Facts and figurines – An Irishman’s Diary about Kevin Barry, Flann O’Brien, and the Child of Prague

In the Czech capital this week for the Flann O’Brien conference, I took time out to visit the source of a possible (but so far unacknowledged) contributor to global warming. I refer of course to the Child of Prague.

The original statue is housed in a church on Karmelitzka Street, where I joined tourists from all over the world studying and photographing the famous figurine of an infant Jesus, with its opulent dress and outsized crown.

But apart from a detail to the effect that it was made in Spain, sometime in the 1500s, there was no clue anywhere as to why it should be associated with sunny weather.

Nor was there any hint about how it had ever acquired a reputation (if only among the people of Ireland) for being able to influence the climate, even via cheap plaster reproductions of itself.

Liturgical season

The only tradition referred to in the church is that of dressing the statue in colours appropriate to the liturgical season. In keeping with this, the associated museum began and ended with a display of some of the most spectacular garments.

As for the Irish cult of putting copies of the statue out in the garden the night before a wedding, the museum has nothing to say. It was equally discreet about the belief in some quarters here that the statue works better if it’s partly buried.

And on the supposedly even greater powers exercised by headless versions of the figurine, the museum’s silence was, if anything, more profound. I left the church none the wiser, except to be reminded once again that Ireland is a strange country.

The point was underlined later that night at a public interview with the writer Kevin Barry, whose weirdly comic creations have been rightly likened to those of Flann.

His Impac Award-winning novel City of Bohane is a modern classic, set in a post-apocalyptic (or post-something-bad, anyway) version of Limerick, or Cork, or a bit of both.

Speaking of holy infants, the only references to religion in the book are of a deity called “Sweet Baba J”.

But if you listen to the author, it’s no great achievement for a writer from certain parts of Ireland (including rural Sligo, where he now lives) to have a wild or warped imagination.

He credited the sheer, rain-sodden dreariness of “307 days” of the year (the ones when when the Child of Prague is not in the garden, presumably) as an inspiration to creativity. And among the influences from his childhood, he also mentioned the regular ESB power cuts of the 1970s, which he said only added to the encouragement of local storytellers by removing the potential distraction of their audiences having absolutely anything else to do.

In a strange coincidence, the interview venue was plunged into darkness twice as he spoke.

But both times, knowing members of the audience looked around accusingly at me, standing in a corner at the back. This is when I realised, each time, that I’d just leaned against the light switch.

City of Bohane is set in a dystopian near future, in a place still just about recognisable as Ireland, albeit that the concept of there being such a country seems to have waned. O'Brien's The Third Policeman, by contrast, starts in a dysfunctional recent past, but in a similarly vague Hibernia, where policemen are not yet gardaí.

Both have accidentally attracted the interest of science-fiction fans.

Barry indulges his, up to a point, but is unwilling (or unable) to explain what happened to make his Bohane end up as it did, a matter of urgent importance to them.

O'Brien didn't live to see The Third Policeman published, never mind to see it inspire other works of science fiction, or whatever you called that strange US TV series Lost, which made his book a sub-plot.

But as I mentioned earlier in the week (September 17th), critics have also discovered striking similarities between his work and that of the later American writer Philip K Dick, author of Ubik and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dick’s wildly imaginative ideas are said to have been fuelled by large-scale use of mind-altering substances, including amphetamines, speed, and LSD, whereas Flann O’Brien’s only known drug was alcohol. But O’Brien did have the brain-bending benefits of growing up in Ireland.

And it's now well accepted by critics that his extraordinary vision of hell in the The Third Policeman was it least partly inspired by several childhood years in Offaly.