Courtney McGrailArimathea
by Frank McGuinness
(Brandon, €11.99)
Anna Farmar
Arimathea, the first novel by playwright and poet Frank McGuinness, is strange and compelling. Taking a familiar scenario, the effects of the arrival of a stranger into a small community, he paints a complex portrait of frustrated lives, imprisoned by a sense of sin, liberated ultimately by the power of art and human connection.
The scene is a small town in Donegal in the late 1940s, “a place where the people are starved of iconography”. Simon, the parish priest, decides to spend his mother’s legacy on the Stations of the Cross for the chapel and pays a painter, Gianni Cuma, to come from Italy to carry out the commission.
Keeping his distance, showing no-one his work, the beautiful, exotic Gianni embodies temptation and stirs up the townspeople’s already fractious lives.
Characteristics
Seven narrators, all carefully named, address the reader in turn, each with their own characteristic viewpoint, beginning with 12-year–old Euni, who voices the sense of sin and the fear of divine retribution that pervades the book.
As in Dante’s Inferno, transgressors in Euni’s world will be punished according to their crimes: “…it is a sin to wash clothes on Sunday. A venial sin. But to iron on Sunday – well, that is mortal, and if you do and you die, God will brand your bare back with the mark of a red hot iron.”
Margaret, Euni’s mother, is eaten up with frustrated ambition. Her husband Malachy is a blacksmith whose livelihood is slipping away. “I am tied to wife and children and the world can only see and hear my chains.”
Simon sees red-haired Margaret as Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. “Her every limb was convulsed with sorrow, begging forgiveness…”
Martha is the character least burdened with guilt. Housekeeper to her uncle Columba, the Anglican minister, she is a Protestant in a Catholic country, made always to feel an outsider. Columba, who is a domestic tyrant, is as afraid as his Catholic brethren. “I do very deliberately entertain my terrors”, which now torment him by day as well as night.
Gianni’s story of his childhood and youth in Tuscany moves into the realm of myth, to a world peopled by grotesques, life played out as a medieval melodrama in which he is cast as the scapegoat.
A poem on the Stations of the Cross is followed by a section in which the seven characters’ stories are taken up again, this time told in the third person, not always consistently.
The paintings are at last revealed to the parishioners and a kind of miracle is worked: a sinner repents and is forgiven.
In the final scene, Euni, now long grown up, is tending the graves of those she loved, when she hears “all the voices she’d ever listened to… the whole town together, singing”.
The last word in the novel is “Arimathea”, the village of the man who loved Jesus and buried him in his own grave.
Although this fine novel doesn’t fully cohere as successfully as McGuinness’ great plays, its intensity, rich allusions, and tormented vision of humanity’s travails, fully repay close reading.