Declan Kiberd on his star pupil Joseph O’Connor: laureate of a lost generation

It was said that in the Dublin of the 1980s, there were at least a thousand garage bands rehearsing for greatness. That may even have been true. There is always some sort of cultural revival, whenever a talented and well-trained generation cannot find jobs commensurate with their talents. In the 1890s, revival issued in Gaelic League activism, the writing of poetry and the founding of literary theatres. In the 1980s, it gave rise to a new sort of Irish novel, cutting-edge plays and all kinds of music. Joe was in the vanguard of all of these.

I remember his arrival as a student of English at UCD. In his very first term, he wrote what was the most brilliant essay on Shakespeare that I was ever to receive from a tutee. Then he disappeared from the tutorial for weeks on end. I pined for him and so, I suspect, did my more dutiful students – for he had a way of making gentle, interesting interventions, which opened constantly new lines of enquiry. And he wasn’t afraid to make comparisons between Shakespeare and Bob Marley.

Eventually, a piece of foolscap was pushed under my door with a bleak, apologetic message, in beautiful Bic-biro handwriting. “Dear Doctor Kiberd– I am sorry to have missed five successive classes. The reasons were both compelling and indescribable – Yours sincerely, Joe O’Connor”. The full-scale spelling of “doctor” and the quasi-bravado of “five successive classes” made me wonder whether he was taking the piss – but there was some element of cryptic candour in the three-line message on an otherwise blank page which made me believe it all. Now, all these years later, it seems that Joe too was in some kind of garage band.

He has always loved plots which are driven by musical numbers or ballad forms –Star of the Sea being the brilliant Exhibit A. When I read it, it seemed to me to be right up there with the great Middlemarch of George Eliot – until the author pulled a postmodern trick at the very end. Once again, Joe had caught me in a no-man’s-land between a heartfelt tale and a jocular stunt. It was only some years after I had compared his book to the Victorian masterpiece that he broke it to me that the author of Star of the Sea had not yet read Middlemarch.

Despite his derelictions in the line of musical duty, Joe is better-read than most professors – which is just as well now that he is a professor himself. He must be the world expert on the way in which many of the oldest jokes are sourced in old songs and ballads. I once told him the joke (found in a book by Angela Carter) about a chap who tried to marry the girl next door, but his father said “no you can’t, ’cos she might be your sister”. The chap meets a woman from another town but runs into the same interdiction. Then he brings home a woman from another country, at which the father begins his usual speech, much more red-faced, saying “God, lad, I did get around”, only for the mother to look up from her knitting and say “son: marry anyone you want – he’s not your father”. Joe sent me a detailed email listing two West Indian ballads and an American Appalachian ballad which told the identical story in tripartite structure. Somehow, it made up for the missing essay and lost tutorials.

He has returned in this latest novel to that lost world of the 1980s – whose laureate he surely became even before the decade had ended. I have often thought that his generation faced austerity and recession with an astonishing range of cultural resources – not only song but storytelling and many forms of art. Yet many of the student-graduates of the period were badly hurt by the downturn – it was commonplace to be asked to write a reference for a person with a brilliant degree in literature or history to work as a part-time packer in a local supermarket. Some of the hurt was papered over by a dignified sense of the comic. Joe once wrote a beautiful essay in a newspaper about his graduation day, telling how students were given their parchments in cluster-groups, before descending from the dais and being instructed by a begowned administrator to “move on”. “And we did move on,” he laconically added, as the memorialist of the first Ryanair generation of commuting exiles.

A later generation, emerging into the affluence and opening vistas of the 1990s, found it difficult to understand the mingled hurt and hilarity of their predecessors, most of whom (like Joe) not only survived but did many great things – but some of them (including very gifted people) never really got the chance to take off. There is a secret world of male and female hurt which Joe understands and articulates better than most – and it reminds us not only of the need to laugh adversity off but also of the fact that every joke is an epitaph on an emotion.

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Next: On Monday, we publish Making a ‘Singable Song’: The Fiction of Joseph O’Connor, by UCD lecturer PJ Mathews .

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