school.

Exuding the sense of mischief and excitement absent from many more literary novels, Murphy’s disturbing narrative feels honest, an enviable mixture of technical skill and imaginative fancy. Sad and funny, creepy, weird and sarcastic in equal measure, John the Revelator is a blistering coming-of-age tale filled with ribald broadsides against the hysterical contradictions of life in everyday Ireland, a changing nation that hasn’t really changed at all. It deserves to be read and reread.

Val Nolan teaches contemporary literature at NUI Galway, and is the recipient of this year’s Oliver St John Gogarty scholarship

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