BOOK REVIEW : Coming to Grips With History of ‘Motherland’

Motherland by Timothy O’Grady (Henry Holt: $19.95; 230 pages).

A story is a ride; a parable is a taxi ride with the meter issuing a steady reminder of what is being collected from us. The ride had better be worth it.

There are some enthralling bits of landscape in Timothy O’Grady’s ornately related Irish jaunt. But for a lot of the time, the main movement is the clock ticking away: Parable, parable.

A fat, self-indulgent, oddly infantile narrator, who lives with his mother in Dublin, comes home after leaving in a drunken rage. The apartment is empty. Steam fills it from a hot water tap left running; there is a smell of mildew and rot. Only the mother’s pet monkey, starving, filthy and furious, remains.

There is also a book, a collection of documents starting in the 12th Century and extending into modern times. They are the records, century by century, of the Synnott family. The narrator reads the chronicle--it is his family’s. He also tracks down Decklin Synnott, a gnomic old man who, as we learn, is the narrator’s grandfather and may know where his mother has gone.

They start out on a quest, accompanied by the monkey and Decklin’s poodle. They have made a compact. Decklin will help the narrator look for his mother. In turn, the narrator, born with webbed fingers and the gift of second sight, will help Decklin find 12 missing pages of the family book, hidden somewhere in Ireland.

What is in the Synnott chronicle, what the narrator and Decklin recall of their lives, and what happens on their pilgrimage and afterward--all these form the body of “Motherland.” As for the meaning, it is in the title.

Pulpy, self-pitying, overweight, alcoholic, mother-fixated, sexually prim, ignorant and sentimental, the narrator is the Irish people. His mother is Ireland herself, part farrow-gobbler, part Mother Machree, and above all, necessary and elusive. Old Decklin is the teacher; his book, Irish history. Through the ordeals and riddles of their quest, the narrator will grasp his history, come to terms with it, overcome it and, finally, after a millennium of pain and evasion, be joined in understanding with his own soil.

Throughout, the recurring symbol is doubleness. Webbed hands are the mark of the amphibian--land and water--Decklin tells his pupil; and they betoken his second sight. Eight hundred years earlier, Hugh, the second of the Synnott lineage, had the same stigma and the same gift.

Decklin, the sage, finds his double in Bertrand de Paor, who accompanied Hervey and Milo Synnott across to Ireland in the 12th Century to back the Irish king of Leinster in reclaiming his throne. He helps them build their castle and, driven out by an Anglo-Norman baron, he becomes prophet and bard to their wandering tribe. The narrator’s mother has her double in Emer, mother of Hugh. Found dying at the end of the book, mother turns out to have had a twin sister.

Behind all the doubling, of course, lies the image of divided Ireland. Past and present feed into each other. Decklin knows every spot in Ireland where blood has been shed; the pilgrimage will go from bloodshed to bloodshed, from Norman’s swords to the United Irishman swinging from ropes under a Liffey bridge, to the contemporary British Army.

“I think you are a repository of unpleasant facts,” the narrator protests to Decklin at the outset. He squalls like a baby for his mother. “It was all the little things--the way she kept me tidy and peaceful, the way she sang to me when I had a bad night. She used to clean between my toes for me because I couldn’t reach them.”

Decklin mothers him briefly, gives him a bath, washes his toes. The sage dresses him in a white robe and gives him the tonsure of the old Celtic scholars. But the pair will harden as they walk through the land; the narrator will grow lean and brown, his mystical images will recede and he will substitute knowledge, love and fellowship for them.

When his teacher is killed by an Army patrol, he is able to go on alone. The killing takes place in the South, so it is not clear just what Army is involved. The time is the prophetic and therefore decidedly elastic and accommodating near-future.

“Motherland” is told in a florid prose whose Irish lilt seems more contrived than spontaneous. The narrator is sprawling and formless. That is understandable, insofar as he has to represent the entire Irish people, but it makes him invisible and highly intrusive at the same time, like a ghost with bad breath. Every conceivable piece of Irish soul and color comes into his story except, perhaps, for wit and genuine lyricism. O’Grady’s lyricism, most of the time, is mannered and self-conscious, although there are moments of real charm in the chronicle of the early Synnotts.

Decklin, full of dry surprises, is more successful. The role of the guru can be a tedious one, but he possesses a welcome matter-of-factness and an occasional touch of fraudulence. It is a fraudulence that provides the book’s most genuine notes.

Friday: Elaine Kendall reviews “Me And You” by Margaret Diehl.