The scarring runs deeper than the flattened landscape in Philip Casey’s novel, set in postwar London
Washed ashore in a bomb-damaged land
THE WATER STAR
By Philip Casey
Picador, £14.99
ISBN 0 330 371 908
The water star is a reflection: imperfect, but beautiful in itself. Its darklit image shivers in a breath of wind, or is obscured by the observer’s shadow in the moon, but that mutability, that elusiveness, is part of its arresting mystery. Lean down too close to the pool and it will appear to vanish altogether.
Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, works in the same way. Casey is a poet and a playwright; he has a poet’s delicate ear and a playwright’s eye for direction. The tale that unfolds in this thick, satisfying volume is not particularly complex - any more than the circumstances of any of our lives are complex, which is to say, infinitely and infinitesimally so. London, 1950: the city is a bomb site, a building site, and there is plenty of work for Brendan and Hugh Kinsella, natives of Co Wexford. Father and son, Brendan’s wife and Hugh’s mother Maire is dead, buried near the blue Irish mountain that haunts them in their grey London days, Croghan Kinsella.
The city separates them. Each longs for home, for the past, finds himself strange even when not among strangers. The London of Hugh’s imagination is nowhere to be found: “When he was a child, he had always thought that London had no hills. He remembered this as he walked up the incline of Tollington Park, past the large Protestant church and into Everleigh Street, where the Irish faithful were congregating. Hugh was perversely proud that his church had a corrugated iron roof, in contrast to its grand Protestant neighbour. No matter that Catholic churches in Ireland were of good stone and slate, the poverty of this one made him feel a cut above the Prods, morally speaking.” But when Hugh’s longing manifests itself in a vision of his dead mother, Brendan hides his own sense of loss in a fear of his son’s madness, and Hugh goes his own way.
He finds a home with Elizabeth Frampton, who takes him into her house and her bed. She has another lodger, Karl, a German, whose family was killed in Hamburg in the war. He manages his bereavement by carving their effigies as he sits in the garden - and by loving Elizabeth. When she takes to Hugh he is faced with another loss. Brendan, meanwhile, finds comfort after his son’s disappearance with Sarah, an Irish woman sent away from home when she became pregnant with her daughter Deirdre. Through the interweaving and the overlapping of these relationships, Casey examines how human nature is shaped by sorrow; how people will find a way - sometimes, it seems, despite themselves - to take comfort from others, to make homes where they can, even among the ruins.
Casey’s technique, too, is one of interweaving and overlapping. He will tell the same story more than once, each time from a different vantage point: Hugh’s own experience of his arrival at Elizabeth’s house and then Karl’s vision of the events. Of course, it is not the “same story” that’s told, which is precisely the point. As an idea in the abstract this might seem laboured; in the novel, however, it works seamlessly, simply functioning as it is meant to and unfolding the story like a fan. Karl works as a labourer, too; Elizabeth trusts he will find work for Hugh. As Hugh sees it: “Elizabeth glanced at him across the table. He had been watching a stray hair which had wandered from her well-brushed head. As their eyes met, she looked back again to Karl. “Can you fix a start for Hugh on Monday?” Karl sized him up. “If he’s willing to work hard. Brickie’s mate, Hugh.”
And then, as Karl perceives it: ˜Can you fix a start for Hugh on Monday?” She asked quietly. Of course. Elizabeth had but to ask, no matter what complication or indebtedness to those he despised that it might entail. It was against his interest, he knew simply by the way she spoke of the young man; but Elizabeth had made a request. He pretended to consider. “If he’s willing to work hard. Brickie’s mate, Hugh.”
This style, formal yet flexible, opens the novel out, and the different perspectives made these hardscrabble lives – death is a frequent visitor to this household and comfort too easily found in a bottle of wine or whiskey – vivid. Casey’s tale comes to the reader bearing praise from Sebastian Barry, and, like the author of The Steward of Christendom and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, he has an unsentimental but affectionate view of Ireland and the Irish. His language is more austere than Barry’s; his characters aren’t given to speechifying and a large part of his skill is in the way he digs through their inarticulacy to find the real emotion beneath.
