Oh When the Saints

by Peter Money

'“Hyper-aware Denny, a young American in Dublin, makes his tentative way towards adulthood with a supporting cast of oddball friends. Denny hopes for a big love, the ‘girl named Ireland’. Akin to a Joycean ramble, Oh When the Saints follows a sensitive boy on the reluctant verge of manhood, who cannot help endlessly analysing his own - and others' - place in the stream of life. His heart is ‘a sack of air’ until he meets a trainee librarian with ambitions to be wild. This is a strange, elliptical novel of ideas, told in punchy, poetic prose; Peter Money's is a vivid, fresh and welcome voice.'

256 pages, Paperback

Published July 19, 2019

Reviews

[Richard S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Money's first novel is poetry, music ("beat-jazz?"), a brilliant cacophony.  In a literary environment where so much new fiction is so predictable in tone and content (first two pages boring me to tears and a return to the library shelf), it's incredibly refreshing to read literature that is geninuely interesting, where every sentence seems unique, where a writer is bending the envelope, creating a different literary consciousness even.  This book was recently published by Liberties Press in Dublin and is available in the United States from Casemate IPM.

Set outside of and in Dublin, the story is about the narrator, Denny, and some of his friends, and is heavy on Denny's sensations of others and his environment. The relationships are rich, described in nuance and with compassion.  It's difficult reading, and the prose-poetry is so rich and allusive it frequently escapes sense.  You are not told dates, and the locations and references are sometimes obscure.  The narrative is oblique, but the book is hardly about that, and yet it's so insanely rich.  Here's an typical example:

"She allowed him for the sake of a conversation deeper and what wasn't a smoke now issued smiles and laughter, the taste of lollipop, honey in the hair, toes; syrup in the throat."

This is creating a "mood" between the characters, in this case Kath and Denny - a set of poetic images which reflect their relationship.  Throughout you are given sense impressions about the relationships, with a few hard facts, but as a result, you feel like you know these characters in a richer way than just pure narrative would provide. The same holds for Denny's relationship with his environment, poetic sense impressions, it's almost an extreme of "show don't tell". And the poetic style of the author gives a richer understanding of sense and feeling than pure narrative can, and a very deep sense of character.

Back in the '80s I used to go to John Zorn's "Cobra" experimental jazz concerts, they were fascinating, so outside the norm.  I kept thinking about them as I read the book, the effect was the same. Re-reading the chapters brings out more, like listening to Zorn's music you hear more each time.  The sense-impressions become stronger as you go.  Kath (my favorite) is so awesome - kind of like the friend you always wished you had, I can't remember a character in a book I "liked" as much as her, and it brought back the fondest memories of friends I had like her in my past.  But it was bringing to the reader the little sense impressions which are so much part of relationships that I found intriguing. This is the way life is experienced, it's not the conversations you remember, it's the sensations, the amount and type of love you felt.

The book also reminded me of a lot of the experimental writing I read - not that I feel that the book was explicitly "experimental", but it felt like "The Cannibal" by John Hawks, an attempt to expand literary realism. The book contains virtually no dialogue, and no "easy" passages. More than half of the style is what I like to call "original author", the authentic voice, not the influenced voice. You can see the influences from beat poetry/jazz, Joyce, Beckett, Rimbaud, but the rest is pure Peter Money. I find so little of this originality and authenticity in most contemporary fiction. The whole "Make it new!" which seems to have been lost is rediscovered here.

So, to sum up: Saints is wonderful, I totally and absolutely love every word of it.  You will walk away feeling like you know these characters and their relationships in a different, more profound way than from ordinary literature, and your mind will be opened that much more. Afterwards you will say you had a different, and in many ways better "literary experience", and certainly a more memorable one.

[Liberties · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tells the tall (or average-size) tale of an American in Dublin: a beautifully written coming-of-age novel, in the style of the Beats, from a renowned Vermont poet. Echoes of Kerouac's classic On the Road. Shimmering prose, with some breathtaking passages. Rightly praised by Nuala O'Connor and Philip Davison. The spirit of Rathmines ("Like Ranelagh, but without the notions", as I saw in a shop window recently) in book form. There's a nice video of Peter singing, prior to a reading from the book, by the Dodder, on Twitter (May 26, @SusanSweeny). Both book and video are recommended (by the publisher).