Jamie O'Neill / At Swim, Two Boys / home / introduction

Take the coast road from Dublin, six miles south till you come to Glasthule, sleepy parish by the sea. It is here Mr Mack has his corner-huckster’s shop, on Adelaide Road, named for – who’s this it’s named for again? By night he dreams of the carriage trade, but his days he spends doling saucers of jam to slum-rats at a ha’penny a go. If only the world would turn that he might get his chance at respectability.

But the world is turning. It is 1915, all Europe is at war: Ireland wakes to the realization of freedom. In the shifting cultures and loyalties, who knows, by Easter next year, even Mr Mack might get his chance.

At Swim, Two Boys follows this turbulent year in Irish history, culminating in the rising of Easter 1916. At its heart it tells the story of two boys, Mr Mack’s son, Jim, a naive and reticent schoolboy, and his dark rough-diamond friend, Doyler. Their companionship begins with swimming lessons, but the bond that draws them deepens as their country marches to war. Every morning the boys meet at the Forty Foot Gentlemen’s Bathing Place. They plan an epic swim to the Muglins, an outlying rock in Dublin Bay, there to raise the Green flag and claim that beacon for Ireland. And maybe to claim it for themselves too. For they, like their country, are coming of age, and must struggle, for their freedom and their growing love, against the current of the Irish Sea.

     Doyler reached inside his shirt and tugged on the string that held his medal. Between thumbs and fingers he twisted the tin till it split in two. Jim saw the proffered half of St Joseph.
     ‘It’s my pledge to you. We’ll have our Easter swim, my hand and heart on that. We’ll make them rocks together, Jim. Are you straight so’?
     ‘I’m straight as a rush,’ Jim said. He sniffed. ‘I am too.’
     ‘Old pal o’ me heart,’ said Doyler.
     ‘Come what may,’ said Jim. ‘Come what may.’
     Doyler grinned. ‘Come Easter, sure. 1916.’

HOW many words in this novel? There are 200,000. You counted them so? I employed a certified numerator for that task. How long did it take to write them, tell. Ten years, give or take a breath. You’ll give a blast of the peculiarer offerings? Leucomelanous. Flapdoodlers. Palatable nonsense. Be arse or be tarse, them are queer creatures – what manner of heathen would say them all, I wonder? Amongst a wealth of characters, we here meet Doyler’s father Mick, now scratching his thirsty existence selling papers in the street, and still with a remnant of the old soldier (he’d take the stick yet) ... the aged Aunt Sawney with her rigid omniscience ... poor Brother Polycarp and his enraptured soul ... Nancy, flighty divil-may-care minx of a girl, slavey to Madame MacMurrough ... And Madame MacMurrough herself, topping it the grande dame of the parish, last brilliant flowering of her illustrious clan – last, unless her nephew should marry and settle. But there seems little likelihood of that troublesome young gentleman’s marriage: of late he has returned from His Majesty’s Wandsworth where he served two years’ hard for gross indecency with a chauffeur-mechanic. Where is he now? Flaneuring it down the Forty Foot, spying the boys in the sea: alone one man ... at swim, two boys. And of course, Mr Mack, the ex-Quartermaster Sergeant, he of the significant face and consequential airs, and behind of it all, his great fatherful love for his son.