The Water Star is a graceful, gentle novel that does not shy from the truth. Is its metaphor of lives rebuilt from rubble – whether the detritus of the past or the structures shattered by the Blitz – too pat? Perhaps, sometimes. But reading along one finds oneself thinking, yes, but that’s just how things are. That seems a small thing, but it is a fine compliment to a work of fiction.
Erica Wagner
© The Times, London, April 8, 1999
Casey is a poet and a playwright; he has a poet’s delicate ear and a playwright’s eye for direction . The tale that unfolds in this thick, satisfying volume is not particularly complex – any more than the circumstances of any of our lives are complex, which is to say, infinitely and infinitesimally so.
Through the interweaving and the overlapping of these relationships, Casey examines how human nature is shaped by sorrow; how people will find a way – sometimes, it seems, despite themselves – to take comfort from others, to make homes where they can, even among the ruins.
Casey’s technique, too, is one of interweaving and overlapping. He will tell the same story more than once, each time from a different vantage point: Of course, it is not the “same story” that’s told, which is precisely the point. As an idea in the abstract this might seem laboured; in the novel, however, it works seamlessly, simply functioning as it is meant to and unfolding the story like a fan.
. . . The Water Star is a graceful, gentle novel that does not shy from the truth.
– Erica Wagner, The Times
full review
Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, confronts the central Irish experience of the twentieth century: exile. It is distinguished by the finely wrought lyricism that has characterised much of his poetry. His first novel, The Fabulists (1994) won acclaim; his new one confirms that he is a writer with a gift for uncovering the tortuous impulses of his characters with a lucid and affecting eye. Set in a post-war London still recovering from the Blitz, the novel follows the overlapping lives of five characters who inhabit the ruins of North London
. . . Casey escorts his reader through the labyrinths of his character’s minds, unpicking the jumbled mosaic of mourning, desire and fear. The Water Star is a bitter-sweet testimony to the never-ending struggle between exile and assimilation.
– John Tague, Times Literary Supplement
full review
There is something at once tough and endearing in Casey’s predominant concerns with making his creations seem like real people, with delineating intimate human relationships – with being, essentially, emotive and compassionate. …No one should read this book in search of lapidary sentences or shock tactics. Instead, the peculiarly quiet power of its tale should be enjoyed at the leisurely pace demanded by its length. It is perhaps a good thing to be sometimes driven to a blurbish cliché: The Water Star is, somehow, haunting.
– John Kenny, The Irish Times
Philip Casey has recreated a whole era of Irish life in this amazing novel. … If you want to find out what it was like for the Irish in London in the early ’50s, read this book. It is a treat.
– Pat Byrne, The Irish World, 26 May 2000
This elegiac novel casts a gentle – but discerning – eye on the lives and loves of Irish and other exiles in a London shattered by the Blitz. Philip Casey brings the lyricism of a poet and the dramatic sense of a playwright to his tale of lost souls doing their best to glue their fragmented lives back together; his characters are vivid, subtly shaded, often tragic, but there’s no wallowing in misery here – on the contrary, a life-affirming tenacity and humour, reinforced by an elegant cyclical structure and more than a hint of mysticism, makes The Water Star a pleasure to read. The final sequence, set in Ireland, chimes a little uncomfortably with the rest, but then comfort was never going to be a top priority in a book about alienation. An intelligent, memorable, moving novel.
– Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times, Saturday April 1st, 2000
Gentle, metaphorical, totally believable.
– Bristol Evening Post
Derelict bomb sites are a refuge for the lonely, war-scarred characters who inhabit the 1950s London of Philip Casey’s impressive second novel. Elizabeth, Cockney-born and bred, invites Hugh, a semi-literate young Irish labourer who has run away from his domineering father, to share her home. They become lovers, marry, and soon after their son Charlie is born, and Hugh is reconciled with his father, who has found happiness of sorts with another unhappy Irish exile. The lives of these characters become totally absorbing as different versions of important events are related from their respective viewpoints. Casey has brought alive the dilemmas of a lost generation and made them vivid and memorable.
