by Elizabeth O'Conner
p. 1960
Despite being set in northern Australia, Elizabeth O’Conner’s
The Irishman is an inherently Irish
novel, as it is tragic and naturalistic and chiefly concerned with the sins of
the father. For awhile near the beginning, I kept forgetting it wasn’t set in
Ireland; what kept bringing me back to reality is the overwhelming presence of
racist undertones in response to the assortment of aboriginal characters.
At its heart, The
Irishman is a classic bildungsroman, or coming of age story. Young Michael
Doolan—twelve years old at novel’s start—is a shadow of his father, Paddy
Doolan, the notorious, stoic and often drunk teamster in an early 20th
century remote Australian town. To Michael, Paddy can do no wrong and he stands
tall in the boy’s eyes, in spite of his cowering mother and rebellious older
brother Will, who hates his father’s uncivilized, selfish ways. Michael sees
none of this though, enamored as he is with the hero his father represents. To
the reader, the cracks are already beginning to show but to Michael, it
understandably takes a bit more time and perspective, and it all starts when
Paddy abandons his family about halfway through the book. Michael, determined
to truly know his father, sets out to find him, but it takes him a long time
and a lot of trouble to get there and when he finally does, he’s not the same
boy that set out.
Michael is growing up in a rough, constantly changing world.
He often straddles the line between the old ways of his father and the new
method which his brother—exiled from his home until his father exiles himself—later
adopts. The contrast between the old and the young is felt and there is no
clear emphasis on which way is the best way, but it is clear that with the advent of the automobile and other
technologies, the old ways, for better or worse, are dying. In both his chosen
profession and his place in his boy’s heart, Paddy Doolan is slowly becoming
obsolete. It is a tough theme to wrestle with and O’Conner handles it with
grace and beauty. This would have been a novel worth reading again and exploring
its complex themes... if not for the casual racism.
It starts somewhat innocuously. Will, having left home for a
job wrangling cattle at a nearby station called Timbooran, finds himself in
thrall with a black aboriginal servant girl who works for the station manager’s
wife. The girl—for lack of a proper name, simply called Bo-Bo, a pile of
gibberish she uttered when they found her as a baby—is educated and appears to
be a favorite of the missus, and it is her unusual forwardness that both
repulses and attracts Will to her. But he cannot start a proper relationship
because people will talk so when he knocks the girl up then shuts her down
refusing to acknowledge it, poor Bo-Bo throws herself off a cliff to her death.
Will not only moves on, but his life gets infinitely better. I kept waiting for
the novel to revisit the Bo-Bo story and Will’s own tale of growing up and
accepting his sins but it never does and—unless you count getting his face
punched in by Paddy, which anyone could see coming a mile away—Will never even receives his comeuppance.
The only reason I could summon for this awkward and
unpleasant side story is to draw a parallel between Will and Mr. Dalgliesh, the
station manager Michael comes to work for who alters the course of Michael’s
life. Dalgliesh, a stern, taciturn, humorless man, is at first a bad match for
wild, charismatic Michael, who is constantly planning to escape this work
detail. Dalgliesh gives Michael grunt work, is moody and laconic, and at one
point retaliates against a cattle-stealing neighbor by murdering 200 of his cattle in what can only be considered the act of a sociopath, and yet his ‘darkest’
secret is the implicated affair with his aboriginal servant Paula. I spent far
too long trying to find the part where Paula was revealed to be a sympathetic
character and Michael learned to get over his racism. Sure, she harbored a crush on a married man, but the only sin anyone was concerned with was that Paula dared to be familiar with white people. From the moment she appears, O’Conner’s language makes it very clear that there is something
sinister about Paula and Dalgliesh. We are never given an opportunity to view
her situation in a sympathetic light... not until Paula is brutally murdered by
a frustrated and off her rocker Mrs. Dalgliesh near the end. Michael hears of
these events later and shrugs it off, thinking Paula probably didn’t deserve it
but it’s no matter because the black characters are treated as disposable and their
loss is never felt. Michael even goes back to work for Dalgliesh in the end, having seen that his way was 'best.'
All of this I might
have overlooked, but then O’Conner had to throw in one last far-too-forward
black servant who overstepped his boundaries. This one had the audacity to try to tell others how to do
their job and for that he got his face punched in by a pissed off kid with
missing daddy issues and no one felt bad for him at all. Look, I know this book
was written in the fifties, so I ought not to be surprised, but the dogged racism
really distracted me from the whole experience and pulled me out of the events.
They weren’t even necessary to tell
the story of boy and man and that rocky path called adolescence. It’s as if O’Conner
just really had some racist things to say and invented a venue from which to
spout them.
All of this criticism and I haven’t even gotten to the part
where the white women (the only ones we’re supposed to like, apparently), are
all timid, fearful messes accepting of verbally and physically abusive
relationships. For a book written by a woman, it sure does a disservice to
female writers, and yet it still won the Miles Franklin Award in 1960.
I suppose it’s fitting that I’m reading a novel with outdated,
politically incorrect language and attitude, when the underlying theme is about
accepting one’s obsoleteness in a changing world.
A couple questions:
ReplyDeleteIs Will a criminal? You mention at numerous points that he's a cattle rustler, which suggests there's a lot of thieving going on, though suggesting that he has an actual job doing it means he's other involved in some major criminal enterprise, or you're misusing "rustler" where perhaps you meant "wrangler." I'd call it a minor point, but it was confusing for the first few paragraphs of trying to parse your description of his character when I thought he was a criminal.
Perhaps this is the inherent difference between reading a novel as a piece of history as well as a story and just reading it from a presentist perspective, but I think the racism angle is one of the more interesting points. Is she emphasizing the racism as a means of criticizing it, as so many Post-Colonial and American authors have? The Miles Franklin Award is given to the novel that not only achieves high literary merit, but also displays Australian life true to form. Therefore, one could argue that by completely removing racism from a decidedly racist time, she would be creating an incredibly ahistorical white-washing not true to the time and place, and not worth of the award. I guess it all depends on how the Australians themselves viewed their relationship with Aboriginals, and how they felt about racism.
Thank you, I fixed the [one] part where I said 'rustling' and changed it to 'wrangling' because I did confuse the terms. I would be no good as a cowpoke.
ReplyDeleteAs for the racist angle, I do not believe it was highlighted with the intention of criticizing. Art is--as we well know--subjective so opinions may vary, but I personally think O'Conner was writing with an attitude prevalent at the time. It is one thing to whitewash history by presenting all the servants as misunderstood angels so as to be politically correct, and another to present real human beings--good and bad--who did the best they could despite not getting a fair chance from their white peers. O'Conner did neither of these. All her black characters either had no voice or were presented as strange and presumptuous and were criticized for rising above their place.
Like I said, opinions may vary but I kept waiting for the part when Michael would grow up and start treating the aboriginal characters like human beings and it never happened. Given that this was written in the fifties, in that sense I suppose O'Conner did write an accurate portrayal of Australian life in those parts, and she would have found no opposition to her opinions.
Past that, you'd have to read it yourself to form an opinion on the matter.