May 20, 2013
Set in the small town of Murn, Ireland, Murphy’s strong second novel (after John the Revelator) introduces Enoch O’Reilly, an ex-seminarian who doesn’t believe in God but prays to Elvis. As a child, Enoch decided to become a radio preacher after hearing a sermonizing program, Holy Ghost Radio, on his father’s private basement radio. Enoch has the personality to carry this off and doesn’t mind making up sensational tripe to entertain an audience, and his own Holy Show is a big draw—until he delivers an earnest sermon about the great river Rua, the book’s other main character, and the sermon is poorly received. Murphy expands the narrative with vignettes about Murn’s troubled inhabitants, among them a woman who drowns herself in the Rua, a boy who “takes fit” (has seizures), and a troubled arsonist. Murphy’s language is powerful, and in particular uses wavelike repetition to good effect: “Maybe a man’s beloved did not love him. Maybe a man could not bear how the world had turned pallid.... Maybe a man’s mind burned until the fever of it, the heat of it, turned his soul to char.” Agent: Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary Agency
July 1, 2013
An Irish river floods; nine people drown, presumed suicides. Folklore and radio transmissions provide part of the answer in this work of magic realism, the Irish journalist's second novel (John the Revelator, 2009). On the first of November 1984, the torrential rains begin, causing the river Rua to overflow its banks in the town of Murn. Nine bodies will be retrieved, six of them young adults. The flood begins the novel and is reprised toward the end, so Murphy has begun with the climax--a daring move. The rest of the novel sketches the protagonist, Enoch O'Reilly, and offers haphazard vignettes of the dead. (In the inevitable comparison, Jeffrey Eugenides' tightly focused The Virgin Suicides fares better.) Enoch grew up in a small town south of Murn. Mother Kathleen was a devout Catholic; father Frank owned an electrical business and was a published authority on sound waves. This tight-lipped man had built his own machine. The pivotal moment of Enoch's life came when the 12-year-old snuck into his dad's workshop and heard a thundering preacher's voice through the headphones. That same night, his idol, Elvis, the King, exhorted him to emulate the preacher, which he did after a fashion, espousing the Word (but not God) and years later hosting a parodic Revival Hour on local radio. The trouble with this Elvis freak is that he has no interior. He is less complex than Frank, who gathered data on historical flood patterns through his machine and concluded the river was a force to cull the population. Certainly the Rua Nine were mentally troubled or miscreants. One was an arsonist; another, a farmer, shot all his cattle. As a battlefield casualty in Korea, Frank had a vision: "chains of men descending into a river." And after Enoch's incursion, he suffered a breakdown, babbling in "riverish." It's the rightness of Murphy's language that thrills us into temporary submission, but as the novel progresses, its odd structure becomes increasingly problematic.
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