The River and Enoch O'Reilly by Peter Murphy

Published by Mariner Books on September 10, 2013

Every voice that ever made a sound still lingers, waiting to be heard if only you know how to listen. The patterns of flowing river waters make a sound that can unlock the mysteries of the universe. These, at least, are the insights and beliefs of certain characters in The River and Enoch O'Reilly, characters who may be gifted with special insights or cursed with mental illness. The blurry distinctions between truth and myth and madness are central to Peter Murphy's remarkable novel.

Murphy tells us that "a man is not defined by his death. Every man has his story, and his life is in the telling." This is the story of Enoch O'Reilly, and while it is also the story of other boys and men and women and the torments of life in southeastern Ireland, it is more fundamentally the story of Ireland's myths.

Over a period of two weeks in November 1984, with no logical explanation, nine people drown as the Rua overflows its banks, apparent victims of suicide although nobody will speak the word. The night before the flooding starts, Enoch O'Reilly fits the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth. The novel then resets, beginning Enoch's story at the beginning, as a boy who is shaped by Elvis Presley and Holy Ghost Radio, each imparting a lifelong sense of existential peril. He later attends a Christian Brothers school where he learns this: "Ambition does not always know its end, but its beginnings are palpably manifest in the guts of those who nurture it, and whom it nurtures." Feeling a calling to preach, Enoch enters a seminary because he understands that "mass is the opiate of the religious," but his atheism does not go over well with the Dean. What happens to Enoch next is, like much of the novel, open to interpretation. Suffice it to say that his life continues to be informed by Elvis and the Holy Ghost.

From time to time, Murphy shifts his attention to other characters, some momentarily, a few in greater depth. Among the latter are Enoch's father Frank, who spent much of his life trying to recover words lingering in the ether, spoken by people long dead, and Professor Charles Stafford, a psychiatrist who may have mental health issues of his own. We also glimpse some of those who drowned, people ill-treated by life who were drawn to the river, who heard its call.

Language is power, Enoch learns in seminary, and power is evident in the language that Murphy wields. There is a surrealistic quality to The River and Enoch O'Reilly that makes it difficult to separate the story from its symbols. The river is a connection to the past and future, a symbol of life but also of death and madness, a place for people who are "speaking in riverish, knowing only riverality, the sound of the river the sound of thought itself, the babble of water that ... erodes the stuff of sanity." Other oddities include preaching voices emanating from a radio tuned to the dead, the unlikely interruption of a brawl by protective herons, a machine that ticks off the countdown to a flood. According to one of Murphy's characters, the Irish prefer myths and legends to philosophy -- it is the Irish way to order the universe -- and that mythical ordering is reflected in this sometimes baffling but always beautifully told story.

RECOMMENDED