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The claim often made of Dylan Thomas’s poetry is that it is first apprehended before it is understood. The same, I think, holds true for this novel (which derives its title from Thomas’s war poem, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’), though for quite different, less lofty, reasons. Whilst this certainly is a novel, for instance, it actually feels like a series of meditations, sometimes lyrical, sometimes haunting, and often deeply comic. Corcoran has a sure touch with comedy and has a memorable vehicle for it in his elderly protagonist, Connolly, an Irishman living with his Anglicised, self-important son, daughter-in-law and grandson in Cardiff. The themes of the novel – exile, ageing, memory – are apprehended largely through the episodic, trance-like musings of its protagonist rather than through a coherent and single narrative structure.
Connolly is an astute observer of the tensions and incongruities of domestic life. A partial outsider in his son’s home, Connolly has long been distanced from family homes since he left his own family in Ireland in order to join the British Army shortly before the Great War. Corcoran derives comedy from Connolly’s hallucinatory memories, brought on by diabetes and by exile. Sometimes, however, the comedy strikes a false note as when Connolly, racked by guilt, confusion and a deep sense of displacement, imagines the ghosts of De Valera and Yeats appearing before him. Announcing that ‘Maud is waiting downstairs’, Yeats urges Connolly to ‘make your journey’ to Ireland, which doesn’t ‘give a toss any more’. Who am I to quibble?’ asks Connolly. 'He must have a cottage somewhere up in Leckwith Woods. Knows Cardiff quite well then.’ Though the image of Yeats on the town in Cardiff gets the laughs. This particular comic approach (an ironic debunking of the old myths) to the workings of memory and the weight of history on the exile’s shoulders is by itself insufficient and, dare I say, feels altogether too kitsch and easy.
There is more to Last Light Breaking than this, however, and it has some eminently memorable insights, which tell of the complex geography on which the novel, and the experience of the Irish community in Britain, is based: ‘Our address is 206, Marlborough Hill. We celebrate the noble history of the British Army every time we mention where we live’ (p. 18). The novel’s recurring motif is of crossed rivers and seas. Where Thomas’s poem speaks of the ‘unmourning water / Of the riding Thames’, Corcoran turns, not only to the Irish sea, but to the estuary which separates Wales from ‘England, land of the free’ and almost separates Connolly from his family as the tide approaches and threatens to cut them off from land. Refusing simply to mourn and grieve, Connolly’s account is nevertheless elegiac: ‘I also used to look out to sea . . . I do not look back with regret. I acknowledge. Celebrate the hours I have drawn breath . . .' (p. 69). Marked by his own deracination and his son’s absorption into English, middle-class life, Connolly’s musings share something of Thomas’s cosmic affirmation in the face of severe loss. Or, as Connolly expresses it in his reading of the Roman poet, ‘Lucretius’s theory seems as plausible as anyone else’s. So far as I can tell anyway. He tells a good year, with conviction, passion even. When we are gone, he says, nothing will have power to disturb our sense, not though earth can be fused with sea and sea with sky’ (p. 76).
Ruth McElroy
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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