At Swim, Two Boys [Hardcover]

Jamie O'Neill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 2002

Set in Dublin, At Swim, Two Boys follows the year to Easter 1916, the time of Ireland's brave but fractured uprising against British rule. O'Neill tells the story of the love of two boys: Jim, a naive and reticent scholar and the younger son of the foolish aspiring shopkeeper Mr. Mack, and Doyler, the dark, rough-diamond son of Mr. Mack's old army pal. Doyler might once have made a scholar like Jim, might once have had prospects like Jim, but his folks sent him to work, and now, schoolboy no more, he hauls the parish midden cart, with socialism and revolution and willful blasphemy stuffed under his cap.

And yet the future is rosy, Jim's father is sure. His elder son is away fighting the Hun for God and the British Army, and he has such plans for Jim and their corner shop empire. But Mr. Mack cannot see that the landscape is changing, nor does he realize the depth of Jim's burgeoning friendship with Doyler. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the scandalous nude, the two boys meet day after day. There they make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, Easter 1916, they will swim the bay to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves.

Ten years in the writing, At Swim, Two Boys has already caused a sensation in England and Ireland, earning lavish praise for its masterful portrayal of class, tradition, and the conflict that has haunted Ireland for centuries. Jamie O'Neill's poetic and evocative storytelling makes him a natural successor to James Joyce and Flann O'Brien.

At its heart, At Swim, Two Boys is a tender and tragic love story that will resonate with all readers. But it is also a compelling and important work, a novel about people caught up in the tide of history -- set in a place and culture both unfamiliar and unforgettable.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

You may have read the hype. Irishman Jamie O'Neill was working as a London hospital porter when his 10-year labor of love, the 200,000-word manuscript of At Swim, Two Boys, written on a laptop during quiet patches at work, was suddenly snapped up for a hefty six-figure advance. For once, the book fully deserves the hype.

In the spring of 1915, Jim Mack and "the Doyler," two Dublin boys, make a pact to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter. By the time they do, Dublin has been consumed by the Easter Uprising, and the boys' friendship has blossomed into love--a love that will in time be overtaken by tragedy. O'Neill's prose, playing merrily with vocabulary, syntax, and idiom, has unsurprisingly drawn comparisons to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but in his creation of comic characters (such as Jim's pathetic but irrepressible father) and in the sheer scale of his work, Charles Dickens springs to mind first. But Dickens never wrote a love story between young men as achingly beautiful as this.

In the character of Anthony MacMurrough, who is haunted by voices as he pursues his illegal and dangerous desire for Dublin boys, O'Neill has created a complex and fascinating center to his novel, rescuing the love story from mawkishness, and allowing a serious meditation on history, politics, and desire. For as Ireland seeks its own future free of British government, so Jim, Doyle, and MacMurrough look back to Sparta to find a way to live. As Dr Scrotes, one of MacMurrough's voices, commands:

Help these boys build a nation of their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literature for words they can speak.

In this massive, enthralling, and brilliant debut, Jamie O'Neill has indeed done just that: provided a nation for what Walt Whitman calls, in O'Neill's epigraph, "the love of comrades." --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk

From Library Journal

Published last year in Great Britain, this novel has been compared to works by James Joyce (or Flann O'Brien, whose At Swim-Two-Birds the title plays on), but it has more in common with the film Chariots of Fire in its painterly depiction of male athleticism and relationships. The sheltered son of a pro-British shopkeeper, 16-year-old Jim develops a doting and eventually homosexual relationship with Doyler, a bright boy from an impoverished family, as the two train for an ambitious swim across Dublin Bay on Easter 1916, a date that happens to coincide with a planned Republican uprising. Both become entangled with McMurrough, scion of wealthy Irish gentry, who is back in Dublin following imprisonment in England for indecent behavior. Jim is too na ve and Doyler too politically sophisticated for their years, while McMurrough is typecast as an Oscar Wilde figure. Still, these are rich characterizations, and together with the playfully rendered Irish dialect they outweigh the book's imperfections. O'Neill also offers gorgeous descriptions of the Dublin environs and remarkable details of the period. Recommended for most fiction collections. Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1st Scribner ed edition (March 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743222946
• ISBN-13: 978-0743222945
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (115 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #182,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A heartbreaking tale that rewards the reader's patience, May 10, 2003

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: At Swim, Two Boys (Hardcover)

Let's start off by saying this book may not be for everyone--but it should be. I'm not referring here to the fact that its three lead characters are gay, since "At Swim, Two Boys" is so much more than "a gay novel" and since, while often sensuous, it is hardly erotic. Instead, the efforts of many readers may be thwarted by O'Neill's challenging and lyrical prose, the Irish brogue and street slang, the invented Latin derivations and oh-so-clever puns. After 50 to 75 pages, though, the reader's patience is well rewarded. Once you accustom yourself to the pattern of the prose, the context provides clues to even the most unfamiliar words, and I found the book difficult to set aside. (A little advice: after you pick up the cadence of the dialect, you may well want to go back and read those beginning pages again. The second time around revealed some wonderful passages and pivotal characterizations that flew right over my head initially.)

