The year is 2011, the locale is Dublin and 26-year old Neil, who is unemployed, is caring for his grandmother each Friday night in a roster arrangement while eager to follow his girlfriend Kathy to Canada as soon as he can. Moreover, he was obliged to postpone his flight to Canada to attend the recent funeral of his grandfather.
Meanwhile, his grandmother is anxious to let him see some letters written by her father, Harry Casey – Neil’s great-grandfather – at the time of the 1916 Rising. The late Harry Casey was an eager young Pathé newsreel cameraman who was fortunate enough to capture the dramatic events of Easter Week with a so-called cine-machine and four reels.
Then Harry’s unpublished memoirs come to light and Neil delays his flight yet again to check out their monetary value. He has to be pragmatic about this - without some substantial inflow of cash, he will not be able to budget for Canada. All very well, those notions of patriotism and blood sacrifice but times are hard and thousands are sailing - if not flying - as employment figures shrink throughout the country.Despite the allure of letters written in another time, the tragic glory that the Easter Rising and its aftermath is remote in Neil's field of vision.
Meanwhile, Neil concentrates on building up his physique at the gym while enjoying the usual hedonistic excesses of a 26-year old youth. Curran’s compelling novel includes some perceptive and none too edifying portraits from Irish public life - he doesn't paint Neil or Kathy in any kind of faux-heroic manner either and is astute and measured in his portraits of both.
Thus, with the Pathé cine reels, Citizens plays with the allure which cinematic images have for Neil’s generation as the book subtly explores the contrast between ideals long dead and contemporary greed. Meanwhile, Neil Skypes Kathy as he tries to play down his anxieties as to whether she could hook up with a new boyfriend in far Vancouver. The author is a sensitive, intuitive explorer of human relations who gets the dispiriting, somewhat hollow feelings that Skyping can engender down pat.
And every time he goes onto Skype now, he starts to get the nagging feeling of unreality, and the unreality of their relationship hits him with every awkward silence. He worries she may be feeling the unreality of it all too.
While Citizens is an unflinching, honest account, the 314-page novel could have done with some editing – 200 pages would have been more than sufficient to tell the story, it would seem. That caveat aside, Curran’s twin accounts pivot fluidly between their respective time periods making for a compelling, vividly- conjured narrative.
Paddy Kehoe
