The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1973: Vincent Banville, An End to Flight

Jürgen Kamm, ‘Jennifer Johnston’, in Rüdiger Imhof (ed.), Contemporary Irish Novelists (Tübingen: Narr, 1990), pp. 193–206 Also Published in 1972 Aidan Higgins, Balcony of Europe; Brian Moore, Catholics; Edna O’Brien, Night; Paul Smith, Annie (reissued in 1975 as Summer Sang in Me) 1973 Vincent Banville, An End to Flight A native of Wexford town, Banville (b. 1940) is best known as both a crime writer and an author of children’s books. His work in those genres has contributed to broadening the range and conception of Irish writing. In An End to Flight, originally published under the pseudonym Vincent Lawrence, the author draws on four years spent teaching in Nigeria during the Biafran war (1967–70). The novel was reissued in 2002 with an ending rewritten to reflect the influx of Nigerian immigrants to Ireland and the continuing story of Biafra as embodied in the execution of the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The town of Ogundizzy in Biafra (the former province of eastern Nigeria) may have a school, a hospital and the Welfare Hotel, but as a domicile – a place to settle in, a community with a future – it represents one of the senses of a dead end that the novel’s title connotes. At least that is how Michael Painter, an Irish teacher at the town’s mission school, has come to view the place. Yet the flight which brought him there from Dublin was not merely a matter of escape. It initially contained elements of uplift and a fresh perspective which produced in Painter a certain idealism and enthusiasm for his new responsibilities. But he has not been able to sustain this outlook. In familiar expatriate style, he keeps referring to Ireland as home, and retains such Irish practices as going regularly to Mass and dining in the sweltering noon on bacon and cabbage. Positive change has led to sameness and time’s attrition . To Painter, his teaching has now become ‘merely a job, something to occupy the hours between eight and one, an exercise to prevent the mind from succumbing to the green deliquescent fungus’ (17). Increasingly seedy, derelict in his professional obligations, and given to drink, Painter seems in the process of turning into a facsimile of one of Graham Greene’s minor colonial functionaries or some similar version of that modern citizen of the world, superfluous man, conscious to just about the point of moral inanition of his dislocated 46 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 state and of his incapacity to do anything about it. He is unwilling to share the things of the spirit available from the local priest, Cork-born Father Manton. And he seems unable to act on his interest in Anne Siena, an American nurse at the local hospital. Stranded between the spiritual and physical forms of service, ritual and social structure embodied by those two fellow-expatriates, it is hardly surprising when Ben Nzekwe, an Ibo friend from Painter’s Dublin days, concludes, ‘I think you have really reached a point of no return’ (210). The outbreak of war between the federal Nigerian government and the secessionist Ibo people of Biafra brings predictable changes to Ogundizzy. Eventually the town is evacuated. Anne and Father Manton both leave, and Painter is more obviously on his own than ever. His decision to stay put ignores the instructions of his superior, the local bishop, and he feels unmoved by the threat of those particularly intimate forms of violence and treachery peculiar to civil war. Indeed, he sees in the hostilities an opportunity to rekindle the spirit that brought him to Nigeria in the first place. Or so he claims in one of a series of extended, complicated and lacerating conversations with Ben in which his friend rejects Painter’s plea ‘to travel a road that is going somewhere ’ (210). In the course of these exchanges, Ben not only unsparingly exposes Painter’s personal weaknesses but also associates him with the generally false and parasitical European presence in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Although Painter claims that ‘I have dreamed of freedom, just as you Ibos have dreamed of it. It is my war as much as yours’ (220), he is plainly incapable of experiencing the war as Ben does. There is no indication that he detects in his friend’s acceptance of bloodshed as a necessary prelude to nationhood, and in his understanding of the conflict as an expression of youth and power, echoes of...