Inish

by Bernard Share

First published in 1966, revolving musically around three separate identities and the idea of identity itself, Mr. Share's novel can, perhaps, be best described as a metaphysical farce.

Genres: Ireland, Novels, Fiction

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Bernard Share has taught English Literature in Australia and edited Books Ireland and CARA, the inflight magazine of Aer Lingus. He has written extensively on language and Irish social history and the third edition of his dictionary of slang and colloquial English in Ireland, Slanguage, was published recently. He lives in Co. Kildare.

Reviews

[Zadignose]

It is clear why the book's blurbs read "Inish is the funniest novel I have ever read." and "A very funny book." It is because "Barking Madness" doesn't make good copy.

I would not say this is an exceptionally funny book, though it surely provokes a few chortles. But it is a very engagingly strange novel, unique and innovative, with modernist roots.

If I had to say what it's about, I'd summarize it as a novel about departures, or perhaps about the state of the permanent wayfarer. That may perhaps suggest that it would be suitable to follow this with a reading of the entirely dissimilar Knut Hamsun novel Wayfarers. Almost everyone would disagree, perhaps including myself.

Perhaps I should allow the book to speak for itself:

"In the world of today our three great nations, Pitt Street, Keflavik airport and Arrack Mines, must preserve at all costs their proud insular heritage which has been handed down to them as casually as possible by generations yet unborn."

If that doesn't communicate, I don't know what does. In fact, I don't know what does.

"The words by this time didn't matter. Everyone was full, and at that point of fatigue when the careful enunciation of any word or group of words will load it or them with a rocking pile of meaning which everyone stands round with baited breath hoping to catch."

The length of the book is somewhere in the range of a hundred and fifty pages, or perhaps four pages. I'm not sure. Certainly if you removed the reiterations, repetitions, regurgitations, and redundancy, it would come down to about nine words. If you'd like to know what those nine words are, you'll have to read the book itself, but I promise you that at least one of those words is "of."

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words alone cannot describe the awesomeness of this book, but I ought to try.

Imagine being trapped in the mind of an OCD amnesiac possessed by the spirit of James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. Imagine a book that uses such strange, warped idioms, again and again, that the mind is forced into hilarity by proxy.

Imagine a story that makes no sense, but entertains and amazes with the galloping energy of the prose. This book is a masterpiece. It has to be read to be believed. (Hint hint).

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great quivering incoherency of bits of repeated/conflated action and identity, playing out over a great dexterity of words. Late in the book, I suddenly though "AHA, we're within the muddled reminiscences of a now-senile narrator who can't keep the events of his life straight anymore, but is mostly hung up on various real or imaged romantic episodes." But honestly reducing this (or "solving" it) to any one explanation is probably besides the point or just impossible. Like a weird amalgamation with Christine Brooke-Rose's mid-60s facility for repetition structures and Flann O'Brien, perhaps.

[Nathanimal · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Then the boys became men and moved, took on new nationalities, spoke new tongues, most of them a kind of Australian-Inish that was both unlovely and unreal. But beneath the false moustaches, the advancing hairlines, the differently-shaped paunches, the differently-paced prejudices, there was a confusing similarity, a concatenation of echos." [mytalics]

I appreciate it when a confusing book, a book that wants to be confusing, that couldn't be unconfusing without violating its own raison d'être, at least tries to explain itself. Such a book tries to explain itself by describing itself as best it can — and the above quote is one of many instances of beautiful and entertaining self-reflexivity Inish offers almost apologetically on its own behalf. A concatenation of echos. You get these recurring little bundles of language that multiply and mutate and cross-contaminate throughout the book. Fortunately Share is such a connoisseur of words, his sentences are interesting and musical enough, that you actually enjoy encountering them again and again. But it's not just the words that echo, no. The characters echo, the plot — can we call it a plot? — echos. Inish is a chamber of echos where you can't tell exactly where other people are standing or what it is they're talking about and yet your mind is able to piece together the general tone of the conversation. In this case, according to Inish tone, the echo chamber might actually be the foamy bottom of a pint glass.

I don't know that Inish is as funny as the two quotes on the cover keep insisting. I mean, I certainly laughed at: "Marriage, he reflected as he passed through the bathroom, kitchen and pantry, was not all a bed of clitoris" — a brilliantly set-up joke. But the book wasn't full of LOLs and LMAOs, per say. Let's call it intensely playful. That almost seems more important anyway, doesn't it? Imagine a very smart and devious child taking apart a machine (I can't decide what machine best represents a novel, so I'll just say machine) and putting the parts back together in astonishing, artful configurations. It doesn't actually work as a machine anymore, but who really cares?

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

now this was recommended as very funny irish writer, and i admit the very good garden of choice hysterias, glowing hydrants and delicate clitoris is pretty funny, but maybe i missed the funniness in general? oh sure, there is (was?) even a bar called shenanigans here in olkahoma that wasn't as funny as the shenanigans in this book and the Times IS A RAG, by any name, and I've read it, the SAME NEWS EVERYDAY. so is that what is funny? that as farcical as this is, one can find these self-same things going on in "real life", hah!, even you doing these self-same things in real life?! perhaps. a very funny Irish writer recommended this.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to review Inish as it's like Bernard Share dumped the ingredients in a bowl, whirled the mixer a few times, and opted not to bake the resulting batter. The result is a spiraling, loosely-connected collection of vignettes imbued with light humor and a penetrating poignancy. I submit the following passage as evidence:

It was the untypical details that came up first. Under the house, with the bicycles, antipodean handlebars crooked upwards, were a number of domestic objects, their precise outlines now forgotten, which keyed the evening. They spoke of family, of the overspill of domestic bric-à-brac that a man living on his own never accumulated, of a casualness about nails and dead men and old newspapers which a bachelor can only affect. To meet these objects at night was worse: they lived their own relentlessly useless lives even more intensely, proclaiming the somnolent, cluttered ease of existence behind an emotional palisade where there is more than one tamed mutineer. There was even a bottle, Tooheys Flag Ale, not quite empty, whereas he would have made a point either of finishing it, or of washing it, or of leaving it somewhere where his planned insouciance would have been noticed. He crouched down under the house, waited for the objects: the old motor tyre, the empty teachests, the perfunctory gardening tools to take him over, make him one of them; while outside in the moonlight his head was swimming away on its own and above him, through the thin floor and the fibro, the radiogram and the feet seemed to be nailing up a door from the inside.

[Norah · Rating 2 out of 5]

A difficult book to read, hard to follow, but as it looks like a rather old edition, will probably pass it on to a rather literary friend who may appreciate it more!