–The Good Book Guide
Philip Casey’s first novel, The Fabulists, was one of the most original of recent years and remarkable for his ability in writing about women. That skill is evident in his second, The Water Star, which follows the lives of an interconnected cast of characters in London during the fifties. The Water Star is a compelling series of life stories at a crucial point in modern history; it is equally compelling as an imaginative analysis of national versus private identity, of how people may transcend the bogus boundaries of their lives through small acts of honesty and kindness.
– Sharon Barnes, IMAGE
Casey’s approach to a hackneyed theme – the sadness of exile – creates original new fiction. Based in fifties London, his story mixes together displaced Irish and Europeans and concentrates on new beginnings in alien territory. This series of love-stories told from individual perspectives resonates with authentic feeling.
– Sharon Barnes, round-up of the year’s fiction, IMAGE, December 1999
The Water Star is a powerful work of fiction, at once passionate and compassionate.
– The Waterstones website review
Philip Casey is one of our most intuitive and interesting writers. …What is most impressive in this multi-layer book is that it captures both the British and German experience of the aftermath of war, as much as the mindset and experience of the migrant Irish flocking to find rebuilding work. The torched buildings of Hamburg in RAF raids are as real here as the improvised mountain slopes of Wexford that its main protagonists, Hugh and his widowed father Brendan, leave behind. Casey is excellent in slowly weaving together these diverse and conflicting strands of human life as (like the city they inhabit) they struggle to rebuild the present, while still haunted by old loyalties and ghosts from the recent past. …This is a lyrical and captivating read in which the dead are as present as those survivors rebuilding their lives and the mental scars of inexpressible wounds find expression in moments of exquisite tenderness …
– Dermot Bolger, The Sunday Independent
Written with a poet’s eye for the intensity of physical detail the narrative unfolds gradually, and time moves in loops with one event being recounted by up to five different voices’…
– Della Nock, Irish Post
… Yet there is something compulsive about the lives recounted in Casey’s flat, slow-moving prose that keeps you reading right to the end
– Alannah Hopkin, The Sunday Tribune
Casey captures the warmth and tragedies of ordinary life with exquisite detail.
– Maurice Haugh, The Evening Herald
The Water Star is a tense moving novel which describes a scene from different perspectives – the author’s eye for capturing even the most complicated and hidden of human emotions make this book an incredibly vivid read… Highly recommended.
– A reader from Dublin , 27 May, 1999 ***** Amazon.co.uk
This is a book about ordinary people adjusting to life in England after the war. It is also a story about the difficulty experienced by exiles, trying to adapt to life in their newly adopted country. It is a love story, and highlights the difficulty of making the right choices, and living with the consequences of those choices.
Philip Casey uses the technique of multiple voices, narrating the same bit of personal history from the the different perspective of each of the characters. However, in each successive narration, one learns a bit more, another facet, of each event as it unfolds.
The “menage a trois” involves an attractive, capable and independent young British woman, in the prime of life: a traumatised and isolated German man, who is a guilt-ridden survivor of war: and a young and inexperienced Irish man, a manual worker. The German has intelligence and depth, and is fond of contemplating the mystery and beauty of Spirals found in Maths and Astronomy. He finds solace and healing in the music of Mahler. The young Irishman has a sexual awakening, and comes to adulthood and parenthood, under the tutelage of the heroine. She herself has to deal with the necessity of making hard choices.
The book is an enjoyable and light read, and involves other minor characters. Towards the end of the book one is given a glimpse of the beauty and poverty of Ireland, contrasted to the life of working class Britain. What I found hard to believe was that in the house owned by the heroine, there is an indoor bathroom! It is my experience that homes from that era usually had outdoor bathrooms. But…read it for yourself, and YOU decide!
June T. Walters, from Grahamstown, Eastern Cape South Africa, May 27, 2001*** – Amazon.com
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INGRATE OF MY GENERATION
Like most of humanity I take
my clothes off each night before bed.
Personally I throw them along with the day,
onto the nearest chair if there is one,
if not then onto a gaping floor.
You’d think with that, with the uniform -
of my personality gone - that is, me offduty -
that another day could be shoved out the door.
But no, not only it but thousands of today’s
recent and ancient kin and legacy hunters
flock into bed with me, fussing
like clucking hens over my laxity,
my lack of get-up-and-go to change the world.
How could l treat them like this,
after all they’d done for me?
