There has been no shortage of Irish novels in the past half-century about exile, estrangement and escape, and Denis Kehoe’s debut work is another. It tells the tale of Daniel Ryan, a man in his late sixties who is returning to the Dublin of his early adulthood after an absence of 46 years. As a young man, he had made the classic escape from a small village in the south of the country to live in the capital, discovering there the delicious urban Gomorrah of bright lights, late nights and loose characters, together with the kind of anonymity the rural fledgling craves.

Another kind of discovery awaits him too, dimly discerned perhaps in the initial need to flee the familial and priestly attentions of village life. "Through the years", he confesses, "my perverse thoughts had been a kind of secret I’d managed to keep from myself". After a couple of inconsequential nights out with girls, Daniel has sex with a man, and his secret is out, at least to himself.

Taken under the wing of Maeve, a louche but kindly woman-with-a-past who runs an alternative theatre group, he finds himself being persuaded to take a principal role in a production of the gay Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca’s most celebrated work, Blood Wedding. He has also struck up a major relationship with a faintly unstable but encouragingly handsome man called Anthony, whom he has met at a glittering diplomatic reception.

The narrative pursues the young lovers through the underground gay world of Dublin in the early 1950s, where social oppression has bred – much as it did everywhere else – an autonomous community with its own codes, its own moral standards and its own tattered glamour. The elderly Daniel finds the gay Dublin of the 1990s much changed for the worse, the unconcealed outness bought at the cost of a shallow soullessness.

He makes the acquaintance of a young writer, Gerard, who is researching a novel about just exactly the period of Daniel’s reminiscences, and the stories immediately begin to run on parallel lines. Gerard’s discovery that Daniel was more personally implicated in the period than he is letting on leads to angry recriminations, but the narrative nonetheless homes in on the events of the tragic, blood-soaked night that led him to high-tail it to New York for half a century.
 
It’s a fairly naïve first effort that suffers from the classic problem of many debut novels, which is that it is larded with far too much dialogue, much of which is quite banal. The narrative voice is relentlessly repetitive, as each thought is accorded two or three ways of saying the same thing, and not a great deal really happens. The atmosphere of the tale is curiously unsexy, and a substantial wager is laid on the reader becoming as interested in the plot of Blood Wedding, and the mechanics of amateur dramatics, as Kehoe himself obviously is.

That said, there is a fleeting hint in the opening chapter of a more engaging lyrical tone, which we must hope gets a fuller and breezier outing in this young writer’s subsequent work.

Read our interview with Denis Kehoe.

Nights Beneath the Nation, by Denis Kehoe
Published by: Serpent's Tail
Released: 4 September 2008
ISBN: 1846686687

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