IS Crew na Cille, first published in 1949, one of the great books of modern Ireland? Reading and enjoying it again in this new edition convinces me that it is. How did he do it - given the extreme confines of his chosen form?
The book is entirely in dialogue; the voices are those of corpses in a Connemara graveyard; they cannot move - although they "turn" - and know nothing of what is happening in the world above until informed by a new arrival. Maybe the art is in the overcoming.
The main plot is simple enough and based entirely on the character of the chief protagonist, Caitriona Phaidin, a strong, utterly self centred old woman, whose great regret is that it was not she but her younger sister, Neil, who won the prize of their generation in marrying Jeaic na Scoloige.
The book starts with Caitriona Phaidin's inflated social image of herself. This will be stripped away eventually, but without puncturing her indomitable self importance or blunting her bitter and agile tongue. Her fierce pretensions and the poetry of her insults never flag. She is one of our great literary characters, on a par with Queen Medhbh in the precision of her vindictiveness and the scope of her enmity. Those she feels have wronged her are excoriated from the grave. Any corpse who does not serve her purpose is lambasted to hell out of it. Little wonder that the others turn against her, forcing her to ask, much like Leopold Bloom, "Why is everyone in the cemetery against me?"
Marriage, also, forms the basis of the second principal story, the remarriage of the School Mistress to Bileachai the Postman, much to the chagrin of the dead School Master, her former husband. The main characters are well delineated: the blunt unpleasantness of Brian Mor, the lazy scheming of Tomas Taobh Istigh, the thin veneer of the School Master. The description of Caitriona as the martyred blackmailing Irish mother is unsurpassed.
The minor characters are caught in fierce antagonisms with each other which seem to sum up all the petty hopes and frustrations of their small lives in the "ould country". In the graveyard no statement ever goes unchallenged. Nor can we ever be sure what to believe. Most are condemned to repeat for all eternity the minor - or not so minor - crises of their lives: the card game interrupted by the exploding mine, the All Ireland they saw, or failed to see, in 1941. Cre na Cille is full of interrupted stories; many get told, but few are brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
The dialogue, too, is handled with steady skill. A particular turn of phrase or a known preoccupation with a certain subject is the only indication given as to which character is speaking; it is all we need. When, after a long political argument between the corpses, Caitriona Phaidin finally chips in, her familiar voice comes to us as clear as a cracked bell. So true is the dialogue to the ritual of conversation in Irish - we are the Japanese of the West - that, although all we have on the page are three dots, we can still hear the voice of the second interlocutor, vague and barely audible from the next grave. We hear between the lines and read between the coffins. The one place where I was severely brought up, on page 219, was due to homoeoteleuton in this edition.
The dialogue, of course, can become tedious through repetition and the pace is sometimes slow. Many parts of the book, however, are pure writing. The prose takes flight in a way that only O Cadhhain seemed capable of. The tongue in cheek melancholy and ironic poeticism of Stoc na Cille are fine examples of O Cadhain's florid style.
The book is also richly humourous. It is black humour, indeed, much of it at the expense of the corpses' pretensions - their desire for culture, their electioneering, their founding of a Rotary Club. There are a number of marvellous set pieces woven into the fabric: the story of the clogs, the visit to the pictures, the man whose bowels were swapped with those of another in hospital. The list of proposed Rotary Club lectures is the epitome of barbed irony and understated spite - culminating in a proposed lecture to newly arrived Tomas Taobh Istigh on the "Art of Living".
The pathos and humour of the ironic situation are exploited to the full. When Cait Bheag, who used to lay people out for burial, finally arrives with "It was me laid you all out", she brings on a storm of denials from the outraged corpses. The irony and pathos become horrible when, shortly - after the arrival of Jeaic na Scoloige, Caitriona declares "I have Jeaic now."
The two main plots are resolved towards the end with the death and arrival of Bileachai the Postman who, after his searing confrontation with the Master, comes like the neighbourly official he is to dispense good news and affable reasonableness to all and sundry. Caitriona will even get her cross which is to be erected at the same time as Jeaic's. For the first time in the whole book she seems to soften.
The graveyard is a closed world, and the world above little more than a rural townland. Rare glimpses of a wider existence are given by the crashed French airman - but he speaks French and is not understood. The end of the book coincides with the ending of the second World War. Only the Frenchman seems to notice. The corpses continue to support Hitler or Churchill on the basis of indissoluble ignorance and self interest.
Rarely have such telling features of Irish life been so sharply captured: our raw social and racial prejudices, our self serving superstitions, the huge gap between our expert and well directed words and what we actually achieve - a botched job if anything. Not since Swift has there been such unrelenting satire.
Whatever about the editorial principles used in its preparation, this edition is disappointing in the extent of its misprints. Little "typos" are everywhere and are a damned nuisance - not so much a dripping tap as an indecisive house fly in a closed room. As with the corpses, we look forward to the next edition with not a little impatience.