writing from the top class
All Names Have Been Changed By Claire Kilroy (Faber & Faber, £12.99)
Saturday May 16 2009
Claire Kilroy's title challenges readers to play a who's who guessing game, but there's more to this fine novel than spotting crudely concealed reality. Some names have indeed been changed, but not all. The republic of Trinity College Dublin remains insistently itself, scene of literary crimes and serious drinking, a place where mind-magic can defy the world outside its walls.
Back in 1985 its creative writing programme was directed by the acclaimed novelist PJ Glynn (no marks if you figure who he is modelled on). Glynn, a drunken vainglorious lout with a powerful lyrical imagination, is consumed by romantic longing and voraciously consumes everyone in his path. His reputation and his subject matter -- unsurprisingly, the self -- lure a straggle of would-be writers to his den. A sublime mockery of the cliched Irish writer, drunkenly verbose on paper and drunkenly morose everywhere else, he presides over his acolytes.
For their part, this knot of students is on a pilgrimage to a literary Lourdes, holding their breath for the miracles that will transform their miserably inept past into a shapely tale.
Declan is the narrator. At first glance he's a creep and a self-deluding chancer, all academic airs and graces, skulking on the edge of the group. His version of events is neither inspiring nor reliable. How can you trust someone who points out self-importantly the iambic cadence in his own sentences -- and gets it wrong? (Any pedant would tell you it's anapestic.)
How can you trust the tale when the teller continually misreads incidents and reactions? Declan chooses not to hear the mighty Glynn tell him he will never make the grade as a writer, and the examples of his work he shares with us lead us to agree. The funny thing is, he then confounds us all with this revealing account of a year on campus.
Declan's companions -- friends would be an overstatement -- are Antonia, lonely, chilly and feeling her age at 39; fey Faye, cowed by her violent husband; Aisling, full of passionate intensity; and Guinevere Wren, the nearest thing to a writer, who comes straight from the Camelot of Declan's imagination. They attempt to make sense of their small lives by writing them out and through frantic, unsatisfactory couplings. The nearest Declan gets to empathy is with a drug pusher from a flat adjoining his, but Declan does not do friendship.
There's something of Martin McDonagh's theatre in the gratuitous violence and easy treachery that abounds. Kilroy knows that laughter is sometimes the only response to desperation.
All Names Have Been Changed is truly remarkable. It does not just satirise stage-Irish writers: Kilroy spills their bag of writers' tricks before us, exposing cheap novelistic double crosses. She is a consummate novelist as well as a fearsome critic. Her plot is as taut and meticulous as any of Deirdre Madden's and her literary references light and unostentatious. Read this story for its witty uncompromising honesty and its dead-on dialogue.
Dr Mary Shine Thompson is dean at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. Four Courts Press has just issued The Fire in th' Flint: Essays on the Creative Imagination, which she edited, and which includes articles by Seamus Heaney and artist Bridget Riley
