IRISH LANGUAGE:AN CLÉIREACH WAS the winner of a €10,000 Oireachtas na Gaeilge prize for a novel in Irish commemorating the 400th anniversary of the foundation in 1607 of St Anthony's College, Louvain by the Irish Franciscans.
Successful precedents for a historical novel in Irish include, in particular, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc's 1962 novel, L'Attaque, which is driven by urgent moral purpose and based on events during Humbert's invasion of Connacht in 1798. Ominously for the present work, Ó Tuairisc followed this with a novel tailored to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising: the result, Dé Luain, was far less artistically successful than L'Attaque.
An Cléireach is really a series of vignettes, with numerous sub- stories and a heavy emphasis on background and colour. The individual characters are lightly sketched, resembling the personae of a traditional tale; alternatively the novel could be read as postmodernist pastiche of 17th-century prose accounts in Irish of wars and wandering earls. The result is a somewhat one-dimensional portrayal of the novel's actors rather than the psychological depth synonymous with fully achieved fiction.
The action opens in the spring of 1650. The central character is a disaffected clerk soldiering under a colonel of the Connacht O'Flahertys as part of the Catholic Confederation army. His job allows him access to the leadership of the Gaelic military forces and the novel has at its core the priority given to native culture and poetry by that elite.
Cultural concern rather than military action is what engages the novel: as the army retreats westwards so does the concomitant civilisation and literature. "Táir ag marcaíocht leis an máistir ceathrún sa mbagáiste inniu . . . chun aire níos fearr a thabhairt dho do chuid leabhar" ("You are riding today with the quartermaster . . . the better to protect your books") says a fellow-soldier to the clerk, and this faith in art and literature as overarching values is legitimated throughout the book.
A higher linguistic register distinguishes the dialogue of the elite from that of the novel's commoners, but it is the demotic spoken Irish of the latter class that represents the future.
In our own time the rich oral culture that characterised the Gaeltacht world is threatened with annihilation, just as the aristocratic culture of Gaelic Ireland disappeared in the 17th century, and if An Cléireach has a contemporary relevance it lies in its projection backwards of issues of cultural survival and value, which are of crucial significance as the seemingly unstoppable forces of anglicisation sweep away what remains of cultural difference.
This then is a novel in search of a plot, a story that attempts to attain a significance that eludes it. That said, the context is convincingly drawn and researched, even if the fictional possibilities inherent in the fractious rivalries that divided the confederate army by region, background and language remain under-explored. Verbal forms characteristic of 17th-century Irish are sporadically employed, but the mixture of these and the current Irish in which the book is written has a jarring effect, not least when mixed with more recent neologisms such as "ceann maith" ("a good one").
However, these reservations apart, it is important to say that the author's use of language is generally assured and capable, not least his confident use of dialogue and repartee.
Much of the best recent Gaelic fiction has been written in Scottish Gaelic and a novel published last year by Aonghas Pádraig Caimbeul, An Taigh-Samhraidh, achieves particular artistic force in an engagement with threatening issues of cultural destruction, doing so through a strong plotline and characterisation, features disappointingly deficient in the work under review.
Proinsias Ó Drisceoil is the author of Seán Ó Dálaigh: Éigse agus Iomarbhá, published by Cork University Press last year
An Cléireach, By Darach Ó Scolaí, Leabhar Breac, 226pp. €19.50