Peadar O’Callaghan: St Brigid’s Day

Getting your hands on a copy of the novel NIGHT SWIMMERS by Rosin Maguire, published on the Feast of St. Brigid, which I don’t think is a coincidence, might be a good way to celebrate.

St Brigid, Drummin Church, Westport, Mayo

The unforgettable Covid virus is in the atmosphere of the book but at least the cover is blue and white and not ‘those yellows and greys of the pandemic’ detested by Grace Kielty the novel’s protagonist.

And there might be some protection offered in the very first pages when Maguire plunges the reader into depths of blue brine. Was it called PPE or something – and was Number 10 the name of the hand sanitizer?

Though it is still only early spring you must tog-off and jump in to experience the full pleasure of Maguire’s prose from the start, which at times is as merciless as the sea and as foul-mouthed as a sailor’s. No matter age or gender preference you will envy the sea caressing the bodies of others and ask yourself “Why couldn’t it be me?”  

The novel starts on the beach of a beautiful early spring sun-drenched coastal village. Jaws drop as a strange sea-creature emerges within barking distance of yogi-bathers. But all is revealed as it comes ashore – definitely not male, nor mermaid – maybe only a harmless unpimpled Cailleach or old Crone.

Readers who emerged from SARS-Covid 19 with losses of loved ones without goodbyes or wakes will probably be shocked to be reminded again of the arrival (forewarned in the opening pages by occasional hints) of the sudden shock of shutdown brought about by the global pandemic. No community had immunity and you are in for a good seascape of memories of it in Night Swimmers. The Ballybrady gang certainly listened to the advice and followed the example coming across the pond – from Downing Street. 

After the preamble and the protagonists are introduced, the story takes off in salty wind. Maguire herself says: “My novel Night Swimmers began as a daydream …” *

Maybe it did, but the arrival of the ‘deaf’ miraculous child, Luca, turned her dream into a nightmare for some. He is the Puer Aeternus, beloved by Jungians “… an image of the Self, which literally weighs on the natural man and yet at the same time is the only thing that can save him.” ** And he awakened the latent powers of Maguire’s ‘Cailleach’ to summon forces from sky and sea with her mobile phone.

Luckily, for the plot to develop, Evan, from Belfast, before arriving in Ballybrady seems not to have read Adrian Peace’s account of his time in coastal Ballyxxxxxx – ‘a different place altogether’ (according to its inhabitants) which he anonymized as Inveresk in his study of a sea-village people in ‘A World of Fine Difference’. ***  

After reading this book I think many people from all over the world (and other places possibly too) will be searching the map for Ballybrady to place orders with Abbie. But they should be forewarned: it is averse to day-trippers, tourists, townies, and a variety of unmentionables. I think Maguire’s manuscript chronicling the progress of the pandemic and its unforeseen consequence in a rural seaside town is itself a safe place to visit on St. Brigid’s Day to pause a while on any long weekend – but switch off the mobile.

Maguire’s ‘biography’ of the Irish Cailleach will make up for the omission of this ‘lady’ under ‘C’ and the only eleven lines given to BRIGET or BRIGIT in the 788 pages of H.G. Adams’ 1866 ‘Cyclopedia of Female Biography Consisting of Sketches of All women Who Have Been Distinguished by Great Talents, Strength of Character, Piety, Benevolence, or Moral Virtue of Any Kind, Forming a Complete Record of Womanly Excellence or Ability.’ (Robert Forrester, Stockwell, Glasgow)

Before leaving only my footprints on Grace’s beach and in fear of being blasted from her “two barrels”, as she promised Mickey Flanders she’d do, I would like to wave the white paper of my diploma in ‘ad Rebus ad Feminas Spectantibus’ of 1998 from UCC at her window and say – I’m not going to bin it just yet. It is my early ‘prescription’- inoculation against the ‘epidemic’ Maguire fears is now endemic. 

A great book – to be read annually around St. Brigid’s Day – the feast day of our national Cailleach who must have had a ‘good head on her shoulders’ – since a piece of her skull was brought home recently after a thousand years to her shrine in Kildare. Ms. Grace Kielty, her devotee, has a great pair of hands like Brigid – for yarns and bringing things home – after a swim. God bless her.

*MENOPAUSE Perhaps I’m Broken. Perhaps I’m Fixed (The Irish Times, Weekend Review, Sat. Jan. 27, 2024)

**von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Shambhala, Boston & London, 1999.

***Peace, Adrian, A World of Fine Difference, University College Dublin Press, 2001.