Banjaxed By The Celtic Tiger: The Wild Laughter By Caoilinn Hughes

Poets elevate the moments they scrutinise, crystallising subjective insights and responses into assiduously crafted literary expressions and in so doing, often articulate the essence of both the granular and the universal. As such, poets are often rightly venerated as crucially important voices amongst literature’s soothsayers. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) wrote, ‘Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself’. Caoilinn Hughes might agree with Shaw and find herself in sympathy with the thoughts of another of her countrymen. Sean O’Casey (1880-1964), a fellow Irish poet and dramatist tells us that, ‘Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter is soft, loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness – the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living’.

Hughes is an acclaimed Irish poet turned novelist and the author of the recently published, The Wild Laughter. Released two years after her esteemed debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp (2018), Hughes’s latest book is suffused with brutal insights, intellectually vibrant dark humour, tenderness and dextrously robed in a richly lyrical, yet emphatic, prose style as scintillating as it is original. This novel melds poetry and fiction to offer any reader nothing short of an exquisite and thoroughly entertaining delight, rippling with absurd fun and stark truths.

Set in 2014, eight years after the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern’s, avaricious pronouncement that ‘the boom is getting boomier’, austerity and its consequences form our thematic backdrop. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008 had destroyed huge swathes of Ireland’s over-heated economy. Hughes focusses on this ineluctably pernicious historical moment, exploring its societal and cultural ramifications in the form of a State-of-the-Nation novel. The agrarian tableau is a potato farm in County Roscommon and offers the reader a compendious micro-epic which combines domestic and national saga with a love story. At the heart of this black-comedy-cum-rite-of-passage legend sits a poignant religious and moral conundrum as serious as it is inescapable.

Doharty ‘Hart’ Black, our unreliable narrator, is a twenty-five-year-old fatalistic culchie and the perhaps feckless son of terminally ill Manus, ‘the Chief’. Hart’s elder brother Cormac is an intelligent, self-centred chancer who has eschewed his agricultural heritage in favour of a university degree, harvesting, not potatoes, but self-deterministic autonomy and material trappings derived from dubious Dublin-centric entrepreneurial start-ups. Reluctantly working the woefully bankruptcy-prone farm with only his saturnine ex-nun mother Nora for company, Hart’s authenticity and self-esteem lies every bit as submerged as the crop he singlehandedly tends, that is lessening in worth as recessionary forces tighten their grip on his family and the nation.

The diametrically opposed and deeply antithetical brothers must overcome their vicious cat-and-mouse rivalry and unite to confront conjoined perils, as the impersonal tentacles of reality destabilise atavistic norms and threaten to destroy the already torn, wafer-thin fabric of their family’s fragile world. Skilfully woven into this bucolic backdrop, the story consists of interlinked domestic vignettes, spliced through with co-dependent narratives, each threading the novel’s multifarious themes through its raw, emotionally mendacious epicentre.

Taking a leaf from Stendhal’s book I will not say more about the plot or its twists, sharing his view that to do so would rob the reader of the experience of a first read and is therefore ‘theft’! En passant of this pledge, though, I will reveal one salient point. Structurally, the plot is a worthy construct for the complex and rapidly propelled thematic cargo it transports. Indeed, given that plot serves to bring forth a denouement of striking emotional power, its adroit craftsmanship is for me, the vital and highly effective lynchpin of the book’s artistic success. Hughes may have a sensitive poetic soul, however she also possesses the architectural competence of a practiced novelist and displays this with intelligent, carefully distilled aplomb. Given that the book was eight years in the making, perhaps it is no surprise that the plot is a slickly engineered and well-oiled mechanism.

Thematically, the novel explores a viperous nest of antithetical binaries, from cowardice and sacrifice through to self-sabotage and self-actualisation, fidelity and faithlessness and culpability and exploitation. During ‘The Great Famine’ of 1845-1849, the innocent suffered alongside the guilty. Hart’s almost mythological story told in the first person strikes me as Hughes’s audacious attempt to take stock of a nation once again enduring an epoch of crisis deeply inimical to its sense of self and the identity, integrity and the idiosyncratic traditions and sacrosanct values of its inhabitants. The complex web of internecine agencies acting upon both family and nation, stirred through with existential angst, emotional and psychological manipulation and humanistic fatalism, generates a potent mix of intellectually profound motifs and provocative, unsweetened realisations.

