Ghosts and Lightning - Trevor Byrne

Sisyphus by Titian, 1549

I needed to finish Ghosts and Lightning by Trevor Byrne. When I began reading it, I found it so easy to set it aside in favour of another and I did so several times. (I think there’s something to be said about a book to which you can so easily return after long absences.)

Set in Dublin, modern day, the first-person narrative of the life of a twenty-something man is disturbing and sad. Denny Cullen wallows: drugs, alcohol, and unemployment; violence, bigotry, and death; suicide, loneliness, and poverty as well as filth and grief. But this isn’t dystopia; it's simply an ugly reality.

This man needs a change. In fact, each character in the novel, to varying degrees of awareness, needs change. Only Pajo, a longstanding friend of the narrator, seems positive about his situation. At least, he isn’t as despondent as Denny and his relentless pursuit of the religious experience counterbalances Denny’s godlessness.

Not surprisingly, Pajo both annoys and inspires awe in his friend:

He’s mad into this kind o thing; life after death, ghosts, yetis, any and all religions. Basically, anythin there’s fuck all proof for, Pajo’ll believe it. Almost like he’s definin himself against the world in some way.

I think Pajo’s belief-seeking faith provides him with a certitude that Denny does respect even if he doesn’t believe that he could have it for himself.

Denny, in contrast, finds little by way of supernatural motivation or guidance and certainly no comfort. When we consider the appearance of a stuttering priest at a funeral (his message makes no sense to our narrator) and the fact that Pajo’s relentless, religious optimism bothers Denny, then we are as certain as he that nobody’s god will scoop him up to safety, either.

And Denny often muses, unpretentiously, about the nature of stories and the function of narrative in our lives. Mostly, there’s the sense that stories and their sources are to be questioned but the possibility that some stories ring true objectively – ghosts, gods? -- is never entirely discounted, either.

But it seems to me that narrative in itself is a transcendent experience and individual story might be a form of mysticism or mystical experience. I don’t know if Trevor Byrne agrees, but when Denny explains:

Stories though, man. The way they work on yeh. They’re a kind of spell, aren’t they? Or a prayer, maybe, some o them. An article of faith. How the fuck else can yeh make sense o things, like?

It sounds like transcendence to me.

Conversations about fairies, banshees, and the wee folk abound as do the legends of pre-Christian Ireland in Cúchulainn and Finn MacCumhail (McCool); Buddhism and Catholicism are also dominant. I love the appearance of so many kinds of stories. In addition to the above Irish and specifically religious ones, gossip, drinking tales, jokes and even Jack Frost, appear. And, as Denny says, “Stories don’t ever actually end, do they? They go on.”

But there is the sense that the author wants us to examine our tales in a philosophical context. We need stories – and Denny says so -- but why?

It’s not just all fuckin . . . like . . . evolution or wharrever. Cells and impulses. There’s got to be stories as well. This happened and then this happened and then this happened. And it all meant this. It all meant this.

The stories in our lives – those told to ourselves, to others and those that just seem to have followed us all our lives – give life meaning which, our narrator seems to sense, is otherwise lacking.

We find, consequently, strong themes: personal responsibility, action, the necessity of defining ourselves and isolation. We decide which stories make the most sense to us as well as who – and where -- we want to be; and we decide that we are, ultimately, alone in determining these things.

The novel’s messages call to mind Sartre and Camus and make me want to revisit Being and Nothingness and Myth of Sisyphus, respectively, as two decades have lapsed since I last read these. They also remind me of Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game which I read at the end of 2009 (in which Camus’s work actually explicitly appears).

I love this novel but love it in retrospect. I strongly suspect that there’s so much more to it that I haven’t here mentioned or even considered yet. I think it bears thinking about for some time.

There's seamlessness and everything hangs together so well that I have to admire the final product even if it isn't exactly what I wanted. In fact, there isn't anything about the characters that I could not believe: The strength of Denny's own voice is unwavering throughout and each character eventually confronts the future and the question of personal responsibility in his own way.

Molly and the Middle East

I'm lying in bed with my latest book propped up against my knees. A sickly Molly is lying beside me because her illness has been concerning despite antibiotics. I'm exhausted but she's not tired.

"Molly, you need to go to sleep. I'm doing research."

She loves to "do research" with me. So, really wanting her to go to sleep, I realize I shouldn't have said this but, oh well. You can't unring a bell.

"So, tell me about that fancy pen of yours," she says, smiling up at me. It's often easy to forget that she's only two but, at this moment, the fact that she's only two has hit me. Hard.

