John Hawkes' last novel is in a notably lucid style, quite at odds with the prose of his early works, but that's not to say it's exactly normal. Narrated by thirteen year old foundling Dervla O'Shannon, who seems at first glance to be the typical sort of Irish girl - cheerful, plucky and rambling brightly on with only the vaguest sense of formality. Over the course of this short novel, she runs off with Teddy Stack, an old soldier from the Great War, driven by boredom to sham senility. From their new abode, Dervla writes home fanciful, inanely pious letters until the day their lives coincide with those of a decaying aristocratic family.

In a sense, this could be considered a coming-of-age story, as Dervla has her first encounters with oppression, insanity, injustice and sexuality. And yet, even as her letters begin to develop parallels in reality, even as she is pawed over by almost every male in the story (Teddy being a notable exception) she accepts everything with a docility strangely at odds with her impish narration. As she waits for a chance to escape from her new situation, her innocence begins to sound more and more like coyness. In the coming-of-age yarn, the hero/ine gains new perspective, accomplishes something and is changed forevermore. Dervla accomplishes nothing.

Some people say that late-Hawkes refuted the claim he'd originally made that "the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme," but this quote cuts both ways. On the one hand, Dervla's character dissolves as this story progresses, making her harder and harder to define as a person. The other characters float through their scenes in a similarly unmoored fashion. The story hardly depends on "character" in any meaningful sense of the word, and the plot has all the logic of a peculiarly vivid dream.

On the other hand, Hawkes always had a very strong sense of setting. His 1961 novel The Lime Twig dwelled on the details of a highly imaginary London, full of criminality, horse racing, foggy wharves and grimy crowds. Similarly, An Irish Eye defines its setting in an archetypal, almost naive way - there are ponies, pubs, louts, foundlings and hunts across a wild, blackish-green landscape:

"It was a mean and frightening sight from empty road to distant horizon everywhere we looked, and never the same but closed in there by black slopes of barrenness and there by a stand of distant trees inside a circlet of the cruelest briars. Miles away from where we rode a miserable stone bridge lifted its broken back over a swollen stream, and fields and woods and distances and roads were all the same, every one of them, so empty that there must be unfriendly figures lurking where we could not see them but knew they were. Sometimes there was the sound of hounds with their jaws open, sometimes a black rain that passed us by or trapped us unaware in its downpour. There were hills and crags far off and empty cottages closer by."

Where Hawkes excelled was beyond the boundaries of character or plot and solidly in the realm of prose and imagery. An Irish Eye is crammed with fantastic visuals: a horse and rider as they plunge over a cliff, an old bridge with no modern use, a haircutting episode in an overgrown garden, a roast pig:

"More potent and pleasing grew the pig's aroma, golden because its plumpness as Mrs. Grant ladled the poor creature's own melted fat back over its broad tender self, with the little tail tightening and the eye sockets growing emptier and wetter by the moment, and the little teeth increasingly exposed as if that shining animal were grinning at his own plight, as he well might have done. Oh, but I could not grin at mine."

Later on, having dropped the platter, which was much too heavy for a child to be carrying anyway, she picks it up off the floor as this Anglo-Irish family look on:

"Oh, there was nothing for it but to haul him onto the slant of my knees and to grip him top and bottom as I would a rebellious child, and I did so and lifted him as high as my chest all covered by this time with the slime of his golden skin. And stood up, tottering. And with my own hands returned him to the platter, for which they might have thanked me or sighed in unison, as I thought as inadvertently I wiped the sweat from my face and thereby smeared my face with the grease of the pig who was lying askew on the platter feet up instead of on his stomach with his feet tucked tidily underneath. On the platter exactly as he had been on the floor, as they deserved, I thought, and stumbled like the light from that cold room."

So: in Hawkes' fanciful, deranged vision Ireland is a land where human beings will molder behind one wall or another, where a thirteen-year-old girl will never be treated like a child, where identity and motivation become inscrutable and where a casual outing can lead to chaos. All told, it's pretty disturbing stuff, but the one real problem with the book is its lack of emotional involvement. My feelings while reading this novelette vassilated between disconcertion and bafflement. Often I found myself thinking it would make a fantastic art/foreign film. As a work of prose, it is an unexpected curiosity. Recommended to those of you who prefer the strange and obscure. ( )