(1) Shall We Gather at the River
(11) John The Revelator
By Tom Mooney
‘It takes a long time to play like yourself,’ said Miles Davis, long after A Kind of Blue, endorsing the contention that what is most durable in creativity is style.
In Shall We Gather at the River, Peter Murphy has gone far beyond the achievement of his first novel, with deft nuance in his more wholesome prose, a remarkable feat considering the heat he must have been under to match or surpass John The Revelator.
There is a temptation from the off to draw parallels between both because of the evangelical titles, but Shall We Gather at the River is more epic in scale, more aural in its delivery, and in certain passages, funnier.
Murphy is a novelist with a poet’s eye and a dramatist’s ear: if you look for it you can discern the template of the comic and the eerie in The Followers by Dylan Thomas, and the shamanic Wodwo by Ted Hughes.
Murphy has, however, framed the narrative of Enoch O’Reilly from the bricolage of his substantial experience as a reviewer of music with Hot Press.
The Faber and Faber press release says the novel is about the story of a small town, Ballo, the suicide of nine young people in the river Rua and the great flood that afflicts it.
This summation is a mere appraisal of the tip of an iceberg. It doesn’t do Murphy’s achievement justice.
Shall We Gather at the River was the most popular hymn used in Westerns – half a dozen times by John Ford – and Murphy brings a panorama as vast as MonumentValley to his depiction of Ballo and its inhabitants.
“The fields are prettified with wild carrot and buttercups. You can hear the metallic cackle of a pheasant, the distant crawk of a heron. Mountain ash claws the air, a lady will trails her finger in the water.”
John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara wandering in Arizona in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon? Nope. It’s Enoch O’Reilly and Alice Stafford during an indian summer afternoon by the Slaney.
The prose has a seductive and sibilant pleasure. The description of Frank O’Reilly, picturing sound waves resonating through the sky, once read aloud spins like the opening credits of True Blood.
Murphy is equipped with the verbal range and dexterity to put the evangelical bark and drawl of the American south into his either long or short sentences.
He covers clerical abuse and copycat suicides in an oblique but never les than tender way, with a brilliant set of precis about the victims towards the conclusion, which bookends the story.
Shall We Gather at the River is a moving feast of tributaries, slowly coalescing as the life and career of proselytizer Enoch O’Reilly unfolds. It is a novel Fellini might have written, the Fellini of I Vitelloni, which also opens with a violent downpour on small town life.
Derived from Enoch of Genesis, who prophesised Noah’s flood and whose proximity to God is such that he one day disappears, Enoch O’Reilly is not a stereotypical charlatan, but a preacher with an imaginative gift of the gab, of that tradition that can compare a sinner to a loathsome spider suspended by a slender thread over a pit of seething brimstone, a colourful but likeable harbinger of a great awakening to come.
(11) John The Revelator
As auspicious debuts go, Peter Murphy’s novel, John The Revelator, published by faber and faber, was acclaimed wherever good writing is appreciated, because, as Colm Toibin noted, it was fresh, original and disturbing.
As the tectonic plates of his young life growing up in and around a town not dissimilar to Enniscorthy, shift endlessly around him, John Devine, born in a storm, guides the reader through his young life with all the authority of a dishevelled Virgil escorting Dante from inferno to Paradiso.
So good was Murphy’s prose that it left behind a train of open maws among reviewers: there was, in his other career, a reviewer and interviewer with Hot Press, little to indicate that John Devine and Jamie Corboy were beavering away in the smithy of his dark imagination.
So, John The Revelator, came more or less from nowhere, though pared of excess, a loose wire in a socket, in early 2009: hard to believe that it was four years ago. The impact was immediate. Here was a new talent in a county already incandescent with literary brilliance.
There was it seems more in the undergrowth to John The Revelator that 254 pages of tight prose with intoxicating passages of Wexford wit and the reverse lightning of vivid portraits capstoned by the sound of thunder and the ebb of water.
With the exception of the first, each chapter is preceded with what could pass as a prose poem, for the beat is different from the novel, extended choreographed epigraphs, where we meet the crow, whose sonars sweeps the nearabouts.
If you have read Ted Huges Crow poems – also published by faber and faber – you will spot leitmotifs, but if you haven’t, you won’t, and will be none the wiser, nor poorer.
In lines like ‘hanging upside down by his claws from the withered bough of a dead alder tree’ there is the seed, a broiling dawn, of the onomatopoeic architecture which has allowed Murphy to segue the novel and a musical presentation of certain passages.
Other sections are plundered for visual drama and undercurrents of lyric, such as Jamey’s letter, which traces Dante’s journey through darkness, ending without any revelation, or beatific light. It is Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard waking up calcified in sweat in the opening of Apocalypse Now.
Picture it and you can hear Robbie Krieger’s sitar.
‘Why have you forsaken me?’ asks Jamey.
Is the CD Murphy’s American Prayer? Time will tell. The music in The Doors’ last album was recorded seven years after the vocal, whereas Murphy is alive and kicking, extracts from which he performed two years ago in a cabaret setting, and the transmigration from page to the stage has worked.
Listening to the 18 tracks and dipping in and out of the book, the travails of John Devine reminds us that in life you ask for more than you are given; the artist knows this, but still pursues the thorny path from question to answer in the hope that he will see many marvels.
The Sounds of John The Revelator is also about metamorphoses, in expression and finally deliverance and, if you are lucky, you find a solace in the midst of darkness. This recording continues the journey of the book, and will truly help you see a sequence of silent irised images.
(The Sounds of John The Revelator by The Revelator Orchestra: www.themudbugclub.com