Typical ingrate of my generation!
I take it in good heart, for if I’m lazy,
I care and recall that wherever I go,
the dialects of rural trains translate
themselves as my partisan language
of acts, the one I will never comprehend,
and the dust clings to my boots,
saying, I belong to you, don’t be facetious,
think of your generations buried beneath me.
l leave, leaving a part of me as hostage.
No, I have not my tongue in cheek, not quite,
but can you really see how such a man could stand
before you and offer himself, when he does not own
to offer, but belongs everywhere, to all, to every time
MAC H I N E B U R I E D
The early shift poured into the works,
some hungover, faces drawn and eyes
sleepcaked, sleepheavy, their mood morose,
unready for its troubling presence.
It had taken root in the concrete,
a steel zeus from a mouthful of dust.
Wary, they searched it for a device
that might breathe some life into its steel,
but it was inert and they withdrew,
disconcerted, and deep in their hearts,
afraid. As with the precursors of plagues,
it had come among them unannounced.
In heaven, alias the office,
all ranks were blissfully certain
that no such god existed, demi
or other, there being no record.
The men returned to work
but in every mind lurked the machine,
which they had christened Colonel Blink.
Then came the solution from on high:
a hole was dug and as the bulldozer
toppled it over the brink, they stared,
feigning laughter; but true to his instinct
a mechanic sprinkled oil on its
complex extremities and they cheered.
The clay was expertly cemented
over, but each year it subsides just
a little and each time a man walks
across it he has a strange feeling,
like an old night-fear from childhood.
INTO WHITENESS
Winter, and green apples still unripe.
A madness even in the seasons.
The sun, like an anaemic orange
throws a watery light on an earth
as cold as the linoed bedrooms
of the poor. The seagulls will never starve
but they clash, ill-tempered, in the bright,
tingling air. A cat shivers in
abandoned cul-de-sac, its instinct
to scavenge frozen.
In a musty bed the body of a woman
cold and stiff in death, its stench
clambering drunkenly onto the solidified morning.
Her only grandchild will visit her in two days time
with flowers to brighten her room a little;
a good, thoughtful girl who will age
within ten seconds into whiteness,
like the century
LIFFEY BRIDGE
A drunken beggar falls asleep,
wine seeping from wind-broken lips.
Sealed into his swollen being,
he sleeps on a cold bridge and dies.
The wonder of lights on water,
its high Sierras! A closed box
of closed thoughts: the proud dead cock
that never crowed.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I was eight when I dreamt
of a dazzling whitewashed wall
and a river flanked by trees.
Three years later they were part
of our new lives, and we saw
the river wash green weed, and smoke
from the cottage against the hill
betray the direction of the breeze.
The genial owner of the farm
by the river taught us to kill
trout, before he and our father
bargained; and we, in high spirits
when the deal was done, ran back to .
the sparkling water to try our skill..
When all three of us had tired
we lay against a grassy brow,
taking in the feverish blue
of the mountain in mid-summer.
In another month, we would float
through the heat of wheat fields
being razed by a hired machine,
and roam the stubbled earth.
Settled into our first winter there,
we watched the rain race across
the fields from Annagh and Croghan.
The earth had become hostile and bare,
and we knew the chill of loss
as hill and mountain turned to stone.
UTTERLY YOU
I can see you as utterly you.
Your laugh is unlike the music
of angels, or the first young thrush
of the day - it’s simply your laugh,
fresh to the earth, and beautifully
free of simile. Look at me now.
Your eyes are not pools of light,
but guileless, flesh and blood eyes
that can break my heart with delight.
I’ve never seen twin silver streams
glisten on your pale alabster cheeks -
only ever salt tears, like those
I remember crying before my heart
grew calm and learned to listen.
T H E D E S E R T D I S C l P L E
F I N D S D O N A Q U I X O T E
Catherine is a mad American lady,
beautiful as the sadder poems of Baudelaire.
Dressed like a harlequin at the edge of the desert,
she spoke out of the sun in German, and when I faltered,
stomped off .
Later we drank beer in the shade, where she spat out
mild delusions.
