The stories that make up Pure Gold, John Patrick McHugh’s debut collection, are searing. They seem to radiate their own heat.
On the surface, Bonfire, the book’s opening story, is a tale of boyhood high jinks. The narrator and his friend Terry, bound riotously about town, “gunned over” their bikes’ handlebars, in search of stuff to burn. For the boys, there is something they need in the flames; fire holds “bold promises”.
The latter description is a brilliant bit of prose, encapsulating in one snippet the story’s wider, more complex themes. At its core, Bonfire is about how youthful energy is channelled – for better and, very often, for worse. Just as fire can be both creative and destructive, children are “bold”: audacious, but also petty, vindictive, mean.
For McHugh, though, there is something these boys play with that is at least as dangerous as fire: language. About halfway through the story, we learn that Terry is from the Traveller community. The term “Traveller” is quickly weaponised by the narrator, who is beginning to intuit the power structures of the society into which he has been born.
Bonfire is a stinging rebuke of a violence that lurks beneath what purports to be “respectable” middle-class Ireland. Like many terms of abuse, an epithet such as “k****er” is powerful only because a particular social context deems it so. As codifications of social status, words, like fire, can burn.
In this story, Terry is set aside and othered. He becomes a “k****er” – a pariah to be ostracised, essentially – only because the narrator’s older brother designates him one. This is endorsed, revealingly, by his grieving father, who politely urges his youngest son to be “a little more aware about who he tags along with”.
‘The Island’
The stories that make up Pure Gold are set on “the Island”, a microcosmic surrogate for rural Ireland with all its charms and pathologies. Shrewd characterisation on McHugh’s part means personages rarely harden into stereotypes, but are recognisable nonetheless.
In Hoarfrost, a couple struggle to repair their relationship in the wake of infidelity. Most revealing by the story’s end is how Annette, whose husband has betrayed her, strives to reframe their marital problems as something redemptive or perversely romantic – less a sign of their relationship’s fragility than what she hopes might be its deeper resilience. At least she tries to convince herself of this, more and more desperately.
Immured by circumstance, the Island’s denizens are reliably unreliable interpreters of their own motives. They are set on appearing knowing, even savvy – to look like they “get it”. More often, though, they’re clueless – almost endearingly so. Post-hoc justifications for what they say and do are routinely marshalled, only the more conviction they attempt to muster (“These are normal fears. This is normal behaviour.”), the less self-assured they tend to seem.
In Howya, Horse – a bizarre tale in which a horse crashes a house party – Cotter, its protagonist, consoles himself by repeating the hollow mantra of his fundamental innocence: “He was in the correct. She was wrong . . . Cotter was the noble victim once more.” Or: “It would suggest he was a bad person, and, importantly, he was not the bad one here.” He remains laughably oblivious to his own selfishness: the elephant – or, in this case, the horse – in the room.
Rural Ireland
From the get-go, McHugh’s prose – like Kevin Barry’s, a writer whose influence looms large over the collection – fizzes with the verbal textures of contemporary rural Ireland and its rich demotic. Things are not tossed or thrown, they are “chucked”. Nothing is stolen, it is “nicked” or “nabbed”. Something is never broken, it’s “banjaxed”. People aren’t drunk, they get “mouldy” or “rotten”. Things are never merely good, they’re “unreal”, “class”.
This can make for wonderfully evocative reading. McHugh’s exuberance is refreshingly at odds, too, with a minimalist style that is de rigueur in recent literary fiction. Yet these stories’ vibrant earthiness, which this idiom is enlisted to convey, can also at times degrade into caricature: a strength thereby becoming a weakness. Colloquialism is crucial to the intimacy of place – not to mention the humour – that McHugh stylishly conjures and it need not be spoiled by excess.
Pure Gold is a mature book about often immature people. These stories exude levity and weight, delight and despair, and pose such questions as: might childish eejitery herald something altogether darker? How do we distinguish what appears socially acceptable or normal from what is in fact right?
On the back of this exciting debut, John Patrick McHugh joins an illustrious generation of talented young Irish writers. One can only look forward to his next offering.
