Winterwood

The historical novel owes much to the Gothic, and frequently shades into it--as is the case with Patrick McCabe's terse and, quite frankly, often repulsive Winterwood.  (Although there's almost nothing graphic in the novel--the nastiest stuff all occurs off-page--the narrator is nasty enough that some readers may wish to spend their time in different company.) Covering approximately a quarter-century of modern Irish history, Winterwood uses its Gothic trappings to turn the relationship between past and present into a singularly claustrophobic nightmare of insane nostalgia, misogyny, perversion, and all-around general ugliness.

Winterwood's first-person narrator, Redmond Hatch (among other names), is an even less pleasant version of Patrick McGrath's shattered speakers.    The very unreliable Redmond narrates in fits and starts, frequently trying to repress the signs of his own physical and linguistic violence; sometimes he intentionally or unintentionally fills in the gaps, while at other times the reader is left to draw  her own conclusions.  Redmond, we learn, comes from a long line of deeply-inbred "mountainers," who lived near a small town called Slievenagheeha.  His mental collapse begins after he returns there for the first time, where he encounters a fiddler and raconteur named Ned Strange--who, it transpires, claims to know a great deal about Redmond's late father, his late Uncle Florian, and Redmond itself.  Redmond's mother died mysteriously, either in church (official version) or beaten to death by Redmond's father (Ned's version); as we eventually discover, Redmond was shipped off to a convent orphanage, where the nuns, enchanted by Uncle Florian's fiddle-playing, fail (or refuse) to realize that Florian is a sexual predator.  While Redmond's celebratory write-ups of Ned Strange make him into a local celebrity, they also give him more access to children.  Unfortunately, Ned is also a sexual predator, who eventually commits suicide in prison after raping and murdering a small boy.  And Redmond, who has his own serious problems with women, finds himself haunted by Ned Strange...

As McCabe structures his narrative, "old" Ireland is effectively undead.  Ned Strange grows popular with the locals precisely because they think of him as an anachronistic curiosity, a remnant of an idealized, lost tradition: "I interviewed a few of the mothers and they told me that as far as they were concerned having characters like Ned in the community was a great way for their children to find out about an Ireland that was fast disappearing--if not, indeed, practically vanished already" (12).  By turning the often-vicious Ned into a "character," whose oddities are just the pleasurable eccentricities of a pre-modern age, the Slievenagheeha community mistake ahistorical depravity for historical difference.   As we learn much later, this confidence trick  repeats that of Redmond's Uncle Florian, who manages to take his young nephew away for "dance" sessions under the enchanted nuns' very noses.  Florian in fact represents his and Redmond's encounters as folk training of sorts (190).  Enthralled by the spectre of "authentic" Irishness, mothers and mother-figures don't just allow their children to be victimized, but inadvertently encourage it.   It's not history per se that's the trap, but a particular fantasy of history, associated with music, nostalgia, pleasure, and, above all, the "traditional," all purportedly bound up in rural, pre-modern men.

As you might guess from the above, both Redmond and the other male characters have problems with women generally and female sexuality specifically.  Although Redmond denies it when it's brought to his attention, all of the men subscribe, consciously or otherwise, to the age-old virgin vs. whore dichotomy: Redmond idealizes his two wives as (figurative) virgins until they reveal themselves as whores by committing adultery, which twice repeats Ned Strange's even more extreme relationship to his lost beloved, Annemarie, who may or may not have committed adultery with a wealthy man returned from America, John Olson.  Both Redmond's and Ned's rhetoric of passionate, all-consuming adoration--Redmond's "flawless union" with Catherine, for example (20)--echo and reinforce Slievenagheeha's similarly pathological fantasies about Ned and Florian.  And the result of such fantasies, once again, is brutal violence, this time meted out against the women themselves.  While Ned's story about punishing Annemarie proves fluid, encompassing everything from drowning to nothing at all, Redmond first tries to replace his adored Catherine with another "C," Casey, then winds up murdering both Catherine and his equally adored daughter, Imogen.  This murder repeats and renders certain the murder/death by natural causes of his own mother and the maybe-murder of Annemarie.  Redmond murders in order to truly possess the women he loves and desires, making them permanent virgins, so to speak; burying them in "Winterwood," so named by Imogen, is his way of freezing time.  (There's something rather "Porphyria's Lover"-esque about this.)

If nearly all of the women find themselves shoehorned into one stereotype or the other, the men are even more interchangeable.  Ned Strange shares his fiddle-playing and sexual perversions with Florian, his smoking and drinking habits with Redmond's father, and his attitude to women with Redmond.   Moreover, all four men actually look alike:  "I swear I was the image of Uncle Florian and Ned.  And, of course, of my own deceased father.  You wouldn't have been able to tell us apart" (195).  Gothic usually  depends on doubling and repetition, but Winterwood extends its doubles to triples and quadruples.   In fact, Ned Strange points out to Redmond that "Hatch" derives from ait, meaning both "place" and, more worrisomely, "strange" (129).  Redmond, determinedly out of place as he wanders from one urban area to another, is permanently estranged--but not so estranged as to be able to escape his destiny, which is merely to repeat, yet again, the deadly sexual dynamics of the mountain.  In an ironic twist, it may be a blessing that Redmond, like Ned, never manages to sire his hoped-for son.

The cumulative effect of such repetitions is to call historical change into question.  On the one hand, because the novel so resolutely associates a certain idea of "Irishness" with Gothic decay, it becomes impossible to endorse the only past on view.  There is no actual transition between "traditionalism and modernism" (to quote the dj), because the few remnants of traditionalism, like the ceilidh, have been modernized.  On the other hand, the novel represents modernity in terms of a mainly American cultural imperialism, albeit one that--Bill Clinton aside--resides in the silliest of pop culture forms: My Little Pony (!), Sweet Valley High, Care Bears, and, of course (?), Dallas.  Even though Redmond, musing on both George W. Bush and the end of "the war in the North of Ireland," concludes (not very insightfully) that "the world is in a state of flux" (139), it is never quite clear where anything resembling an Irish national identity might fit into the mix.  Redmond's documentary, which is simultaneously the crowning glory of his journalistic career and the cause of his final breakdown, embodies this problem: he juxtaposes the "vibrant new valley," overloaded with new, internationally-based businesses and residential areas, to the "evanescent, primordial Eden" of the lost valley, which nevertheless also contains the "tumble-down stone cottage" in which Florian molested Redmond (207).  Modernization, which renders Ireland's landscape simultaneously unrecognizable and cosmopolitan, also makes that same landscape "vibrant," while the lost paradise turns out to contain a particularly ugly snake.