REVIEW: Ghost Light. Joseph O'Connor

Ghost Light Joseph O’Connor, Harvill Secker, 240pp, £16.99

There is a long tradition of experiment and innovation in the Irish novel. From Laurence Sterne to James Joyce, authors inhabiting a fiercely oral culture and writing in an imposed imperial tongue have rejected purer English novel-forms – well-sculpted characters; the unity of time, place, and action. Joseph O’Connor locates himself squarely within this tradition, writing extravagant, polyphonic, self-consciously epic books about Ireland: its people and its past, good and grim.

His previous two novels, Star of the Sea (2003) and Redemption Falls (2007), both took historical episodes - the Irish potato famine and the American Civil war - as backdrops for multi-strand narratives, deploying an enormous range of textual and typographical forms: first-person narratives, letters, verses, ballads, newspaper clippings, posters, advertisements and cartoons.

Ghost Light, the story of the love affair between the playwright J M Synge and his lead female actress, Molly Allgood, marks at once a continuation in this vein, and a departure from it.

Again O’Connor has created a rich bricolage of voices, oscillating between present and past and shifting from second to third person as Molly, now sixty-five, drunken and destitute, wanders through a windswept London in 1952, remembering her days with Synge. One chapter is a “half imagined play” written by Molly herself. Another is “a letter to The Times”, penned by a stranger.

Again, verbal eloquence abounds. A cart is “drawn by a shabby quarter horse piebald whose lugubrious clop draws children from the yards.” The clipped patois of Dublin’s underclass is meticulously rendered, so too the tauter idiom of well-to-do Synge and his fellow theatre directors W B Yeats and Lady Gregory. The book reads beautifully.

And yet something is different here, discordant. While O’Connor’s previous books excelled precisely in the space between history and fiction, telling imaginary stories located in true historical contexts, Ghost Light is all too faithful to fact, emasculated by what is known irrefutably about Synge’s life. Anecdotes from the playwright’s letters are inserted jarringly into Molly’s remembrances, doing little to advance our understanding of Molly or Synge’s character. And where there is embellishment, we are liable to doubt O’Connor’s interpretation of the facts. We wonder whether the writer of The Playboy of the Western World, which sparked nationalist riots during its first showing at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1907, would really have felt that “the hatred of the crowd means nothing”.

In short, O’Connor has overreached with this book. It is too ambitious. Informed readers will be inclined to treat it as impressionistic biography, puzzling over why there is so little mention of Molly Allgood’s two husbands and sons. Such is the resistance of fact to fiction it seems, even when limned in such exquisite terms.