The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1968: Anthony C. West, As Towns with Fire

1968 Anthony C. West, As Towns with Fire Born in County Down, Anthony C. West (1910–88) spent his childhood in rural County Cavan, a time and place which recur in his novels Rebel to Judgment (1962) and The Ferret Fancier (1963). The landscapes of these works are rich in natural detail, and are also the setting of primal experiences of love and violence, blood and soil, possession and isolation. A lush style and an attraction to archetypal intellectual frameworks distinguish West’s handling of his material. His rather small output also includes a collection of short stories and a fourth novel, The Native Moment (1961), set in bohemian Dublin. During the Second World War, West was a member of the Royal Air Force and saw intense action in the bombing of German cities as a navigator in the Pathfinder squadron led by Guy Gibson of ‘Dambusters’ fame. This experience provides As Towns with Fire with a number of impressive action sequences, as well as with notable tributes to the romance of aviation. Yet, even though this work is centrally concerned with questions of identity and of the standing of the individual at a time of collective crisis, it is only a contribution to the Irish autobiographical novel in a limited sense. For while the protagonist, Christopher MacMannan, is a native of the same part of Northern Ireland as West, and like him is an aspiring writer as well as, eventually, an RAF navigator , such items of personal history comprise only one component of his complex presence. As well as being an individual, MacMannan is also portrayed – and indeed is much given to thinking of himself – as man in history, a figure who has difficulty in retaining his individuality in the face of the historical moment’s compelling claims, resisting change even as he succumbs to it. His acute awareness of living at the intersection of personal desire and historical obligation not only highlights some key aspects of Northern Irish identity but also maps the cultural, psychological and existential components that make up the spirit of the wartime age. And it is typical of the author’s imaginative perspective that MacMannan is a navigator both literally and figuratively , in search of himself in a series of unpropitious places – with ‘one foot in Tir na nOg and the other up to the hock in nowhere’ (81), as one of his various descriptions of himself has it. The novel opens in London on New Year’s Eve 1939, a year that sees the aimless MacMannan achieving very little other than the 28 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 bedding of a succession of women who, in addition to putting up with his sexism, take him to various social gatherings where different views of the international situation are rehearsed. These set-pieces (which include a soirée at the home of Irish writer James Stephens) show MacMannan’s resistance to prevailing orthodoxies, his detachment from incipient war fever, and his commitment to thinking for himself. Speaking his own mind makes him appear awkward and out of place, showing him to be not only ‘an individualist’ (77) but to possess an alternative cultural identity to that of his metropolitan acquaintances, one formed by his rural Northern Irish childhood. From this background he retains a strong feeling for the natural world, a taste for English Romantic poetry, an appreciation of innocence and of outsiders who embody it, and a desire to transcend the bigotry fostered by institutional rigidity. When war eventually breaks out and his home place of Kilainey offers a retreat for himself, his wife Molly and their twin boys, MacMannan rejects it, though he is quite prepared to move to Ireland for the duration. The failure of a plan to live in Donegal leads to a sojourn in Belfast which not only includes an account of the ‘terrible beauty’ (270) of the city being bombed but also reports on the numbers from south of the border coming north to enlist – a fact not widely acknowledged when As Towns with Fire was first published. Life in Belfast is uncongenial – ‘this wee toun’s a Third Reich for years’ (279) – and soon becomes untenable. Broke, with an ailing marriage, his writing ambitions in ruins, MacMannan decides to join up, motivated more by the prospect of a steady income on which his family could live than by the call of loftier loyalties. Yet it is these loyalties which consume a good deal of his attention once he...