The Photograph
Eamonn Sweeney
Picador, £10, 374pp
Buy it at BOL
History has a habit of consuming its agents of change. Eamonn Sweeney's large, bold second novel sweeps us through four decades, from the 1960s to the recent past, by focusing on the intertwined lives of four men who both trigger and personify the tectonic changes in Irish politics and society, and are ultimately destroyed by them.
Raised in a backwoods nowhere with recent memories of the War of Independence, each makes his stellar jump from the rut of rural poverty. Henry Caslin escapes the example of his ruined alcoholic father, betrayed by his wartime comrades, for entrepreneurial sobriety and political ambition; Jimmy Mimnagh leaves 16 siblings and the hearthside goat for London; Father Gerry Lee swells his village with pride when he goes to Rome to study for the priesthood; and Seamus McKeon, to please his printer father, becomes a reporter. This is the generation which grew up in thrall to the church and ended up in Dublin Four with "the ABCDE people" (who "believe in Abortion, Buggery, Contraception, Divorce and Euthanasia").
The photograph of the title is a seemingly incidental picture of the four at a dance, taken for the local rag; McKeon returns to it 40 years later in an effort to comprehend the private drama played out by the men on the canvas of public life. Through a combination of charisma and ruthlessness, Henry, "a hobo whose oul fella was a drunk with a kiss-me-arse shop", has, with Jimmy as his loyal fixer, risen to Taoiseach; McKeon's investigation of Father Lee's paedophilia and the Church's arrogant protection of its more dangerous sons impacts on the government and destroys Henry's career.
As a framing device this snapshot is unnecessary, overtly artistic. But Sweeney's authorial control is such that the historical trajectory of his fictional characters' lives, the domino effect of their personal loves and hates, never seems forced. His novel is also an imaginative history of Fianna Fail; he studiously names no names, but slots his Henry with ease into the line of Taoiseachs dominated by "The Party Founder" - Eamonn de Valera - who "made it impossible for the electorate to distinguish between country and Party", the comfy and ineffectual "Man With The Pipe" (Jack Lynch) and the megalomaniac face of the new realpolitik, "The Tough Guy", whose gun-running background and corruption echo the scandals of Charles Haughey's political career. It's an ambitious gamble which pays off spectacularly.
Similarly, the story of McKeon's pursuit of Father Lee allows Sweeney to dramatise the paedophilia scandal which has driven a schism between the Catholic church and the Irish state. (The church complains that the very term "paedophile priest" is proof of the media's anti-religious bias; Sweeney wryly observes that it has more to do with sub-editors' love of alliteration.) "Try and stop this caper if you can at all", the priest is told after his first little mishap, as the pattern of relocation from parish to unsuspecting parish and envelopes containing "small gifts from the church" begins. From the protectionism of the 1960s to the public outcry of the present, Sweeney never flinches in his portrayal of a man becoming a monster; his narrative voice is charged with psychological insight as well as righteous public anger.
Sweeney also traces the encroachment of the North on what used to be called "the Free State". Henry crosses the border for the first time as a businessman happy to do a deal with other businessmen who happen to be Northern Protestants ("the roads were very good... They probably did massive work on roads near the border out of spite"). But even the address on the contract shows they are worlds apart:
" - No one calls it Londonderry.
"- No one I know calls it anything else.
" - Can you just change it on my copy of the contract. To Derry... I'm being reasonable. What about the Siege of Derry? It's the Siege of Derry ye won."
Soon more than place names and points of honour are involved. With the dirty protests and hunger strikes of the 1970s, Sweeney identifies one of history's turning points: "The young men with their shit and starvation had upped the ante and made sure that this story would have an end. There would be some kind of solution."
As Taoiseach, Henry is involved in the first delicate brokerings of peace; he also oversees the decriminalisation of homosexuality because, as this good but practical Catholic observes, "the guards have better things to do than go around arresting lads for riding each other". In politics as in journalism, Sweeney teases out the personal whims and ambitions behind the turns of history. McKeon's most intimate hunger is for the front-page scoop, Henry's for a place in the history books; dazzled by the glare of the future, he is blinded to present danger and lays himself open to attack from those closest to him.
As in many narratives of Irish history, at the heart of The Photograph lies betrayal from within. "It was always your own side that gave it to you." This is a theme developed and writ large from Sweeney's dark first novel, Waiting for the Healer, in which a booze-soaked Irish emigrant returns to avenge his murdered brother and finds the killer not, as he assumes, in the sectarian struggle or criminal gang warfare, but within his own clan.
The Photograph can, with its hindsight and fact/fiction tricksiness, godlike author and brisk, persuasive style, feel like teleology; it is history portrayed as progress, and also as individual tragedy, in a style speckled with farce. Sweeney has a huge tenderness for his flawed and ambitious protagonists, men left behind by the change they engender, as well as for his vast array of minor characters, brought into richly imagined life with a single sentence. "Destruction is the best friend of the future", observes Jimmy. It is Sweeney's grand achievement to comprehend both history's march and its human cost.
