Desmond Hogan, ‘Catford’

Abstract

Excursions in the Real World ends with the author taking soundings between two realms: the intimations of timelessness inspired by the Tipperary landscape and the ‘ephemeral, mortal’ reality of Hickey’s bakery. This hovering between shadow and substance calls to mind the narrative pose of Desmond Hogan, whose displaced angle of vision further underlines his literary kinship with Trevor. Born in Ballinasloe, County Galway in 1950, Hogan is the embodiment of the solitary nomadic artist. ‘I can’t call anything home. I just cling to what is remote’, he told Robert McCrum in 2004, and many of his characters exhibit a similar restiveness.1 Of the many unremarkable departures in his five novels and five short story collections published between 1976 and 2005, journeys to Britain are the most common. No other writer of his generation attends to the ‘purgatorial world’ of the indigent Irish in England with such empathetic insight. Hogan’s exiles bridge the temporal and socio-economic gap between MacGill’s brutalised navvies and the savvy, middle-class migrants of Joseph O’Connor’s early fiction. Ultimately, however, he seems less interested in the experiential dimensions of emigration than in England’s symbolic significance as the place where a particular version of Irishness ruptures and unravels. If, as has been suggested, early twentieth-century London was the crucible in which the elements of modern Ireland were distilled,2 then Hogan’s stories show how the city later became a repository for the nation’s troubling, unassimilable excess. A line from ‘The Sojourner’, set in 1970s Shepherd’s Bush, brilliantly registers the disjunction between hoary romantic ideal and hidden social reality: ‘Irish country and western singers roared out with increasing desperation and one sensed behind the songs about Kerry and Cavan, mothers and luxuriant shamrock, the foetus of an unborn child urging its way from the womb of a girl over for a quick abortion.’3