I bought her a beer because I loved her wild blue eyes,
her beautiful white, quivering lips; I loved your spindly
gesticulating arms and your penetrating madness,
Doña Quixote. You and your windmills.
- A woman should never support a man don’t you think?
Never never never!
You can see that can’t you, or, are you sick too?
Ah yes, she sighed,
I want a husband to keep me in comfort and style.
Already he sends me my cheque, poste restante.
I ‘m secure as the gates of hell and
everythings swell.
Just swell. And you ‘re a nice boy. Goodbye
2083
It’s a wonderful birthday surprise, dear Phenomologica.
Dear, sweet girl, unspoilt though one of The Last Born,
the generation who made it from the womb
into the glittering vista of Eternal Youth. You know,
fondling this triple crystal chart of the mind, your gift,
the great art and armchairs of past and future
available at an idle glance -
I still can’t accustom myself to being eternal.
Back in the dark days of the nineteen-eighties,
when my broken body was a sign of the times,
and the world cowered at the feet of profiteers
and annihilation, I would often amuse myself
by wondering which would blow first -
myself or the burdened globe.
Yet here we are, not only intact
but omniscient, omnipotent, magnanimous
and bored. Gods giving a blithe deference
to the Great Being we will now never, ever see.
LYNWOOD, WET SUMMER
Sixteen rectangles, sixteen window panes,
through these
I see a bank of white roses, and
behind those, an elder tree, its fruit
burgeoning.
Beyond that, a wild garden:
apple trees, red roses, pink roses,
lilac.
Rhubarb
hidden under convolvulous -
that everywhere
in the wet summer, and
snails everywhere. A voracious plague,
they seem to crave the lilac,
but the tiny young are on
almost every apple leaf.
The sun breaks through,
lights the crown of the apple tree.
How romantic,
yet unromantically beautiful too.
Cloud, mostly grey,
has dulled the flowers and trees,
the walls and granite steps -
this sliver of the world
through sixteen panes -
for many weeks now.
ROSA LUXEMBURG
-A letter from prison to Sophie Liebknecht
I write from a prison garden
alive with trees, my friends the birds,
a hundred grasses, a dozen lichens.
Beyond these walls, my comrades battle
with hunger, war, their own passions,
the shallow politicians and their puppets.
Do not fret, dear Sonyusha, do not fret
for my life and freedom. We’ve worked
long and hard, and already I’m forty-seven.
Their greed will trample the poor for a while
yet, that is evident. You can’t thwart centuries
of tyranny and ignorance at a stroke.
But there are signs, and we must not despair,
and after me you must work to widen the design,
and bequest your vision to others after you.
Before they murder me, by a wonderful irony
they have given me this: my trees,
my friends the birds, my lichens, my grasses.
We will, dearest Sonichka, we will come through.
TRAIN TO WESTPORT
You start, glancing at the handsome Tanzanian:
his fine, delicate head, his skin the purest silk
which unknowingly brushes against your pitched breath.
Your disquietude moves me, quickening my guess
that you are revealed to yourself by his beauty -
like a currach in an equinoctial storm.
Pity floods me at how vulnerable you are,
half like a mystic consumed by transcendent light,
having waited most of her life, open and pure.
As if to taunt you, he leaves quickly at Athlone
and does not pass our window for a last glimpse.
The train drones to Westport, oblivious to loss.
You spot the sunset falling behind Croagh Patrick,
making of it a blue, slowbreathing pyramid.
BOND
-for Venus
Every moment we change
and our bodies become flesh
untouched by each other’s lips
or hands, our voices unheard
by seas breaking in our ears,
over cables on the floors of oceans.
We should by now be strangers,
and I feel new in strange skin,
and want to pose a question
about how I’ve come to know
you time and again, moving
one step behind your blood’s new
images, learning to love
the woman who, by a sleight
of growth, no longer exists.
AND YET AGAIN, FAREWELL
-in memory of Mairéad
The old world is moribund, the new,
a feverish beast, scarred and obese,
but jerking with its crass bravado,
a last, laizzez-faire, sexual gasp.
You go to pit your energies against
the tough dream of eluding a dead end.
And we know there is only so much time.
With each shift in the year I lose a friend,
lured away from parochial Ireland.
