I might have mentioned it before but it’s worth repeating, i’m not a great fan of modern Irish novels - with the exception of a couple of authors (like Pat McCabe - who’s guilty of repeating himself on a grand scale, however good the original spirit of his work may be), there have been precious few novelists since Flann O’Brien that do anything for me.
So I was wary of Peter Murphy’s ‘John the Revelator’ - the story of a young man coming of age in Co. Wexford. I’d read a lot of Murphy’s journalistic work in Irish magazine Hot Press, which was at turns inspired or ugly depending upon how willing you were to share the same ideological church with him.
John the Revelator though managed to banish any preconceptions about either Irish novels or Murphy’s work, while at the same time recognisably belonging to both camps.
I think it was the rhythm above all else that made me get the novel, from its opening pages:
I was born in a storm. My mother said the thunder was so loud she flinched when it struck, strobes of lightning and slam-dancing winds and volleys of rain for hours until it blew itself out and sloped off like a spent beast. ‘I knew you were a boy,’ she said. ‘Heartburn. Sure sign of a man in your life.’ My name is John Devine. I was christened after the beloved disciple, the borther of James the Great. Our Lord called them the sons of thunder. ‘John was Jesus’ favourite,’ my mother told me. ‘The patron saint of printers and tanners and typesetters.’ When she got started like this, it could go on for hours. […]I like that opening salvo, full of southern gothic and shakespeare (remember, it’s a storm that opens Macbeth, full of portents and ill-omen), coupled with the down-to-earth language of that ‘when she got started like this, it could go on for hours’. It invites the reader to take on the mythic and knit it together with the concrete.
