ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Writers from Ireland — the republic and the north — are among those being featured in this year’s all digital Melbourne Writers Festival.  I have already read and reviewed Anne Enright’s Actress, and listened to her session yesterday; and I enjoyed listening to Jan Carson talking about her book The Fire Starters, and have the book on my TBR. I bought Caoilinn Hughes’ The Wild Laughter because the blurb sounded interesting:

An exhilarating, anarchic look at contemporary Ireland, from one of the country’s most exciting new voices.

It’s 2008, and the Celtic Tiger has left devastation in its wake. Brothers Hart and Cormac Black are waking up to a very different Ireland – one that widens the chasm between them and brings their beloved father to his knees. Facing a devastating choice that risks their livelihood, if not their lives, their biggest danger comes when there is nothing to lose.

A sharp snapshot of a family and a nation suddenly unmoored, this epic-in-miniature explores cowardice and sacrifice, faith rewarded and abandoned, the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we resist. Hilarious, poignant and utterly fresh, The Wild Laughter cements Caoilinn Hughes’s position as one of Ireland’s most audacious, nuanced and insightful young writers.

It certainly is anarchic.  The humour is very dark, and there’s a great deal of crude language among colloquial dialogue and expressions that will be unfamiliar to many outside Ireland.

Skip this section if you just want to know what I thought of the story.  Come back to it if you’re going to read it yourself.

The text is peppered with Irish:

‘Would you try and talk some sense into him, Cormac?’ He might listen to you, with the education.  I’m no use to him.  An ignorant skivvy poltergeist.’

‘Mam,’ Cormac said, shocked.

She inhaled and shifted her gaze to me.  We had the same deep-green eyes, though Nóra wore them like wreaths.  ‘And would you ever close the doors after you.  Keep the winter from following me around, le do thoil.’

Le do thoil means  please  unless a woman like Nóra says it.  Leh-tho-hell, she says.  With your hell. What would she have me do with my hell.  With my hell what?’ (p.38)

I don’t have any experience with Irish.  I like to think that I’m pretty good at negotiating other languages: I have fluency in two, French and Indonesian, and tourist capability in three more (Italian, Spanish and Russian), and learning these languages has enhanced my ability to work things out from context.  And when I’m stumped, I know my way around Google Translate for any language that uses a Roman script. I used that for ‘Sin é an scéal’ plonked on the end of a paragraph on p.86.  It means ‘That is the story’ which makes perfect sense in context, but all the same I could not guess what it meant.  Maybe that’s a common expression in Irish storytelling.  I rather like it, but Google doesn’t have voice output for Irish so I don’t know how to pronounce it.

Then there are allusions to local knowledge:

The lottery tickets won her ten quid and a jealous little sip of air from the man behind the counter, who registered that this woman was spending her winnings in the newsagents and not taking it to Lidl to make it stretch in the way if should rightly be stretched, in light of the economic conditions. (p.87)

I laughed at myself when Google told me that Lidl is a chain of supermarkets and not a town as I had thought it was. No wonder I couldn’t make sense of it.

In French, I’ve been learning about Verlan, a variation of what we call Pig-Latin. Pig-Latin is a language game, but Verlan is spoken by the urban young in Paris with the intention of excluding those not in the know (and they change words if their meaning becomes known).  I am wondering if some expressions incomprehensible despite my best efforts are an Irish version of the same phenomenon, or maybe just slang.

I’m not a nationalist but I think it’s important for writers writing in English to use their own version of it, as we do in Australia, as Kiwis and Indians and Canadians do. It’s part of who we are, and we lose something if our literature uses some kind of vanilla English. But for an international audience, a publisher can’t assume that others will know or understand or want to learn a distinctive version of English, especially if it’s sprinkled with an extra local language as well.  There are some Maori authors doing this.  Good for them, they have the luxury of having only one Indigenous language to worry about, and there is a strong movement to spread its use into the mainstream.  But I’m never going to learn Maori just so that I can understand an occasional novel, so it’s helpful for international readers if there’s a glossary for anything that can’t be worked out from context. Because at the end of the day, (figuratively and literally, because I’m mostly reading in bed) I do not want to read with Google by my side.

The point is that I had to work at reading this book even though I’m not obsessive about knowing what every word or expression means.  For me, if I’m going to have to struggle with it, a book has to be worth it.  It doesn’t have to be Ulysses, and I don’t even have to like it, but it has to have something significant to say.  Though the critics are full of praise for The Wild Laughter, I’m not entirely convinced.  FWIW I think Steve Amsterdam’s The Easy Way Out canvasses the issue of euthanasia with more finesse.

Anyway…

The story traces Manus Black’s journey towards a painful death from cancer.  It’s melancholy reading, especially if you have recently experienced or are facing the loss of a beloved parent.

Like many in Ireland, Manus is a victim of the Celtic Property Bubble, lured by bad advice into catastrophic debt in an effort to escape the poverty that had dogged him all his life.  He has two sons, locked into decades of resentment and conflict, exacerbated by the mother’s overt preference for Cormac and the father’s for Hart.  When Manus asks them to assist him with voluntary euthanasia, the stage is set for a betrayal of Biblical proportions.

The narration is from Hart’s first person perspective.  He is the one who is hard done by: Cormac the flashy entrepreneur has left home and despite Ireland’s ruined economy has made a successful transition to another dodgy business, leaving Hart behind literally and figuratively to live a life of drudgery on the farm.  Cormac isn’t as clever as Hart, and he’s not as good looking, but Dolly, a cynical young woman with her eye on the main chance strings them both along until it suits her to choose. And her choice is no surprise.

The flaw in this novel is the characterisation. There is a suggestion of suppressed violence in Hart’s persona which erupts in an episode of frustration towards the end of the book, but overall, good and evil, weak and strong are too neatly packaged.  These characters make it feel like a weak YA novel, not paying the reader respect for having an understanding of human complexity.  There’s nothing complex about these characters: we don’t know why Nórah is horrible, she just is.  We don’t know why Cormac bullies Hart, he just does.  There’s nothing to explain why after a lifetime of being bullied Hart is so hopelessly naïve, thinking that the Black brothers would put differences aside.  Manus is hopelessly naïve too.  Why does he not foresee (or care about) the legal consequences of what his sons are about to do, and that Cormac and his mother cannot be trusted to share the responsibility for it?  We don’t know, he just doesn’t.  This rudimentary characterisation means that Cormac and his heartless mother are too predictable: anyone can see the betrayal that is coming.  Their perfidy made me think of Cain and Abel, and another innocent who was betrayed: Billy Budd, Sailor. (A priest’s confession, detailing a shocking act of violence against his twin brother, rams home the analogy.)

What is beautifully conveyed is Hart’s love for his father.  A last getaway to the beach ends disastrously because the family are in more close proximity than they are at the farm.  Sliding down the marram grass with a leaden Atlantic Ocean before him, Hart’s tears fall.  Who’d tell me what I needed to hear tomorrow? Who’d keep an eye on me, or spare me a thought?‘ (p.89)  All of us who have lost a loved parent can relate to this…

The title refers to the only thing left to them, with the family and country in decline:

What we could not be without is laughter – the thing austerity couldn’t touch. O-ho, the wild laughter!

Black humour indeed.

Theresa Smith reviewed this novel too.  You can also read the Kirkus Review and this one at The Guardian. 

Author: Caoillinn Hughes
Title: The Wild Laughter
Cover image: Clare Melinsky
Publisher: One World, 2020
ISBN: 9781786077813, pbk., 198 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books