I drink with you to two worlds or three; drive
lost country roads after the pubs have closed,
or to a film through a timeless snowfall;
or gasping, just catch the last frantic bus
into the stretching shadows of the past.
HOSPITAL BED
This bed upon which I lie
has taken so many bodies
upon it, that it’s fit
to hitch up its sheets
and lean its backrest
against a dimly-lit lamp post.
-Do you want a good time, handsome?
I can fix you a petit-mort
before you know where you are!
AN INDIAN DREAMS OF THE RIVER
I can no long smell freedom on the river.
A woman’s life is always hard, but at least
I had my teeth, then. My smile was famous
in the village.
They have polluted my river with the burning leather
of their jackboots.
At night, when the fireflies eat my brain,
I think of how they broke my husband,
bone by white bone.
Curse by obscene curse they raped me,
clutching José’s eyelids open
to see our shame.
I cannot eat fish anymore because they remind
me of their eyes.
Sleep comes like a caravel of conquistadores,
gleaming Toledo bayonets flecked with blood.
FORETELLING OUR MEETING AGAIN
i
How tall you are, as I hobble to greet you,
arms wide as the univers. How long has it been,
my true and lovely friend, the months falling
like leaves in a dream? Too long but no matter,
and now the ache is purged, everything is changed
except what will never change - the smooth stone
of our secret: silent, unperturbed, timeless.
ii
When I meet you will I be much older
(with wrinkles and unreliable organs)?
The habit of need will have caught me out,
as always, falling for the roadshow, perplexed
at so many scarves being pulled form the hat.
It will be good to find you vital as ever,
laughing about your next trip to the coast,
to the mountains - it’s of no importance where,
the value of the journey being in the journey.
I will go with you, oblivious to passing time.
YOU WITHIN ME
I read page after page and see nothing
but your face, word after nulled word.
I have the absurd urge to vacate my skin
and pour your molten essence into its mould,
so that never again would I know estrangement.
Usually I love the lawless present, give space
its due and needless, restore self to myself.
But in these intese days, on obsolete maps,
I search crude alleys and mountain paths,
though I know I will only find you within me.
I match my longest memory against your tears,
your briefest smile with my caught breath.
So many scattered parts of us are as one,
as five thousand days or one make a life.
Into its finally proud expression, I piece
your body together with loving care, and see
your mind race free with a tiger’s grace,
its chains broken by the weight of continents.
Your hands shape figures from amorphous mass,
as they shape the intrigued cast of my long story:
it is a woman crouched at the root of a tree
it is the beseeching ghost of a childhood pain
it is rain hurtling earthward, regardless of need
TOM MOORE’S ROMANTIC DANCEHALL
‘Tis distance lends enchangtment to the view
and robes the mountain in its azure hue.
-Thomas Campbell
It was inevitable that his birthplace
would become a pub, a liquid island
dreaming of lost causes, and the cause
which should have been won, but was not.
Nietzche, who fortold this wizened century,
had it in for the likes of Moore and Byron,
bosom pals in a parlour for fun and games.
Their atrocious luck was that two world wars,
a thousand revolutions, television and the web
and a billion deaths from hunger and the bomb
saw to it that Nietczche and Adorno got it right,
and now what songs there are are cynical and stark.
Yet I walked past Moore’s birthplace every day,
and his name was etched above the door in gold
and on the hearts of dancers in his dancehall.
Moore lay dying when the Great Famine struck,
as the Apocalypse crashed in upon the Irish,
but while few epicures have heard of Lalla Rookh,
what Tom symbolised survives in the Irish manner.
It’s what makes us seem like innocents abroad.
CHOSEN PLACES
At the astounding moment you were born,
did I suddenly feel a rush of nerves
and know that part of my fate was sealed?
I was probably in love with a local girl,
and driving cows through a miserable field.
And later, when in turn you reached the age
that is between us, in your klassenzimmer,
you weren’t to know of my existence - and drunk
on newly liberated Spain, I had no hint
that there was space in my life reserved for you.
Thus it unfolds, in what may be a modern fable:
how your path should find its way to my life
before continuing on to distant chosen places,
like a bird unerringly finding its seasonal
home, which it has known since time immemorial.
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