Thomas McCarthy writes: A poet and former director of Poetry Ireland, Theo Dorgan has already written a number of successful prose works, including Voyage Home, his marvellous logbook of an ocean voyage from Antigua to Kinsale on the seventy-foot schooner Spirit of Crosshaven. A goodly portion of the introspective and meditative powers of that earlier book reappears in his new novel, Camarade.
This new work carries us across the ocean of a young socialist’s mind, with his background of Cork radicalism and militant socialism in the immediate post-Spanish Civil War years. The spirit of youthful radicalism learned from a veteran Republican grandfather (in both the Spanish and the Irish sense) is what carries the main character of this novel, propelling his personal drama in a dreamlike manner from the attempted shooting of a Cork policeman to a life of flight and exile among radical political activists in Paris between the 1960s late de Gaulle era and the early dawn of the Mitterrand presidency.
The novel is, essentially, the memoir of a political exile in Paris, full of the flavour, perfumes, foods and political theoretics and political gymnastics of that hopeful moment in recent French history. Dorgan also has an unexpected gift – unexpected in a male Irish writer, that is – of intense descriptive powers, describing both fashion and domestic interiors with uncanny fidelity. This descriptive precision is one of the delights of an otherwise very cerebral political novel, a book of escapes and evasions.
All the evasions, whether in Spain or Ireland or France, are unfinished revolutions, frustrated plans and very real but unsatisfactory love affairs. In a very subtle and mysterious way this book is a young man’s fiction written by a poet in his seventies: it is a Cork L’Étranger, more intensely poetic and idealistic than the work of the worldly Camus. It is that kind of lyrical and idealistic novel because Dorgan is primarily, and resoundingly, a poet in the way Camus wasn’t. Political immensities are dealt with in thought processes that hover between poetry and prose. Dorgan has recreated a hinterland that belonged to the post-Marcuse generation; the work is nothing less than a series of revealing biopsies of radicalisms as they develop in an educated Irish Catholic mind. I can think of a number of UCC radicals of the novelist’s generation who might have wanted to write the kind of novel Theo Dorgan has now written, but they didn’t possess the poet’s eye or an older novelist’s relentless persistence.
Dorgan’s fictional paradigm is created with incredible precision; and that in itself is a wonderful achievement for which all literary socialists in Ireland should be grateful. Only Dorgan, with his very particular mental plumbing, could have written this book. In doing so he has achieved a personal triumph. Appropriately, it is an Algerian, Vincent – ‘a rangy Algerian in his late twenties. A spring in him, in all that he does and says’ – who suggests that Joseph, the narrator, write down the story of his life. Following Vincent’s instruction, the novel unfolds into a series of interlinking chapters of time past and time present, the secret story of secretive Joseph who was born in Cork in 1940 and fled to Paris less than twenty years later.
The narrative has real ‘heft,’ as Seamus Heaney used to say. Fully imagined, there’s nothing delicate or tentative about either the Cork or Parisian situations and relationships: Dorgan had already dealt with issues of Cork Northside social life in impressive collections of poetry such as Rosa Mundi, Nine Bright Shiners and Once Was a Boy, but this work is a political thriller set in a dramatic matrix of socially and politically excluded Cork and Parisian radicals. The story begins in that hidden Cork neighbourhood of Blackpool, Great William O’Brien St and Dublin Hill, a milieu of poor but proud republican and trade union families whose chauvinism and sense of godly historical mission is palpable all through their talking and waking hours. All of the elders described are animated by a deep distrust of authority, a disdain for the Irish Free State, a suspicion of power, and a capacity to maintain radical belief in an unattainable ‘pure’ Republic.
From the beginning the characters simply refuse to accept current Irish realities. This attitude is pervasive and in its nature radicalising, so that each bedroom window becomes a kind of watchtower where left-wing souls await the arrival of barbarians. There is a good deal of furtive watching from high windows going on right through the novel, right down to the final pages, the narrator noting that ‘Across the road from the café there is an unmarked police car, a man and a woman in it.’ As in all left-wing worlds, the barbarians are inevitably wearing official uniforms.