Social mobility is a, perhaps, seminal thread loosely bundling these acutely scrutinised themes into recognisable and authorially unmolested truths. As readers, we are confronted not by a blight rotting a nation’s harvest, but the undeniable implications of economic austerity upon personal and national self-confidence. A disease of the soul is born in the euphoria of opportunistic capitalism gone sour by dint of misplaced certainty. However, our author is an acerbic observer, not a moralising accuser. Bitter truths are unflinchingly acknowledged, but castigation and reprimand are subservient to humanistic compassion and truth telling. That poetic soul I’ve repeatedly alluded to is neither bitter nor pessimistic; Hughes is an optimist who does not lie.

Though set in the vividly realised landscape of County Roscommon and joyously exuding the quintessential uniqueness of Ireland itself, the issues the novel confronts and exploits as its literary conflicts are universal. This is not an Irish book about Ireland, though couched in that nation’s shibboleths and argot. Neither is it a myopic, unmodulated partisan comment on its tribulations as distinct from the rest of mankind’s tango with fate. Whilst the prism through which we engage with its themes is saturated in the hues of a nation’s definitive characteristics and traits, Hughes is, to my mind, writing from her authentic centre, addressing questions faced by humanity, irrespective of local detail and geo-political particularity. As such, the issues the book portrays move far beyond the peculiarities of the Celtic Tiger and Ireland and deal with the danse macabre, human frailty and the nature of individualism when confronted with the stone-hearted actuality of reality itself.

Hughes recently described herself as someone who ‘writes realism tinged with tragedy’, and I find myself agreeing with her apt description. Though she never strays into the murky waters pioneered by Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977), or the unsavoury but undeniably provocative realms of ‘dirty realism’ per se, Hughes garners much of her power from the ability to acutely observe her subject matter and translate her vision into a prose form that sizzles and crackles on the page. The quotidian is lit from within, whilst profound truths are almost epigrammatically decanted, without ceremony, cliché or hyperbolic linguistic smugness.

The intensity of her allusive, lyrically verdant prose, its relentless pace and idiom-infused lexicon, saturates the book with an intelligence arcing from sentence to sentence like a hungry flame leaping across bone dry kindle. Meaning is compressed into every syllable, once again revealing a poet’s deft touch and reverence for every mark made on the page. Poetically imaginative and wonderfully inventive, metaphors and similes riddle the text like a seam of priceless gold through metamorphic rock strata. I suspect many readers will do much as I did and immediately re-read entire sections of the book, just for the thrill of their pulsating originality and verve.

Let’s now address characterisation. The ‘Chief’ is, for me, one of the most astutely rendered figures to grace the pages of the novel. However, psychological insight, emotional veracity and attention to minute detail, lend every character within the book not just verisimilitude or the semblance of humanity, but an authenticity that renders them kindreds, if not directly, then by refraction. Hughes does not sit in judgment upon her characters, they are compassionately drawn with a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ tenderness. They illuminate the book’s dark themes with the light of human spirit, even when that light is almost snuffed out by the vicissitudes of capricious fate, or their own culpability.

For me Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is brought to mind, not simply because of his focus upon poverty, failure, exile and loss, but for the way Hughes seems to echo the literary works of his middle period (1945-1966). I don’t find my mind recalling Murphy (1938) or his Proust (essay) – Schopenhauer’s Pessimism (1930). However the phrase coined by Martin Esslin (1918-2002), ‘The Theatre of The Absurd’, and the eponymous title of his book, does seem pertinent, as does Beckett’s Endgame (1957), especially Nell’s line,’Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that…Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world’.

At one point in the novel, Cormac responds to his humourless interlocutor, ‘I’m Irish, sure. Everything’s a joke’. Stylistically, Hughes has what might be called a Beckett-esque quality and though the book is necessarily bleak at times, its sardonic humour is never far from the surface, gurgling like a river as it flows through the novel’s darkest chapters. The ‘wild laughter’ of the title is an irrepressible and cathartic force defiantly asserting man’s determination to exist despite calamity, loss and the absurd nature of reality.

Further amplifying my contention that Hughes is a glorious amalgam of poet and novelist, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven serves as a resplendent authorial device to elucidate the themes of confronting one’s death, the nature of loss and self-abasement, or, as one the novel’s characters Dolly says, ‘the national penchant for victimisation’.

Finally, you would expect a technically proficient poet now writing dazzling fiction to be acutely sensitised to the power of symbols. Adorning the dust jacket and final page of Hughes’s novel is an image of the Snakeshead Fritillary. A flower threatened by the rapacious greed of modern agricultural practices, this ancient totem resonates with the novel’s mythical spirit, literary allusiveness and pervasive themes of death and re-birth. I won’t elaborate, but suffice to say that its use only reinforces my view that Hughes’s poetic imagination is as boundless as her prose is self-confident and original. What faults I could find are not worth sharing, unlike my hearty recommendation that you pour yourself a nice cup of tea and savour this extraordinary, lyrically sumptuous gem!


The Wild Laughter is published by One World