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Snapshots
‘Nothing is fair in love and war. When has it ever been? But make sure you win. That is, after all, what everybody wants. I thought that when I fell in love I’d leave a lot of death behind. But love isn’t pure and shiny. It doesn’t make you happy. Love is war.’ ‘Love is war’ – and never more so than when you’re young, gay, and trapped ‘between the cracks of society’ in troubled ceasefire Crossmaglen. Marking the debut of a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction, Snapshots tells the story of Oisin Grant’s struggles to assert the truth of his emotional and sexual identity against the backdrop of a land still haunted by the shadow of a gunman and still bound by the compassionless shackles of a conservative Catholicism. Bold, frank and iconoclastic, Snapshots imaginatively crosses and subverts political and personal borders. Erotic obsession, teenage friendships, wild student parties, art, family strife, grief and republican violence are just some of the potent elements in a novel that shatters sexual and stylistic convention to probe to the heart of what it means to simply be yourself in a world where everybody wants you to be something you’re not. Tender, angry, humerous, and beautifully realized, this audacious first novel perfectly captures the pain of young adult relationships.
204 pages, Paperback
First published July 6, 2001
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December 21, 2024
Before offering my enthusiastic but modest review to you I wanted to include the following excerpt from a very thought provoking review of this novel (and Jamie O'Neill's 'At Swim Two Boys' and Keith Ridgway's 'Standard Time') by Michael J. Cronin on the Stingfly.org site from Winter 2001 (I can never work out when it is permissible to provide links so haven't but if you are interested it isn't hard to find). I felt compelled to do this as this wonderful novel has attracted no reviews and I didn't think my effort, no matter how enthusiastic was sufficient.
Michael Cronin's professional review:
"...Jarlath Gregory’s Snapshots is a more modest first novel, but nevertheless a promising start to the career of a writer still in his early twenties. Set in Crossmaglen, and the notorious ‘Bandit Country’ of South Armagh, it is an episodic, picaresque, drink-sodden tale of those truly awful late teenage years spent in a dreary small town: ‘without the bombs and the bullets to chew over, the town would have collapsed of boredom.’
"Moving back and forth between the perspectives of Oisin and Jude, interspersed with brief third person ‘snapshots,’ it is mostly a sequence of those utterly dismal parties which chiefly comprise of boredom, too much drink and bad, desperate sex. All of which Gregory captures in unrelentingly bleak detail. The style is chatty, composed of short sentences, with lots of yoof slang and local dialect. It is heavily ironic, though also touchingly poetic at times, and with much very dark, camp humour...
"It is interesting that in a novel set at the very end of the nineties the characters are not cheerfully embracing their gay identity, buoyed along by the glittering promises of the instant glamour that awaits them made by television soaps and glossy magazines. It is a world where growing up gay is still tough; a world where there is still the fear and loneliness of being different; still confusion and uncertainty and disavowals, and tearful confrontations with parents. And, of course, there is still a world out there where copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger, with cautionary tales on sensitive boys who go to the big city and come back wearing pink T-shirts, are placed on pillows by anxious mammies.
"This is made all the more convincing by Gregory not reducing either of the two main characters to victims, they are both too resilient and knowing for that, nor contriving a glibly cheerful post-coming out ending. And since the boys spend their time exclusively in the company of their straight peers, the novel clearly sets the difficulties of growing up gay within the messy, tortured confusions and uncertainties of just growing up.
"In some ways it is perhaps as much a novel about becoming a man as becoming a gay man. Most of the sex in fact happens between either of the gay characters and curious (or desperate, or both) straight male acquaintances. This is not, however, the stuff of fantasy: it’s far too squalid and wholly unerotic for that. The novel is also, of course, set in a very particular context, one where becoming a man is complicated immeasurably by politics and a war held at bay by a brittle cease-fire; by the undertow of violent tensions and legacies of bitterness. A place where brothers can become embroiled in bloody actions and families irreparably damaged by tragedy.."
and now my review:
Before saying anything I want to quote the following:
"...What Creggan Church, with all its Catholic-Protestant husbandry, does remind me of is how little I care whether you call me Irish or British. You might as well ask if I am gay or straight. These questions carry assumptions that have nothing to do with my life."
