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The past is another county
Sunday, July 09, 2006 - Reviewed by Anthony Glavin
In The Wake Of The Bagger, by Jack Harte, Scotus Press, €9.95.

This first novel from the accomplished short story writer Jack Harte is truly a many-splendoured thing. Loosely autobiographical, it tells the story of the Dowd family, who leaves their beloved coastal Sligo for a midlands town and the employment opportunities provided by the industrialisation of the Bog of Allen in the 1950s.

While a lesser writer might have happily settled for a thinly disguised sociological treatment of that historic rationalisation of rural Ireland, Harte offers us a far more ambitious and multi-layered tale - one that explores not only a particular epoch, but also the manner in which we all grow away from the homeplace.

Narrated by eldest son Robbie, the novel opens with the Dowds’ journey from Sligo, in a truck carrying all their furniture, to their new home in Ballyclare, Co Longford. It’s a single-storey house on a new estate, with running water and a flush toilet that fascinates Robbie’s younger brothers.

A blacksmith by trade, their father Joe has been hired to do the work of a mechanical tradesman at a labourer’s pay rate, an inequity that proves central to a workers’ strike against ‘‘the Company’’ (aka Bord na Mona) later in the novel.

The ‘bagger’ of the title is actually a gargantuan contraption, a kind of nightmarish Rube Goldberg device, with multiple buckets on a rotating belt that scoop out huge mouthfuls of peat and feed them into the belly of the bagger.

This digests and then excretes them, like two endless turds of turf, which are promptly sliced into properly sized sods by a row of metal discs.

What truly interests Harte, however, is the way in which this mechanical beast on the bog utterly distorts the natural rhythms that marked the traditional hand-winning of turf, and offers the workers a goodly quotient of stress and anxiety instead.

In fact, two stories are being told here, as each chapter of the Dowd family’s new life is followed by a shorter chapter in which the older Robbie addresses and interrogates his younger self, whom he variously compares to a little manikin, the smallest of Russian dolls or a child preserved by the bog itself.

This gift for metaphor appears throughout the novel, in which the few awkward words that a tongue-tied Robbie utters to the girl he adores resemble ‘‘an involuntary spasm, like the graceless flap of a dying fish’’.

Elsewhere, Robbie tells us how his father Joe, keen to escape what he considered the rural bondage of Sligo, ‘‘seemed only to dream of the future, in the way that my magnetic needle always rotated toward the past, towards the northwest’’.

This father and son dichotomy, with its reversal of the traditional roles as the son chafes against a custom-bound father, serves the novel extremely well, and the portrait of Joe that emerges is at once canny and sympathetic.

There is nothing sentimental in this look back at an earlier life and times, with its depiction of the sexual abuse perpetrated by a schoolmaster or the cot death of a younger sister which leads to a powerfully described coming-of-age moment for Robbie, as his father struggles with the ban on the burial of unbaptised infants in consecrated ground by a Church described as ‘‘a heartless outfit’’.

Years later, Robbie manages to purchase his former childhood home, only to discover that ‘‘retrieving the past is another matter’’ - much as ‘‘the same tide will never flood the bay again’’. Here, as elsewhere, Harte’s lean and lucid prose serves up a story that is both wise and engaging.

Anthony Glavin is a novelist and short story writer.