"It's a highlighter," I explain, a sense of dread creeping up on me because I have taught her not to write in or otherwise destroy books. Could I really end up unravelling a couple of years' worth of her learning in this regard, end up changing her relationship with books?

"How does it work? How do you draw with it?"

"Well, you don't draw with it. Sometimes, in special circumstances, in special books, for special reasons like research, you use it to mark words that you want to remember."

She's really happy to learn, I think, that she may one day be able to write in books and she asks me to show her what highlighting a word actually means.

It's not a "dry" read by any means -- a memoir of travels in a Middle Eastern country -- but I can't imagine a two-year-old enjoying it or that I may be able to edit effectively as I read. But she wants me to read aloud.

"It's about a country called Iran," I tell her. "It's part of the Middle East."

"Could we travel to there?"

I pause. I don't want to tell her about visas and the difficulties one apparently encounters while trying to secure them. She is, after all, only two.

"Yes, we can one day."

She smiles and hugs me. For a moment, I imagine the two of us travelling to the far reaches of the globe together.

"We can travel there now, tho', in our imaginations. We can pretend we're there. Books help us do that. You can go all over the world by reading books."

And I start reading to her. There's really nothing obviously inappropriate in the passages I've reached thus far and, when something questionable arises, I omit it. If she notices, she doesn't let on. She listens attentively as the narrator recounts how his faith in humanity has been restored following an act of kindness by locals.

Time has stopped for a brief period. I'm no longer thinking that it doesn't feel like 8:30 at night; I no longer feel exhausted. As the story escapes my mouth and the words fall and settle between us, there's a calm sense that she and I have started something that we'll always love to do together.

Notes / Reading this week

Because I can't read just one book at a time, I have all these loose ends that need to be tied up. (So don't believe everything you read on a sidebar). I'm closer to finishing The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine than I was last week.

The only problem that I have with this novel is that I can't read it casually (which degree of intensity would really suit my lifestyle). It seems as if every paragraph has embedded within it an observation, an analogy, a metaphor -- and not in an undesirable way -- that stops me in my tracks and forces me to re-examine the preceding passages. I'm not well-versed in the history of Lebanon, having to draw sometimes as much from the common cultural sense of "Middle East" (unfortunately) and from my friendship with a family that fled the troubled nation when I was very young as I draw from my past reading experiences. But maybe this isn't as much of an obstacle as I worried it could be. In May 2008, in a review in the New York Times, Lorraine Adams wrote:

If any work of fiction might be powerful enough to transcend the mountain of polemic, historical inquiry, policy analysis and reportage that stands between the Western reader and the Arab soul, it’s this wonder of a book — a book not about a jihadi but a hakawati (Arabic for storyteller). 'Listen,' Rabih Alameddine invites. 'Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.'

In the beginning, rapt by details of Osama's (the narrator's) return to his country of origin, I was thirsty for images of modern Lebanon as seen through the eyes of one who had lived through harsher times there. Now, I find myself adrift between the ancient times of legend and my sense of the modern country and it doesn't bother me because the story is captivating.

I see the parallel that the author draws between the story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham, and the story of his grandfather's life, and I note the differences. In this way, I am at the will of Alameddine and not just because he directs my journey -- I've come under a spell of timelessness that he has deftly cast:

'The Hakawati' uses one of the oldest forms of storytelling, the frame tale. Western readers know it from 'The Canterbury Tales,' but the device precedes Chaucer by well over a thousand years, originating in Sanskrit texts known variously as the 'Panchatantra,' 'The Fables of Bidpai' or 'Tales of Kalila and Dimna.' As Doris Lessing notes in her introduction to the most recent English translation, one version of the Sanskrit framing narrative has Alexander the Great enlisting an Indian sage to reform a cruel potentate by telling him stories. In another, an Indian king uses the stories to arouse the curiosity of his three sons, whose brains have gone soft from privilege. Whatever the original frame, the history of the whole collection is a record of the cross-fertilization of cultures. Through storytelling, the conquered and the conquering can become as close as family.

I'll admit that I don't usually read reviews before reading a book (almost never), but you only stand to gain when a reviewer encapsulates an idea more succinctly and to a greater depth than you yourself could. And, again, I'm in unfamiliar territory because my exposure to Chaucer at university was scant at best. Regretfully, I can't riff on the cultural significance of story-telling through the ages, other than to surmise that mores and value systems are heritable and that the story-teller, among other things, is an agent therefor.

I'm happy just to sit right back and listen to a tale (or two) unfold because the voice is mellifluous and mesmerizing.