Sunrise with Sea Monster
Neil Jordan
Vintage pbk, 192 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
Irish film-maker Neil Jordan must wonder sometimes why he made the transition from page to screen. For every artistic and/or commercial success (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) there is big budget befuddlement (We're No Angels) or outright travesty (High Spirits). He's always been best on something like small family drama The Miracle or his first (and still best) film, the brilliant existential IRA thriller Angel. He hit paydirt last year by putting Rice's Interview With The Vampire on screen (big, ballsy, and just teensyist bit boring), but his artistic triumph of the past couple of years comes not in Brad Pitt's woodenness but the pages of this affecting little novel.
The book's size (183 pages) and sheer readability belie the canvass on which it's painted. It's narrated by one Donal Gore, a young Irish volunteer fighting Franco. Would-be fighting - he was captured as soon as he arrived, hearing battle rage in the distance. Now he's facing a firing squad. From this bleak prison he tells of his life growing up on the Irish coast, of the early death of his mother, stained relations with his politician father, and erotic desires for Rose, his piano teacher.
On the cusp of death he's snatched away by a suave, movie-quoting German, who will return Donal home in exchange for fostering contacts between the Reich and the shadowy men of the Republican army. Although he tries to settle back into the family home, into the bizarre menage a trois with Rose and his now mute, stroke-crippled father, Donal finds divided loyalties and emotional debts for the paying.
Sunrise With Seamonster is an historically peculiar novel, taking in as it does both the Spanish Civil War and Ireland's own neutrality during WWII. The authorities are interested in the coded letters (based on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, no less) Donal receives postmarked Germany, and yet the country is lost in some unaccustomed limbo, a neutral pivot between world events. Loyalties lay, like Irish politics, everywhere and nowhere: "A native acceptance of the surface of things would lead one to believe the island lay fifty miles off the coast of Britain, whereas its actual position could only be found with reference to medieval cartography, wherein the earth was flat and the boundaries to the known world lay somewhere to our west."
As befits a split artistic personality, Jordan's writing is unusually visual. From the colour-coded religious ceremony that punctuates the desultory opening, through Donal's cross-continental expedition, back to the weather-scared beaches and fermenting seas of Ireland, his prose is remarkably easy and yet unaffectedly poetic, almost dreamlike.
Given its scope - both emotional and physical - this is one novel that could so easily have expanded to fit some imagined space. Jordan appreciates that less is often more, and does in these few pages what many would struggle for at twice the length. The economy learned as an award winning short story writer shows; this is epic on an intimate scale.
As a writer, Jordan has a film-maker's eye. He is currently back home with a starry cast (Neeson, Roberts, Rae) on a biopic of Republican hero Michael Collins. Covering somewhat similar territory to this novel, it scarcely seems credible that the final film will be half as haunting.