At Swim, Two Boys
By Jamie O'Neill
(Scribner, Paperback, 9780743222952, 576pp.)
Publication Date: February 25, 2003
Categories: Literary
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Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916 -- Ireland's brave but fractured revolt against British rule -- At Swim, Two Boys is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O'Neill.
Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son -- revolutionary and blasphemous -- of Mr. Mack's old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves. All the while Mr. Mack, who has grand plans for a corner shop empire, remains unaware of the depth of the boys' burgeoning friendship and of the changing landscape of a nation.
Raised in County Dublin, Jamie O'Neill is the author of Kilbrack and At Swim, Two Boys, which won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Men's Fiction. He lives in Galway, Ireland.
Peter Ackroyd author of The Plato Papers and London: The Biography The music of Jamie O'Neill's prose creates a new Irish symphony.
Felice Picano author of Like People in History The secret is out, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde had a child: his name is Jamie O'Neill, and his novel is a big, character-filled Edwardian triple-decker.
Andrew Solomon author of The Noonday Demon Reading this book is like swimming itself. You have to take a deep breath first, and plunge yourself into an alien element -- but as you make your way forward, it dictates quiet, ecstatic rhythms of a heightened reality. It's a book in which the full range of human passion is implied: a highly erotic love story that manages to be neither anatomically specific nor euphemistic; a narrative about politics and patriotism that avoids jingoism or sentimentality. There is a gentleness, a loveliness here that is extremely rare in modern fiction.
Kirkus Reviews Altogether the best literary news out of Ireland since the maturity of Roddy Doyle.
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