Kate Bateman is a teacher, reviewer and seminar facilitator. She has
given workshops at a variety
of book club festivals in Wexford, Dublin
and most recently at Ennis. As part of our 'Spotlight on the Reader' series Kate examined a variety of literary genres, focusing on works by authors participating this year's Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival.
Workshop 1- Notes: The Gamal & The Fields
Both of these first novels are written from the viewpoint of a young, Irish male. Both start with childhood and chart their way through adolescence. The Gamal’s protagonist-narrator, Charlie, and Jim Finnegan of The Fields are immersed intheir local worlds. Both have a female they are besotted with – though in very different ways. Both use dialogue in a vernacular heavily salted with “fuck” – which to my ear is not gratuitous, but rather a convincing argot of the bragging but less-than-confident young male.
What is most
significant and useful for discussion is that both novels, in subtle but comic
style excavate current issues of depression, abortion and the Irish in London.
With the Catholic Church’s scandalous secrets again in the news, Kevin Maher’s
tale of boy versus priest in 1980s Dublin feels very timely, despite its period
setting. And Ciaran Collins highlights
the validity of special needs persons’ intelligence
Eilis ni Dhuibne
in her Irish Times review of The Gamal says: “The novel provides deep
insight into the complexity of the phenomena we dump too easily into the
catch-all term “bullying”. The author, who is a teacher, understands very well
the messy stewpot of teenage emotions, and how kindergarten rivalries can
escalate into adult criminality of the worst kind. . . . . . It
is a complex tragicomedy, portraying the life of young people in an Irish
parish in a highly original way, and dealing with the major teenage issues of
the moment – bullying, depression, suicide – with compassion and intelligence.”
Language & Title – The Gamal – Note the definite article, “The” reads as definitive while The Fields refers to the song...
Point of view –
both are first person narratives and are faux personal records.
Structure – The Gamal has headings in bold such as
you’d expect when reading a report. We are given a report on what medics refer
to as ODD; Oppositional Defiant Disorder (p.12). He has been told by his psychiatrist,
Dr Quinn, he must write 1000 words a day. So he is writing professionally as an
author, and writing as therapy, p. 41
The Fields is conventionally structured – dialogue and
narration.
The Gamal
So what kind of
narrator is he??? First person, yes - but also unreliable or is he?
Depiction of a
court case is always dramatic but Collins inserts the transcript of the court
proceedings with a version of the same events witnessed by Charlie who was
pretending to be asleep at the time of the rape. This technique puts into
question the notion of truth in a narrative.
Charlie, like
other young, male narrators (Mark Haddon’s Christopher Boone) is programmed to
be difficult but he is talented. He has a memory for songs and music as well as
events and he can draw. He is adroit at avoidance manoeuvres and has an
appreciation of: lists, numbers, dictionary definitions and diagrams. He often
comments on his own writing “that’s me done for to-day”. He imports
meta-fictional devices into the novel, including – cut’n paste from the internet (p. 10, 342)
lines of poetry (p. 3), court transcripts (p.51-55, 313-318 & 360+)
newspaper accounts (p. 201), psychiatrists’ reports and he uses blank lines;
explaining they stand in for the lyrics of songs he likes but does not want to
pay the copyright fee to quote them.
Sinéad, daughter
of a violent alcoholic, is the idealised heroine who can sing. She’s the first person to be nice to Charlie.
Of course she is beautiful – and especially visible in a town with a surfeit of
apparently ugly young fellas. You can be sure something bad is going to happen
to her.
Her boyfriend
James is also a good singer, nice to Charlie and all laws of fiction would be
broken if he were not also to come to a bad end. James is a rich, a
middle-class Protestant (Gaelic) football star who draws the jealous
attention of other, less accomplished boys.
In the last third
of the novel, a plot emerges concerning the young couple, the violent results
of petty jealousies and the unburied history of the village. Dinky, Teesh,
Racey and others represent the jealousy and conformity small towns breed.
In the last few
pages of the novel, Charlie remarks that perpetrators of crimes, as well as the
witnesses and victims of them, can suffer from trauma.
The Fields
The novel, in keeping with its rapid-fire wit is
as informative on SEX, RELIGION & ECONOMIC issues of the Mid 
Justine Jordan in The Guardian says “it's not long before
Jim's adolescence is derailed . . . by .
. his fervent crush on the much older Saidhbh, whose nationalist father is dead
proud of being Irish so he always wears thick jumpers and makes his kids spell
their names with as many 'bh's and 'dh's as possible" . . . but after a blissful few months, in which
they (Jim and Saidhbh) invent a new erotic activity they call
"shifting". Soon, it becomes necessary for Saidhbh, to make the
well-worn passage to London.
The actual trip is comically rendered with a deft splash of realism.
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