Jabberwock
Dublin, the eve of World War II: Ignatius Hackett, one-time journalist, former patient of Dean Swift’s Mental Asylum, is on his uppers and behind in his rent, until he gets an unexpected summons that takes him to France and later to Germany. Hackett’s task? To investigate a Phoneme [sic] War, an increasingly bold attack on the English language as deadly to the war effort as a bomb.
There is more than a nod to what we think of as the modern blight of fake truth – and the theft of authors’ work in an age of AI. Kavanagh’s prose is so rich that it is by turns compelling and at other times needs to be absorbed in smaller doses. His debt to Flann O’Brien and James Joyce is acknowledged, in the inventive vocabulary of frabbling, fromulous, garmungling and mahogulous. Kavanagh’s exhilarating novel isn’t so much alternative history as a parallel history, in which historical figures like Goebbels, Donitz and Turing are referenced, but in which Hackett encounters a series of espionage eccentrics, none of whom he is able to completely trust.
Some readers might argue that this novel has too much of magical realism to be truly defined as a historical novel; nobody, however, could disagree that on one level it is a colossal, sustained play on words. Kavanagh is a translator as well as a novelist, and it shows. The reader who has a knowledge of German, and indeed Irish, will get the full force – and nuance – of the book’s gags, as in ‘Maulwurf and Leberfleck had been exposed as German moles,’ but even without such advantage, Kavanagh’s novel is an immensely enjoyable tour-de-force. Perhaps never before has the Italian expression ‘traduttore – traditore’ (translator – traitor) been so effectively applied as a plot device.