The painstaking craftsmanship is hugely impressive: characters and their interaction are first rate and fully imagined; and there are whole sections in this book that are absolutely lovely in their prose-music. There has always been something fine and feminine in Dorgan’s sensibility, a refinement that he inherited from his artistic Cork mother perhaps, and this gift constantly rescues the politics from mere and dull Irish masculinities. In the opening series of chapters we are in traditional Corkery/O’Connor territory north of the River Lee, the territory of the narrator’s grandfather Michael John (who has a past elsewhere as ‘Miguel’) but we soon elope with the fugitive Joseph Roche (or ‘Lyons’ or ‘Seanie Lambe’) to an elusive, obscure young Paris or Paris of the young, of 1950s/1960s communists. For security reasons Joseph’s family name is meant to be evasive, shifting, part of the life of a Jacobin exile lived cautiously. Joseph’s surname should prove untraceable. As the novel progresses the Cork experiences become like an Oran of Camus; Joseph’s Cork childhood gains a significance that is as real as the heavy Spanish Civil War revolver that Joseph uses to shoot the vile policeman Cassidy who has assaulted his adored Scoil Mhuire girl, Theresa. The shooting is chaotic and random, very much in the manner of Meursault’s killing in Algiers in the Camus novel. But Joseph’s contempt for Cassidy is not random: ‘Always his feral eyes on me, as if he was trying to make me feel the intensity of his hatred.’
The narrator’s life is lived in a Paris of complex and sometimes mysterious relationships, of Vincent and Henri. It is a Paris, also, of wonderfully drawn Frenchwomen: Thérèse – ‘her eyes direct, expressionless … Long dark hair, pulled back in a soft ponytail. Lean, a green sweater.’ and Marie Louise ‘a cigarette vertical between the fingers of her left hand; her right hand extended to me as she stood, bony and cool … an aura around her … The pin-sharp glint in her black eyes’ and Genevieve ‘Jen’ who arrives with Vincent and each of them wearing the same left-wing uniform of soft black leather jacket, white tee-shirt and blue denim jeans. Genevieve wears ‘White Musk’ and asks Joseph the first of many searching questions: ‘What are you re-reading these days?’
During the riots of the Paris Spring Joseph moves in with Genevieve. Handsome, careful about dress and looks, he constantly attracts the interest of the opposite sex, even the young woman in the local wine-bar who he muses ‘has read every word ever published by Cixous and Kristeva’. Mentioning these authors of seminal works such as Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia and The Newly Born Woman is a reminder of Joseph’s now comfortable, bookish intellectualism. Placed by communist connections into a job as porter at the Sorbonne, he becomes a Parisian Corkman, slow to be impressed and an expert on food, fashion and radical left-wing theory. His Republican/Internationalist worldview transforms him into a native of this Paris world of 1960s riots, of sit-ins and baton charges. Dorgan is one of only a few male writers who give full agency to strong and motivated and mysterious women. None are victims, or not simply victims, and rarely mere objects of desire, but they are active creators of meaning in Joseph’s personal life and in his understanding of left-wing politics in France.
It is a masterful achievement to produce a novel of both political intrigue, and fascinating interpersonal relationships worked out through interconnecting planes of time. Time passing, as Elizabeth Bowen might note approvingly, is an essential structural element of the novel. Time passing is one of Joseph’s major obsessions and the alternating chapters of past and present accentuate this structuring obsessiveness in his own character. Each character, and every one of the relationships, is marked by history. Dorgan very successfully shows how history in the form of the Irish Civil War, the Spanish Civil War and the Occupation, impinges upon each of the characters’ destinies, including most poignantly the personal drama of Joseph and Genevieve. ‘We are of the permanent resistance, we have done our bit, I hope,’ says the communist Henri towards the end. His words are the words of those who choose to remain apart in European politics, but particularly in Irish politics. It has occurred to me more than once since I read this novel that those are the words of people who really only thrive beyond the quotidian, who find political completion only in a work of fiction such as Dorgan’s Camarade.
Camarade is published by the Mercier Press.
