Celtic passion

If we want to hear again an echo of the lost strains of Britain’s Celtic culture, we have to turn to Ireland. It looks as though the repeated onslaught of Viking invasions and the Normal Conquest of Britain put the Celtic strain in English literature on hold for quite a few centuries.

According to Sri Aurobindo, the Celtic genius, unlike the Latin mind, “is attracted by all that is hidden and secret”, and it is Irish literature that led a Celtic revival. John Montague’s writing reveals the strains of such an inward turn.

Inward-looking, yes. But not the face struggling to look upwards to a spiritual consciousness. Montague induces the meditative mood that once gave us the Anglo-Saxon classics, where the Venerable Bede assures us that man’s brief life on earth apart, we have no idea of existence for “what went before this life, or what follows, we know nothing.”

Should we then enjoy love and passion while we are in the present, and forget the rest? The young hero of The Lost Notebook has love for life. You can’t think of a better scenario than a holiday in Florence. Botticelli, Caravaggio. Ah, Titian’s sensuous frames. Romance with a blonde stranger. Rambles in sex with words no more despised as four-lettered. So we get to have kamasutraic lessons from this senior instructress of male naivete, while watching a Mondrian here and a Michaelangelo there to enter the prim cloisters of San Marco and the notorious rooms of the Medici Palace. “To be twenty-one, to have a girl-friend — a mistress! — and to have the run of Florence”: the result is a prize-winning story.

None of the other stories in this collection are as long. Most of the time, it is an attempt to come out of the cozy sleeping-bag of a Catholic upbringing in Ulster. Motague says he loves to let the balloon of his fantasy float (the confessional is in his blood!), but not at the cost of hard realities.

A story begins about getting paid well or ill when a funeral is around. That is also the time when people tend to talk of phantom hearses and joke about electoral candidates coming to blows. The Parish of the Dead could be happening in Nigeria, Karnataka or Sudan. The human animal is the same everywhere!

Boyhood days, days of youth. Of spurning goodwill from ugly little girls, of romantic escapades on the sly. A successful poet, Montague can stuff an action or two with potent vitriol as in Mother Superiors. It is an encounter between Josie Mellon with five children and a Mother Superior, not unlike the Upanishadic story of Satyakama Jabala.
Brigid’s mother tells just the truth, having become the mother of five children by five different men. “There’s Teresa, and Bernie, and Maria and Agnes. I always tried to give them holy names, to call them after saints. Considering how they came into this world, it was the nearest to a good start I could give them.”

And she is here, inspired by the Blessed Virgin. “After all, she was a mother herself, like me, though she only had the one boy. And god knows, where we live in the Back Lane is not much better nor a stable.”

There are many such seemingly tangential lightnings that could result in caustic teeth-gnashings by the reader. In or out of wedlock, Montague cannot miss a chance to touch the physical. An Occasion of Sin has clerical students discussing the Pope and the heroine reading Francois Mauriac’s novel, The River of Fire.

Misunderstood innocence is a daily affair: “Sure some people would see bad in anything!” Montague keeps us guessing in his stories and finally, there is some perfectly valid explanation, after all.

Obviously, A Ball of Fire is a ball of passion for Montague. After all, he translates Mauriac’s title, Le Fleuve de Feu as a flood of human passion. The title story itself  is a message about how a life can curdle into dejection, when a married partner becomes a stinger. An unforgettable tale.

However, Montague can get out of all this and write about the effects of globalisation. A Change of Management is an analyst’s delight. Cronin speaks of “two waves of chancers” who have wounded the Irish culture. The first were “the gunmen turned to gombeen”; “But this second lot are a tougher proposition. In fifty years, they’ll have made this country just like every place.”

Well, substitute gombeen with politicians for fifty years after Indian independence. Now, the time has come for “factories owned by Germans, posh hotels catering to the international set, computers instead of decent pen-pushers: do you call that progress?”

A ball of fire
John Montague
ProLibris Publishing
2012, pp 286
Rs. 295