Ohfrancis review
Eva Plazewska’s review of J the R for www.ohfrancis.com
As a writer for Hot Press magazine and regular contributor to RTE’s The View, Peter Murphy is—no doubt—a man about town on the Dublin scene. Thankfully then, his first novel, John the Revelator, takes you far from this milieu and drops you in some sort of rural Gothic Wexford. Joining John and his mother Lily on Ballo Strand, we enter a story rooted tight in place but adrift in the past fifty years of Irish small-town life. You will go strawberry picking, to the amusements, to the disco. And all the while, signs and portents abound and there is even the suggestion of dark magic.
John is an isolated and strange boy, obsessed with parasites and bedevilled by nightmares. The relationship between himself and his mother forms the hard knot at the novel’s centre but the story grows only as this is increasingly unravelled by outside influences. Until the arrival of Jamey Corboy, the reader may as well be in the 1950’s Ireland of John Broderick’s novels: a claustrophobic and damp place harbouring a parochial distrust of difference. The new boy brings John up to speed on such new-fangled concepts as attractive mothers, African immigrants and the works of Rimbaud. The teenagers form a mismatched friendship, with John the mammy’s boy bumpkin and Jamey the townie sophisticate. But it is John who leads them into trouble the night they desecrate the chapel and Jamey who takes the fall.
As Jamey educates John in the ways of the world, the sickly Lily withdraws. In her weakness she allows her friend Mrs. Nagle to take control of the household. Though she espouses a purse-lipped Christian morality, Mrs. Nagle’s presence hints at witchiness, at voodoo. As Lily shrinks to skin and bone, her friend grows larger and more sinister. But as with John’s prophetic dreams, Mrs. Nagle’s ‘true nature’ remains obscured. Murphy has a deft touch when it comes to the mystical: it is a powerful undercurrent that never swamps the story yet lurks always in the corner of the eye, threatening.
Indeed, the revelatory promise of the novel’s title is never brought to fruition. As in life and the better kind of art, you are left to your own conclusions. This is a stark novel: you feel the damp and the cold in Lily’s house, you see the wild grey sea that churns and drowns on those long Wexford beaches. Reading this novel, you get yourself stuck for a while in a strange corner of Ireland, one which may well boast an Afro-Caribbean food store but remains in thrall to the Mrs. Nagles of the world.
But for all the cold uncaringness this landscape describes, there is humanity in the characters, who strike true in their awkwardness, their unpredictability and their willingness to forgive each other their trespasses. John the Revelator is not a rock ‘n’ roll novel by any means but this little book has a quiet power. It will stick to your bones long after the read is done.