Set during the year prior to the Easter Rising in 1916, the novel focuses on two 16-year-old boys, Doyler and Jim, and their families. The main characters are finely portrayed, and (as others have noted) they successfully arouse the reader's sympathies. But O'Neill adds a memorable supporting cast: Jim's aunt, a doddering, whiskered crone who always seems far more aware of what's going on than one is led to believe; Eva MacMurrough, a rich patron of Irish rebel causes who is flustered by her nephew's Wildean tendencies; and, for comic relief, Jim's father, a pretentious wannabe who always manages to be in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.

The most nuanced portrayal is that of the Anthony MacMurrough. Once may quibble over whether he is a pedophile: textual clues place his age in his early- to mid-20s; Doyler, his "rent boy," is 16. (If he were straight, such a relationship would be lawful and accepted in many states and most countries.) Legality aside, though, one cannot deny he is a sexual predator, and it's difficult not to detest his narcissism and self-rationalizing hedonism. But, as the novel progresses (and here I am necessarily vague in order not to give anything away), he gradually and subtly realizes that such encounters are not the road to happiness. He ultimately redeems himself, learning to find fulfillment by sharing his love rather than taking his way. But to claim that MacMurrough is a "mentor" to Doyler and Jim misses the point: he learns far more from the boys than they learn from him.

A lesser author would be foolish to tackle so much: Irish nationalism, sexual orientation, Catholic guilt, alcoholism, class identity, unwed pregnancy, unionism and socialism, the burden of tradition, Joyce and Wilde and Flann O'Brien. O'Neill's success is his enviable ability to weave together all these topics so seamlessly while fashioning a unique and lyrical voice and spinning a page-turning, heartbreaking yarn.

71 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A straight reader's response, May 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: At Swim, Two Boys (Hardcover)

This is easily the best novel I've read this year. Anyone who can't relate to the universal, and universally appealing, themes that O'Neill treats in this ambitious work simply isn't reading with either an open mind or an open heart.

This is not a "genre" novel; it's outstanding writing by any standards one could think to apply. The story is tightly crafted, rich and complex, and the characters are unforgettable. And yes, as some reviewers discovered to their chagrin, a number of them display the moral ambiguity so characteristic of our species.

I gave this novel to my wife when I finished it, and recommended it to my (also straight) 22-year-old son. If you love fine writing and aren't obsessed with hating those whose sexual orientation puts them in the minority, you'll be deeply moved by this novel.

67 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Pal o' me heart, so he was.", April 29, 2002

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: At Swim, Two Boys (Hardcover)

The tragedy of this book is that thoughtful people who might overwise read it may not because they perceive it as a "gay" novel, whatever that means. This is a gay novel in the way BELOVED is a black novel or PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT is a Jewish novel. A book that anyone who loves serious literature should read, it has all the things I look for in a good novel: an involved plot, wonderful character development and beautiful language. If you believe the old fashioned novel is dead, At SWIM TWO BOYS should convince you otherwise. It actually feels like a 19th century novel in its epic quality. Yes, the three main characters are gay; and this book is as good as any-- perhaps better than any with gay characters I can recall. Almost 600 pages long-- you will be amazed at how quickly the pages fly by-- the novel is set in Ireland in 1915 and 1916. The three main characters, two teenage boys, Jim and Doyler and an adult, MacMurrough, become as real to you as your friends and family. These characters possess a resilience and courage that will make you care for them desperately. Ultimately they will break your heart.

Mr. O'Neill's prose is fine indeed. One example: there is a wonderful scene when MacMurrough watches Jim leave him. "A terrible fear shook him, a fear for his boy and what the future might hold. Lest he should stumble and the crowd should find him. For we live as angels among the Sodomites. And every day the crowd finds some one of us out. . . There is no grand mistake. Aristotle wrote something that Augustine got wrong that Aquinas codified in law. . . What hates is madness. There's no reason, only madness. . . Who but a madman could revile this boy?" This is NOT the love that dare not speak its name.

Words used to describe this novel sound trite: "honor," "optimism," "friendship," "patriotism," "love." We can only hope Mr. O'Neill does not take 10 years to write another novel.