The Rising and the falling

FICTION: CARLO GÉBLERreviews After the LockoutBy Darran McCann Fourth Estate, 241pp. £12.99

THE SCENE IS IRELAND, late 1917, and the survivors of the Easter Rising are home from jail. One is Victor Lennon, former tram driver blooded in the Dublin lockout, Citizen’s Army volunteer, GPO survivor, Marxist ideologue and son of a wealthy farmer. It’s November, and Victor believes that Lenin’s recent triumph in Russia is but the first of many victories for the proletariat.

Most of Victor’s 1916 comrades, of course, are appalled by Russian developments: they believe Bolshevism is atheistical. But Victor isn’t bothered by their scruples: even when Michael Collins tries to put him right he won’t yield. Victor wears a carapace of certainty that no one can pierce, not yet anyway.

And then he’s summoned home, to the Armagh village of Madden, where he collides with his kith and kin. These include his father, the village’s poitín distiller, Pius; his old school friend Charlie Quinn, now an embittered one-legged ex-Tommy; his childhood sweetheart, Maggie Cavanagh, now the national school teacher; the prostitute and village bohemian, Ida Harte; the local curate and IRB OC, Tim Daly; and, most importantly, the parish priest and Victor’s nemesis, Fr Stanislaus Benedict.

These characters (along with the many others I haven't mentioned: for a short novel After the Lockouthas a cast list of Balzacian proportions) don't see the future like Victor for the simple reason (as it took the Soviets 70 years to discover) that their emotions, desires, wants, idiosyncrasies and histories eventually put them beyond the reach of the Marxist proposition that the only solution to inequality is the recalibration of economic practice.

So what Victor discovers during the beautifully sequenced but compressed narrative, set during the winter of 1917 and the spring of 1918 and focusing on his attempt to make Madden a soviet, is that people reserve the right to go their own way and that quite often – actually, more often that not – the way they will go is the wrong way, whatever the prophet, here Victor, counsels.

The novel ends with Victor defeated both politically and emotionally, despite his rhetorical talents and his amorous dexterity. It’s a pretty calamitous conclusion for a character who, at the start, had so much going for him and looked so likely to succeed. However, because this is not a black or white story but one full of light as well as shade, Victor does have one reason for optimism at the end: when he flees Madden, it’s the promiscuous Ida Harte who seemingly spirits him away. If anyone can save him from calamity, it’s her.

Like any novel (first or otherwise, and this is Darran McCann's first), After the Lockoutisn't perfect. The author's handling of the contextual and historical exposition – and as this is a story set during a particularly complex period in our history there's a mass of expositional information – isn't, for me, sufficiently deft.

Nor was I persuaded by Maggie’s surrender of herself to Victor: it’s not that a woman of that time and class wouldn’t, but if she’s going to do something so against the grain she needs more reasons than Maggie has here. Finally, some of the dialogue seems more now than then.

Against these small infelicities, however, one must set the care with which the narrative is constructed (the story, split between several voices who narrate in different tenses, is really well told) and the specificity of the characters (all, with the possible exception of Maggie, are credible, believable and interesting). In addition the writing (bar the pesky odd anachronism) is vivid and crisp and assured.

It is also a relief to swim in a historical period almost never exploited in Irish fiction, that period at the end of the first World War before the Troubles started.

Finally, it is always salutary to be reminded, as one is by After the Lockout,that the Catholic Church has always, whatever its protestations to the contrary, put its interests above the interests of the Irish people. So, though this is a historical novel, it has something very important to say to us (and something that is worth hearing), in the present, about an institution, the church, that, despite certain recent problems, still has power.

And that's probably the most important virtue of After the Lockout: it has an enemy in its sights and it goes for that enemy, though without becoming shrill or impugning the humanity of the clerical characters. Not enough first books have attitude, but this one definitely does, and that's rather wonderful.

Carlo Gébler teaches at Queen’s University Belfast and is writer in residence at HMP Maghaberry. Lagan Press will shortly publish his memoir