The ikon maker: A novel

by Desmond Hogan

This is Desmond Hogan's first novel, written in 1974. Hogan is the author of "The Leaves on Grey", "A New Shirt" and "The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea" which won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1980.

Genres: Fiction

150 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Ikon Maker is Desmond Hogan's first novel, written in 1974 when he was twenty-three and first published in Dublin in 1976.

"It is a tragic story of bitterness and betrayal, conceived with sensitivity and created with a delicate grace...' Literary Review

"'His style is direct, colloquial, laconic. His sentences and paragraphs are short. Yet within this terseness he achieves a lyricism that is beautifully controlled. It is a thoughtful and graceful book...' Victoria Glendinning

"She (Susan O'Hallrahan) loves her son with a passion that has reawakened her sexuality. When he flees her and his unhappy memories of childhood, she cannot stand her life alone and goes to England in search of him. There, suffused with the glow of a woman in love that turns the heads of young men on the street, she enters the world of her son's generation...Mr. Hogan is subtle writer. Crises have resolutions; life's common tragedies; as he makes us see, do not.' New York Times Book Review"
From the back of the 1993 paperback edition from Faber & Faber (the edition I own but not listed amongst editions on Goodreads*) as the synopsis on Goodreads is ridiculously inadequate.

Considering the praise, such as the examples above, heaped upon this novel it hardly needs me to tell you this is a powerful and extraordinary novel. What astounds me is that is that it was first published in 1976 (by the Irish Readers and Writers C0-Op a newly set up enterprise which also published Neil Jordan's first book; it was also the year I did my Leaving Certificate and left school for University) and it is not only a masterful first novel but it is a novel that doesn't even touch on any of the expected gay tropes - it is not a 'gay' novel it is a novel that has gay man in it but has many more important things to say, about family, love, Ireland and the coruscating role that the catholic church has played in strangling the life, love and beauty out of the people of Ireland. Decades before there was any hint in public about the churches dirty secrets it is all but acknowledge and admitted - the church is seen as the power that has strangled and ruined generations of Irish men and women. It almost seems insulting to shelve it as 'queer' because that is to put limits and definitions on it.

The way Hogan writes about his queer/homosexual/gay character is astounding to me, his depths of observation and the way none of his characters ever 'deal' with the issue is a revelation, it seems to me a far more modern novel then many that were written twenty years later. If ever there was a forgotten or overlooked masterpiece this is it. It is also a novel which has some memorable phrases of which the following stands out:

"He was no longer alone...He was part of a whole generation of young people alive too the possibilities of a moment." Which for me is one of the finest descriptions of what it felt like to be alive and young in the 1960/70s the sense of change, opportunity, difference and optimism.

The novel also reminded me, through the memories of Susan O'Hallrahan, of the stifling absurdities of the pervasive sexual repression, the condemnation of sex before marriage "... she'd forgotten...(the) terrible sin (on) Irish consciousness;...there'd been pilgrimage to Lourdes against it, prayers at Fatima, and in Ireland's own shrine Knock, they'd invoked Mary Magdalene and the Baptist against sex..." Susan O'Hallrahan had made love to her husband before marriage and never, unusually for her generation, confessed or cared and now with her son grown up she could see young Irish boys and girls behaving and acting as she had and doing it openly and happily.

(While the church men were leading those prayers and pilgrimages they were buggering boys and sleeping with girls and having babies which they hid away and prayed would die. Never forget that when the next genial cleric appears on your tv screens to demand our attention and obedience my bit of editorial, I can't forget or forgive)

I did wonder while reading this novel about the younger readers who seem, at least those who write reviews on Goodreads, unable to conceive of a place or behavior different from that which they know. Can they understand boys like Diarmaid, in this novel, who left school spent months at home deciding what to do, then going to England and working for over a year, then returning home for many months and then leaving again all before their eighteenth birthday? I don't want the days back when our factories were full of sixteen year old boys or when boys of that age set off alone to find work in a foreign country but realising how close it is might help many understand that that is still the reality in most of the world.

I have drifted off point - The Ikon Maker is a wonderful novel that is as readable and meaningful as when it was published. To me it stands out as a exceptionally strong story of love, family and how they can both fulfill and destroy. There are no heroes or villains just people, although there is plenty that is condemned for the ways is constricts and strangles people. This startlingly original and unique novel should be better known and wider read.