This is both a wonderful novel and a wonderful YA novel. It amazes me that while a novel like this could be published in Ireland in 2001 for YA readers Patrick Ness, in his most recent YA novel, only manages to approach any of the subjects dealt with in Snapshots with such candour by censoring his text with blocks of deleted text which we have to 'imagine'. For a man who went to school in Ireland in the 1970's it is an odd, but wonderful, experience to see Ireland forging a path to honesty, openness and truth while places like the USA degenerate into carping bitter denial and obfuscation.
I won't repeat what was said so well by the professional reviewer - this is just a fabulous book - warm, funny, sad, and completely adult in the way it is written (which may seem odd to some as praise for a YA book but I doubt any actual YA reader would think so). It may turn out to be Mr. Gregory's greatest accomplishment - hitting everything so right so young can be a hard act to follow. I wish this novel would be available to all YA - I know at least one country where it isn't going to happen any time soon - they would gain so much.
Michael Cronin's professional review:
"...Jarlath Gregory’s Snapshots is a more modest first novel, but nevertheless a promising start to the career of a writer still in his early twenties. Set in Crossmaglen, and the notorious ‘Bandit Country’ of South Armagh, it is an episodic, picaresque, drink-sodden tale of those truly awful late teenage years spent in a dreary small town: ‘without the bombs and the bullets to chew over, the town would have collapsed of boredom.’
"Moving back and forth between the perspectives of Oisin and Jude, interspersed with brief third person ‘snapshots,’ it is mostly a sequence of those utterly dismal parties which chiefly comprise of boredom, too much drink and bad, desperate sex. All of which Gregory captures in unrelentingly bleak detail. The style is chatty, composed of short sentences, with lots of yoof slang and local dialect. It is heavily ironic, though also touchingly poetic at times, and with much very dark, camp humour...
"It is interesting that in a novel set at the very end of the nineties the characters are not cheerfully embracing their gay identity, buoyed along by the glittering promises of the instant glamour that awaits them made by television soaps and glossy magazines. It is a world where growing up gay is still tough; a world where there is still the fear and loneliness of being different; still confusion and uncertainty and disavowals, and tearful confrontations with parents. And, of course, there is still a world out there where copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger, with cautionary tales on sensitive boys who go to the big city and come back wearing pink T-shirts, are placed on pillows by anxious mammies.
"This is made all the more convincing by Gregory not reducing either of the two main characters to victims, they are both too resilient and knowing for that, nor contriving a glibly cheerful post-coming out ending. And since the boys spend their time exclusively in the company of their straight peers, the novel clearly sets the difficulties of growing up gay within the messy, tortured confusions and uncertainties of just growing up.
"In some ways it is perhaps as much a novel about becoming a man as becoming a gay man. Most of the sex in fact happens between either of the gay characters and curious (or desperate, or both) straight male acquaintances. This is not, however, the stuff of fantasy: it’s far too squalid and wholly unerotic for that. The novel is also, of course, set in a very particular context, one where becoming a man is complicated immeasurably by politics and a war held at bay by a brittle cease-fire; by the undertow of violent tensions and legacies of bitterness. A place where brothers can become embroiled in bloody actions and families irreparably damaged by tragedy.."
and now my review:
Before saying anything I want to quote the following:
"...What Creggan Church, with all its Catholic-Protestant husbandry, does remind me of is how little I care whether you call me Irish or British. You might as well ask if I am gay or straight. These questions carry assumptions that have nothing to do with my life."
This is both a wonderful novel and a wonderful YA novel. It amazes me that while a novel like this could be published in Ireland in 2001 for YA readers Patrick Ness, in his most recent YA novel, only manages to approach any of the subjects dealt with in Snapshots with such candour by censoring his text with blocks of deleted text which we have to 'imagine'. For a man who went to school in Ireland in the 1970's it is an odd, but wonderful, experience to see Ireland forging a path to honesty, openness and truth while places like the USA degenerate into carping bitter denial and obfuscation.
I won't repeat what was said so well by the professional reviewer - this is just a fabulous book - warm, funny, sad, and completely adult in the way it is written (which may seem odd to some as praise for a YA book but I doubt any actual YA reader would think so). It may turn out to be Mr. Gregory's greatest accomplishment - hitting everything so right so young can be a hard act to follow. I wish this novel would be available to all YA - I know at least one country where it isn't going to happen any time soon - they would gain so much.
Displaying 1 of 1 review