Understandably,
a casual reader of Ferdia Mac Anna’s recently reissued first novel, The Last of the High Kings, might think
of it in Joycean terms. Originally
published in 1991, this novel of youthful development seems, on the surface, to
share some essential thematic territory with the spirit of non serviam articulated famously by James Joyce’s
quasi-autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man: “I will not serve that in
which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my
church.”
Yet, even aside from the fact that he is not cast in the role of
“the artist”—that is, in the mold of the self-consciously sensitive individual
committed, in his struggle against the values of a repressive society, to
deploying the Joycean strategy of “silence, exile and cunning”—Mac Anna’s
protagonist Frankie Griffin emerges as much more, or at least much other, than
a late-twentieth century variation on Joyce’s Stephen. Set in the north-of-Dublin community of
Howth in the summer of 1977, Mac Anna’s novel is ultimately very much a product
of its own place and time and is infused with a comic spirit that distances it
both tonally and stylistically from Joyce’s signature ironic treatment of his
Dublin-centered creation.
Not
unusually for a first novel (and in that regard not unlike Joyce’s Portrait), The Last of the High Kings is also infused with many details drawn
from the author’s own life. As Mac
Anna registers his childhood and his adolescence in The Last of the Bald Heads, his memoir published in 2004, these
details include not only Howth as setting but also essential elements that
propel the narrative of the novel: a domineering and eccentric mother, a
frequently absent father, a male youth longing for individual identity in a
community and culture (social, scholastic, political) demanding blind
conformity to established codes of conduct. As Mac Anna acknowledges in recounting the family’s move
from Killiney to Howth, even the novel’s title derives from a refrain that he
endured throughout his growing-up years: “On the first day, the local kids came
around to check us out. ‘Where are
you from?’ one asked. ‘We come
from the High Kings of Ireland,’ I replied, repeating what Mother had told me
to say. The kids were not
impressed. A girl said that she
was going to ask around about us.
She reckoned we were from Cabra.”
In
fact, one of the central tensions of the novel
involves Frankie’s mother’s designating him for greatness from a very young
age: “At home, Ma told him he was a special boy, descended from the
ancient Celtic warriors and High Kings.
She said there was powerful blood in his veins because he was the
firstborn son. Someday he’d be a
great man, she promised; he’d be a professor of history, then President of
Ireland. That kind of talk made
him feel great. Every time Ma
leaned over him, he felt warm and secure and lightheaded. It was like being bathed in his own
personal spotlight.” But by the
time Frankie reaches his teenage years, such puerile gratification has been
replaced by his interest in girls, drink, and rock ’n’ roll: “At home Ma gave
out to him about everything. She
said his hair was a disgrace. She
didn’t like his clothes or his habits or his friends.” Clearly, Frankie has trouble living up
to his mother’s expectations for a descendent of “the High Kings of Tara” whose
“bloodline is one of the most revered in Europe.”
Ultimately,
the tension between Frankie and his mother centers on her “politics”: a diehard
nationalist and a local activist in the Fianna Fáil party, she actively
despises any and all Irish Protestants, whom she labels sweepingly as
“Brits.” Indeed, the climactic
confrontation of the novel involves Frankie being accosted by his mother for
his burgeoning romantic (and sexual) relationship with a local Protestant
beauty, Jayne Wayne, whose mother happens to be from Belfast and whose father
happens to be from Essex in England.
“No Brit bitch is going to come between an Irish Celtic warrior mother
and her eldest son,” she launches her verbal assault on Frankie: “Who would
have thought that my own flesh and blood would have turned out to be a dirty
Brit-lover. You’re as bad as the
dirty Black and Tans. What about
the 1916 Rising when Jayne’s father’s countrymen shot dead thousands of
innocent Irish revolutionaries?
What about Father Murphy’s glorious Rising of 1798? What about Wolfe Tone and poor old
Robert Emmet? Look what they did
to Parnell.” She then proceeds to
assault Frankie physically, pelting him with whatever she finds close at hand,
starting with a bronze bust of Cuchulainn from the mantelpiece. Frankie retreats out the front door and
down the drive: “When he looked back, he saw Ma in the light from the open
doorway, darting in and out of the house, hurling objects out into the darkness
after him. A book clunked onto the
tarmac. Then a picture frame
smashed on the path. His brand new
Stranglers album went gliding over his head into Figgis’s garden. Within moments, every album he owned
seemed to be flying through the air.
He recognized the sleeve of ‘The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore
East’ just before it thudded into the telegraph pole above his head and went
spiraling off into the blackness.”
Tellingly,
of course, the mother’s passionate nationalism reflects the spirit of the place
and the time that Mac Anna chooses for his novel’s setting. Born in 1955, Mac Anna sees both
himself and his younger protagonist as products, or victims, of the nearly
six-decade domination of the Irish political and economic landscapes—and thus
of the social and cultural landscapes as well—by Éamon de Valera, nationalist
rebel, later Prime Minister, and later still President of Ireland. Founded by de Valera in 1926, Frankie’s
mother’s beloved Fianna Fáil party set the tone of social conservatism and
lingering republican nationalism that defined the heart of the twentieth
century in Ireland. Frankie’s
resistance to his mother’s political bent thus represents, even in this novel
characterized by hilariously comical scenes and dialogue, a serious indictment
by Mac Anna of the spiritually dreary times that he himself grew up in and that
continued to characterize both Dublin and the countryside up until the economic
boom of the 1990s known as “the Celtic Tiger.”
The Last of the High
Kings was adapted by Gabriel Byrne and David Keating as a film, directed by
Keating, with the same title in 1996.
While featuring cameo appearances by Byrne, Stephen Rea, and Colm
Meaney, the film version—blandly re-titled Summer
Fling when released in North America—has mostly a North American cast
playing Irish roles, including Jared Leto as Frankie and Catherine O’Hara as
his mother. It falls short of
being a cinematic must-see.
But
reissued by New Island Books as part of their “Modern Irish Classics” series, The Last of the High Kings definitely
belongs in the “classic” category.
Its update of the Irish coming-of-age novel etched so indelibly by Joyce
in A Portrait rings as utterly true
as Joyce’s to the period of Irish life that it responds to and reflects and
refracts. Setting the novel in his
native Howth, a fishing village located on a promontory nosing into the
Irish Sea nine miles north of Dublin’s city center, Mac Anna absolves himself
of writing in the long literary shadow cast by “Joyce’s Dublin,” a favorite
playground of casual readers and Joyce scholars alike. He also absolves himself of having to
engage with the more complex social and cultural landscape of “the heart of the
Hibernian metropolis,” allowing him to focus on Frankie’s particular domestic
situation as the window opening onto the larger world of modern Ireland.
At the end of A
Portrait, Joyce has his
protagonist reject his literal father to embrace his mythic father, the Greek
inventor Dædalus: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good
stead.” True to the prevailing
comic temper of his novel, Ferdia Mac Anna ends The Last of the High Kings with Frankie Griffin reconciled, at least
for now, with his mother, and he even joins her and his siblings in greeting
their prodigal father returning from one of his long absences: “‘Wave,
everybody, wave,’ Ma said, her face shining. ‘Show your father what a great family he has.’ Everyone waved.”