*Which is not unusual for many titles on Goodreads, even relatively recently published books.

[Tama · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hogan has sudden observations that are something to keep one going. Susan talking shit about Alice, suddenly realising how there is something to her.

She’s so fucking dramatic. An unreliable narrator to be sure. Her son supposedly seeing her like a beautiful stranger when he was no doubt seeing her dated opinions clearly.

This feels like the Paul Schrader drama he never would’ve done. A book of feminine empathy. But with the darkness of homophobic-confusion, instead of the pornography of ‘Hardcore,’ etc. An extension of ‘Housekeeping’ but this one for slightly older folk.

That final sentence is overwhelming. It’s sad. I got a sensation. I think it was the only time I got a sensation through the book. I do remember it hitting me how sad the book is, for a period while in the bus I felt like weeping. I think it was around the time she is with Diarmaid and is quite confused. Melancholy+confusion. That is simply tragic.

In the end some of her conjecture was right which surprised me. Hogan would’ve impressed more to have shown Susan’s wishful thinking as merely a wish.

I found it a little haunting how perhaps Hogan’s Diarmaid wasn’t the author surrogate, in ways, but perhaps Michael, who went off with a “young boy...”

I hope to remember Susan for a while yet.

[Michael Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diarmaid a young Irishman takes off for parts unknown and stops contacting his mother Susan who goes to London looking for him. Along the way, she discovers what was formerly only a suspicion about her son's sex life must in fact be true. She keeps missing him at every turn and begins to grow desperate. Susan experiences changes in her own life and starts to doubt what might be true and what might be false. Very realistic portrayal of a mother's love that grows beyond the maternal by a writer that seems to know more than he says. Highly recommended.

[Gilles Russeil · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'Irlande des petites villes, une mère veuve, un fils mystérieux et hanté par un drame, son départ, le voyage maternel pour le retrouver et ses rencontres comme dans une illiade miniature. Irlandais donc délectable

[Vivian Valvano · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Hogan's first novel, published in the early 70s, reissued in 2013 with an interesting epilogue in which he comments intriguingly about writing it. Set primarily in 1972, it is the story of Susan, a widow of Co. Galway, and her relationship - no, more like her maternal obsession with - her 18 year old son, Diarimuid. He is the "ikon maker" of the title. In many ways, he's almost as important a character as Susan, but she takes precedence, our being in her consciousness. And her son is often not even present but portrayed in her memories of the past and her poignant searching for him. He is a lost soul in many ways, clearly a gay man struggling mightily with his identity. But Susan has important struggles of her own. There are traits of the novice novelist here, bit the book is very powerful, nonetheless. Hogan's utilization of the 1930s, WW II, the Troubles, the pop culture and counterculture atmospheres of the 60s and 70s - all these are striking and original. And at one point, about the Irish people, he writes one of the most astounding lines I've ever read: "They'd been convicted by history, neutralized by the Church." The sentiment has been said ad infinitum, but never like that. A very affecting novel.

[Cmorice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Titre francais : le garçon aux icônes
Irlande, debut des annees 1970. Susan O'Hallrahan, depuis sa petite boutique de confection a Ballinasloe, dans le comte de Galway, ne percoit plus du tumulte du monde qu'une lointaine rumeur. Depuis la mort de son epoux, elle vit seule, bercee par les souvenirs, et elle attend. Elle attend, avec une ferveur melee d'apprehension, le retour de son fils, Diarmaid, un garcon etrange, solitaire et ombrageux, parti a Londres en quete d'aventure. Jusqu'au jour ou, poussee par un funeste pressentiment, Susan decide de ne plus attendre et de se lancer a sa recherche. Son iliade miniature sera pour elle l'occasion de se confronter aux revelations les plus douloureuses - sur elle-meme, sur son fils, et sur la nature exacte, magnifique et terrible, du lien qui les attache l'un a l'autre.
Ce premier roman d'une beaute foudroyante revele l'une des plus grandes voix de la litterature irlandaise contemporaine, demeuree inexplicablement meconnue depuis pres de quarante ans.

[Lily Ruban · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The Ikon Maker was an iconic book for anyone interested in writing" Tóibín