The Irish Times

August 12, 2006 Saturday

Getting to the point of surrender

George O'Brien

'Gods make their own importance." The concluding line of Patrick

Kavanagh's Epic might well occur to readers of this intriguing, if uneven, first

collection of stories by Irish writer William Wall, whose reputation as a novelist

has been rising steadily in recent years.

Take Dionysus and the Titans, for instance, where the ancient story is

secularised and domesticated in the tale of Zoot and his Caribbean lover,

Semele. When Semele dies Zoot looks after their infant son, Denis, until

interfering relatives bring about Zoot's enforced surrender to the social services.

Or again, when the narrator of the first part of In Xanadu - a revealing though

perhaps over-ambitious story about student life at UCC circa 1976 - sees two of

his friends making love, he thinks "for an instant that I was watching the

coupling of mythical creatures - a Paris and Helen, a Deirdre and Naoise".

Indeed, old Europe generally makes its presence felt throughout, whether in the

arcana which bedevil the lonely lecturer in The Bestiary or the reference to

Horace in the title of What Slim Boy, O Pyrrha, or the use of Dante's Inferno as

the narrative armature for Surrender.

These mere mentions of the mythological and archetypal dimensions of No

Paradiso possibly risk making the stories sound pretentious. But for the most

part, the allusions work quite well, though perhaps it's inevitable that there's a

dissonant note now and then, as in The Meanings of Wind, say, which opens,

"Sitting in the drowning car, Paddy thinks of Thucydides"; or when the narrator

of Surrender thinks, while making love, of the Trojan horse. And an American

businessman in From the Hughes Banana saying "Wait and see what the gods

have planned to screw up your day" does sound somewhat forced. More to the

point, though, the references consolidate the unavoidable presence in the

characters' lives of the intractable, the id, the unbiddable, or whatever the name

might be of the shape-changing power which directs and redirects our paths.

This is the force which commands the protagonist of What Slim Boy, O Pyrrha to

run naked into first World War battle, which prompts the young university

student in Fresher to pour a kettle of boiling water over the offending parts of

the sleeping fellow-student who's just raped her, which is codified in the

obscure texts on which the protagonist of The Bestiary is an authority. The

irrational makes its own deviant, imaginative sense. And there seems to be no

alternative, ultimately, to this power's all-pervasive influence, which results in

the book's main motifs and themes being descent, dissolution and death.

The stories' geographical range - Cork, Castel Gandolfo, LAX (where the Hughes

Banana, a yellow aircraft, lands), Naples and environs, "the Sibylline mountains",

Flanders Field - underlines this pervasiveness. No paradiso is certainly one way

of describing the resulting vision (even if the book doesn't have a title story). It

isn't only the unlikelihood of rising that stands out, however, but the prevalence

of surrender. This is expressed most convincingly in the story of that name,

where the protagonist, having completed his translation of the Inferno, must

now prepare to meet his own death and burial. Here, imagined hell prefigures

lived hell, so that what is intellectually known and physically experienced bleed

into each other in an unnerving dynamic of reciprocation and antithesis.

It's in the formal inventiveness with which this dynamic is handled that the

reader will find No Paradiso most distinctive and most rewarding. In addition to

the author's alert, muscular style, his painlessly communicated appreciation of

obscure learning, his vaguely didactic pleasure in accurately providing a sense

of place, many of these stories are distinguished by a welcome engagement with

form. The "strange geometry" of the final setting in Surrender is reproduced in

the many variations of approach and perspective contained in No Paradiso.

Here again, not all of these work equally well. The change of narrator in In

Xanadu is one case in point; and the use of the unfamiliar astronomical term,

"periastron", in the story of that name is another. But the long, impersonal

perspective and repression of narrative omniscience in What Slim Boy, O Pyrrha,

and the juggling of time and place in Nero Was An Angler (the Castel Gandolfo

story) is very effective. And in the seemingly "found" story called The William

Walls, consisting largely of thumbnail sketches of some of the author's historical

namesakes, the exploration of symmetries is undertaken most economically and

most tellingly. For all the "other possibilities" represented by his namesakes,

there remains, after all, only his own singular presence, so that the story both

embodies and is playfully reconciled to the tension found in the "fracture in the

bond between the world and the way of seeing it", of which The Bestiary (and

the other stories also) speak. In their various negotiations of such tensions, the

stories of No Paradiso engage, challenge and reward the committed reader.

George O'Brien is academic director of the Irish Studies Summer School at Trinity College, Dublin, and professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC

Review Of No Paradiso

“... the  stories of No Paradiso engage, challenge and reward the committed reader.”