Name an Irish-language novel that features German bombs going off in the North Strand, a would-be affair started in the Gaeltacht and continued in Bewley’s, a hero who attacks a colleague by lobbing a dictionary at his head, and an ending with the blunt trauma of a thriller. I couldn’t until I read Flood Tide by Séamus Ó Néill, which has just been translated into English and reissued by Mercier Press.
Originally published as Tonn Tuile in 1947, the novel covers the period running up to the Second World War (or in this world The Emergency) and continues into the mid-1940s.
The narrator, Liam White, a Northerner, works in an office in Dublin but is also a part-time writer and journalist with big literary ambitions. When the novel opens he’s on his honeymoon in Germany with his new wife, Eileen. Together they plan to make a life together that won’t fall into the “deadly listlessness ” of a traditional marriage. “We were to be free. We were not going to let marriage narrow or restrict our lives. Eileen was not going to be a wash-tub wife. . . we would make sure that marriage did not put a stop to her intellectual pursuits. She was to have time to read, to go to the theatre, to see art exhibitions,” Liam declares.
They move into a flat in Rathmines where they can afford the services of a maid. Liam notes that Eileen is a bad cook so this isn’t an altogether altruistic decision. “. . . in a way, I was glad that Eileen was not much of a cook. I never had the impression that women that were great housekeepers had any ambition to speak of,” he observes tartly. The couple have an easeful life, eating out, going to the theatre, reading, visiting family.
But all this changes when Eileen gets pregnant. Liam feels overlooked, but not by the presence of a new baby in the house. He is, in fact, a doting and proud father of their new daughter Bridget despite Eileen’s assertion that seeing a man carrying a child gave him ” a spineless look”. But Liam’s hopes for a marriage that goes beyond the stereotypical roles are dashed as Eileen takes to motherhood and thrifty housekeeping with a passion and swaps literature for detective stories. When after the birth of their second child, a son, Liam gives Eileen a book of Chekhov stories, he’s crushed to find it later stuffed down the back of a chair with a milk stain on page one.
The fracturing of the marriage is slow and corrosive. There are rows about money, there’s the ghost of an affair, a drunken scene at a dinner dance, and Liam’s failed play at the Abbey. In a lovely meta touch, Liam realises that the actor playing the main character (also called Liam) “was too stiff, too haughty and instead of delivering his lines with spiritual passion, he was just speech-making. The character was lifeless.”
Meanwhile the war makes itself felt in growing uncertainty as the state’s neutrality is tested. Liam builds an air raid shelter but it floods and is of no use. There are food shortages and sporadic bloodshed at home – in Europe there is much worse. Then comes the novel’s devastating denouement – the apex of the flood-tide of the title – which is so baldly understated that the reader almost misses it.
In fact, many of the novel’s major life events – the deaths of Liam’s mother and his mother-in-law (whom, much against the stereotypical pattern, Liam actively likes and admires) – are sidestepped or glossed over in favour of smaller, more intimate experiences that Liam recalls – the remembered taste of an ice cream as a child, or a random conversation with strangers on the train after a funeral.
My Irish is too rusty now to read a full novel in Irish. But I recall that there were at least half a dozen Irish texts on the Leaving Cert honours syllabus which I was able to read then. These included the now oft-excoriated Peig (I am one of those rare people who actually wasn’t allergic to poor old Peig Sayers), Gunna Cam ages Slabhra Óir by Seán Ó Tuama, a play of statecraft and strategy set in the 16th century or Tóriaocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, a story from the mythological Fenian Cycle. What most of these texts had in common was that they were predominantly about either the rural or the mythological world, or if they featured urban settings they were invariably in England and charted the experience of predominantly male emigrants in the early 20th century.
But there was nothing like Flood Tide. It’s a novel which upends all of those tropes – a middle-class, urban novel about romantic disenchantment.
The translation which is crisp, elegant and clean is by Séamus O Néill’s daughter, Eithne. The prose may be spare but the emotional world of the novel is rich and textured, the nuances of social class subtly rendered. There are political discussions around the Christmas turkey worthy of Joyce but there’s also talk of Dante, Tennyson and Byron. There’s some casual anti-Semitism; Liam candidly admits that he has “never liked them”, though the sight of hundreds of refugees fleeing Germany when he’s coming back from his honeymoon does chasten him temporarily.
There’s an acerbic account of the Irish language revival movement when Liam visiting the Gaeltacht becomes irritated by the academic types who dominate the scene. “They were trying to revive Irish, terrified that anyone would learn to speak it better than they did, persuaded that they had excellent Irish when in fact they had but crumbs.” Perhaps it was opinions like this that kept Ó Néill’s work off the school curriculum.
But now 80 years after it was written, Flood Tide is ready to reach a new, wider audience. Or readers like me who have the “cúpla focail” but couldn’t tackle a novel in Irish. With this impeccable new edition from Mercier, complete with striking cover design by Craig Carry, there’s no excuse not to read this mid-century modernist gem now.
See – https://www.mercierpress.ie/books/flood-tide-tonn-tuile/
mary morrissy 