Novelist in Oblivion: Patrick Boyle

Peter Guy

Issue 377, vol.95, Spring 2006

He was nearing 60 when most of his work appeared – a novel and three collections of short stories. Off-putting to modern taste is his depiction of women as conniving, predatory, and busybodies intent on men’s destruction. But he is also able to empathise with a married woman’s anguish and suicide. And epithets of treachery and deviousness are bestowed even-handedly on his male characters – as well as his trade-mark animal images.

The image of the baited and flayed badger, dying and defiant, can represent any individual who – though treated as a figure of fun and persecuted – refuses to betray the core of the self to placate his tormentors, and wrests dignity from defeat. Willie Nesbitt, in “The Betrayers”, matches up to this ideal – while the protagonist of “Meles Vulgaris” falls short of it, because overly compliant with his wife.

Simpson, central figure of the novel Like Any Other Man, exhibits the same touch of the mock-hero. Embarked on a career of moral abandon, he knows himself to be at odds with standards obtaining in the Ireland of the day. These, however, he reckons to be hypocritical – and refuses to compromise his right to strike out on an independent lifestyle, however damaging the consequences.

Boyle’s race towards a final, dramatic denouement can meander off course, and his imagery at times relies on crude pastiches and ludicrous situations. But the writing at its best – the ferocity of the words and images, the sheer force of his themes of betrayal and tortured redemption – has an astonishing kinetic momentum.

Death stalks his fiction, often starkly. However, an act of cruelty can sometimes function as a catalyst for the reawakening of the spirit (deadened by the meanness and insularity of human kind). His “message” is twofold. On the one hand, the human form is fragile, susceptible to corruption and vice – while also passion cools, beauty fades and strength declines. On the other hand, the sea, the mountains and the earth itself remain an eternal constant.

Peter Guy is a doctoral student at NUI Galway