THE new edition of Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera subtitles it A Tale of Modern Ireland. The late Anthony Burgess, in his review, called the first edition of Proxopera in 1977 not only “very timely” but also “nearly flawless as a piece of literature”. But though Burgess called Proxopera’s narrative “simple”, he perhaps failed to see the extent to which this short novel’s story is as packed with meaning as the potentially lethal milk churn in the story is with explosive.
Songs wove their way through Ben Kiely’s life and fiction and Proxopera begins with the snatch of a song – a comic hyperbole of a song that serves to darken the action it introduces. It returns later to do heavier duty: mingling with the urgent memories of the man (an elderly ex-teacher called Binchey) chosen against his will to carry the IRA bomb to its target destination.
Violence and atrocity for Kiely were the ultimate dramatic irony in his world, undercutting the ideal beauty, tranquillity and happiness of the countryside and the country people when left to their own devices.
Violence and atrocity are also violations of locality. Kiely’s fiction is unthinkable without actual rural place-names and each place-name does not merely identify and locate but also exacts the responsibility of appreciation, of respect, of civility: there is something close to place-worship in his fiction. The soiling or sullying of things the author holds dear: this is a recurring transgression in Kiely’s entire oeuvre.
The locality of the opening song (and close to the action of Proxopera) is Lough Muck, near Omagh, and no sooner are two lines of the song quoted than we are told: “That lake would never be the same again”. (The reasons for which the reader will find out but not immediately.) In Kiely’s world, places are changed utterly by malign human agency.
That things will never be the same again, that atrocity is game-changing for the worse, is a refrain in Proxopera. In the phrasing of virtually the first line of the book I heard the echo of the last line of Guests of the Nation, Frank O’Connor’s great 1931 story: “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again”.
But it is the IRA volunteer who says this in O’Connor’s story, the perpetrator, and if he is nevertheless an oddly sympathetic narrator, this says something about the difference between the original Troubles (even from O’Connor’s vantage-point of 1931) and the so-called Troubles of the modern era.
A sympathetic Provo killer would be a bigger ask. The only sympathetic IRA activists of late are the brooding and unwilling volunteer in Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Cal (1983) and the wracked and self-tortured one in Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game (1992) which was in fact inspired by O’Connor’s story. Proxopera is devoid of any such sympathy.
Just as telling, the hostages in Proxopera are local people, not British soldiers as in O’Connor’s story, and this is not just a transgression against the tribe but also a marker of how, in the author’s tacit opinion, and Binchey’s express opinion, the IRA of the 1970s and after morally uncoupled itself from the people whose cause they believed themselves to be advancing by terror.
I was surprised to realise that I first read Proxopera 38 years ago. I would have expected that interval to have been much shorter than that between Proxopera and Kiely’s Counties of Contention, his first book which was published in 1945. They are worlds apart, those two books, both in terms of the political landscape and of Kiely’s authorial persona.
I have just re-read Counties of Contention and I found it something of a key to Proxopera. Moreover, I think it an enviably brilliant book, written when the author was all of 25. It is the work of a journalist, historian and cultural critic who is wholly and precociously at ease with his material.
In Counties of Contention he is maintains a melodious song of bi-sectarian unity which in Kiely’s ensuing works became a dominant strain. Proxopera is a work as tightly channelled as a conduit, pressurised by anger and disappointment at what became of his earlier hopes for Irish nationalism at the hands of terrorists, perhaps a reluctant unacknowledged epilogue to Counties of Contention.
A main plank of Counties of Contention could no longer bear the weight of history: that diehard unionists were invariably the instigators and perpetuators of violence. The sobering realisation of this is reflected, I believe, in Proxopera.
His indictment of “the men of blood” is scorching. The gallant men and women of Easter 1916 have become worse than the Mafia; soldiers of the republic “have blighted the landscape, corrupted custom, blackened memory, drawn nothing from history but hatred and poison.”
True, there is in Proxopera, as there is in Cal, Guests of the Nation and The Crying Game, the small consoling difference in culpability between the hapless stooge of a terrorist (the attendant foot-soldier) and the ruthless strategist or wilful perpetrator. But this weighs little in the scales of hurt, pain, loss and injury that were visited for 30 years on a small population. And now on one’s own.
If I think this republication is timely, it is not just for literary reasons. Some of those Benedict Kiely accused in 1977 have come in from the heat, and the violence and atrocities have receded, no doubt to the pain of many surviving victims. Kiely's dedication in Proxopera reads: “In Memory of the Innocent Dead”. A fresh accusation seems perfectly in order to me, lest we forget.
Counties of Contention ends with the author’s eloquent daydream of how things might be in Ireland: it bears resemblance to Eamon de Valera’s pastoral vision with the seamless addition of east Belfast industry. This daydream becomes in Proxopera a daytime nightmare, an unreal unfolding of terror. I will leave the reader to discover how this powerful tale, by turns sorrowful, angry, withering and lyrical, finds the light of day again.
:: John Wilson Foster is a writer and literary critic and an honorary research fellow at Queen's University Belfast. Proxopera by Benedict Kiely is published by Turnpike Books, priced £8.
