Nights Beneath the Nation
Told in the first person, this novel, part gay love story and part mystery, just misses being very good. It is beautifully, even elegantly, written; however, it loses its way and meanders through much of the story until we almost don’t care about its violent end.
In alternating chapters, Daniel, the narrator, begins his story as an elderly gay man, returning to Dublin, Ireland, in the late 1990s, after having lived almost fifty years in the States. His remembrances take the reader to early 1950s Dublin and the circumstances of his exile from Ireland. As a young provincial Irishman who moves to Dublin in the early 1950s, Daniel comes to terms with his homosexuality in the barely increased yet carefully concealed freedom he finds in the city. (The title refers to the symbolic subterranean world in which Irish gay men and women existed during the repressive 1950s.)
The tragedy of young Daniel’s love affair is paralleled with the Spanish play, Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca. Without the reader being familiar with this play and its themes of the individual fighting against the strictures of a rigid society, the novel loses some of its impact, although Daniel and his lover are directly impacted by acting in a local production of it. The ending is rather melodramatic but not overly so. The reader should also know that the novel is quite sexually explicit. Recommended.
