‘Cormac is a photographer. Approaching forty and still single, he suddenly finds himself “the leftover man”. Through talent and charm, he has escaped small town life and a haunted family. But now his peers are all getting divorced, dying or buying trampolines in the suburbs. Cormac is dating former students, staying out all night and receiving boilerplate rejection emails for his work, propped up by a constellation of the women and ex-lovers in his life.
In the last weeks of the year, Cormac meets Caroline, an ambitious young dancer, and embarks on a miniature odyssey of intimacy. Simultaneously, he must take responsibility for his married brother, whose mid-life crisis forces them both to reckon with a death in the family that hangs over those left behind.’
I picked up Niamh Campbell’s latest novel We Were Young with a mixture of trepidation and optimism. The novel came highly recommended by a trusted friend, but Campbell, as an Irish female author under the age of forty who was a student at Trinity College Dublin, has, with wearying inevitability, come under the Sally Rooney umbrella – a category I am (perhaps unfairly) wary of. I need not have worried: We Were Young is a jewel of a novel, and Campbell an impeccable stylist, armed with artistic elegance, understated wit, and a disarming compassion for her characters’ complexities and foibles. The narrative opens with a scene in which Cormac, our protagonist, attends an immersive play about the Magdalene laundries, during which he experiences profound discomfort as a post-‘Me Too’ man who polices his own instincts even as he chafes at the need to do so. During the show, Cormac, a photographer, is petrified of his own attraction to actresses playing the unmarried mothers who fell victim to Church and State; he ‘feels aroused and panics slightly’, straining not to look at ‘pop-up youthful breasts’ even as he curses the casting directors for selecting an actress with ‘a taut, sexy body’. There is mischief in Campbell’s tone, but the scene serves wonderfully as an introduction to Cormac’s character and some of the fundamental conflicts of the narrative, as well as knotted and uncomfortable discussions that underlie Irish culture. Cormac, who was invited to the show by his friend, colleague, and former lover Alice, feels as though he has been tricked with malicious intent; he is irritated by the performance, exasperated by the perceived inaccessibility of this national trauma to his own masculinity, and frustrated at the guilt this petulance prompts in him. However, readers begin to sympathise with Cormac’s suspicion of the show’s ‘self-congratulatory’ worthiness, a sympathy that is further fleshed out by Alice’s concurrence that its subject matter lends the performance a trite moral imperviousness, an apparently inarguable value discrete from its theatrical merit. Cormac’s relief at Alice’s legitimisation of his discontent enacts one of the central binds of Campbell’s ingenious novel; as a photographer who capitalised on the perceived grittiness of his working class, North Dublin roots to gain access to the metropolitan intelligentsia, and as a bi-sexual man who thrived in the cultural margins of Dublin at the beginning of this millennium, Cormac can’t bear to feel himself aligned with patriarchal or establishment hegemonies. After all, he:
‘Remembers Worker Party meetings when he was at college, which were composed of whiskered men with border convictions muttering internecine oaths in an upper room of the Teacher’s Club. He would join the six or seven students pressing arselessly to a radiator in the back. They used to meet the Irish conversation class coming down the stairs.’
There is something slightly pathetic, if understandable, about Cormac’s refusal to acknowledge the bourgeois nature of his almost middle-age existence, and a crankiness in his attitude towards the Bright Young Things following in his wake, including his own students. However, readers also suspect that Cormac’s instincts may be sound in suspecting some hollowness, some superficiality, and some entitlement developing in the artistic milieu that has clawed its way from the fringes of society to its most fashionable echelons, and that he may be justified in mocking ‘the fight between the hipsters and sans culottes’.
The key to all of Cormac’s frustrations and apprehensions is his position as a photographer, an observer of himself and others who helplessly ‘sees himself watching and watching the watching and still feels awkward about it’. Readers are led to understand that Cormac is genuinely talented, possessed of an aesthetic rigour that is ‘ruthless and practised’, and, as Susan Sontag argued, inherently objectifying. Cormac’s self-conscious watchfulness allows him to believe himself particularly attentive to the vagaries of human nature, the quirks of his friends’ behaviour, and the artifice of his milieu. However, it becomes increasingly apparent that Cormac is masking his fatal tendency to self-sabotage as a kind of arch knowingness, even a form of cynicism, which stems from the unresolved complexities of his class and sexual identity, the lasting trauma of early bereavement, and a deeply rooted distrust of intimacy. Furthermore, Cormac’s satisfaction at his own understanding of women is built on puerile chauvinism and a particularly masculine cruelty. This immaturity is painfully evident in Cormac’s dealings with Nina, one of his former students. Cormac engages in an on-off pseudo-relationship with Nina; they sleep together regularly, he is mercilessly aware of the hold he has over her and occasionally toys with the idea of entering into a serious relationship, but ultimately balks and leaves her dangling pathetically. There is such proprietorial paternalism in Cormac’s observations about Nina: he enjoys her preference to ‘be alone’ after sex, but suspects her habit of teasing out his plans:
‘She tends to wait cannily, in the morning, to ask what you are doing that day. She never volunteers her own plans first.’
Cormac’s observations about Nina are generalised, with breathtaking arrogance, as traits of her sex; as she chastises him for his lackadaisical attitude towards emergency contraception and confides in him about her own experiences with unplanned pregnancy, he muses, uncharitably, on female strategising and manipulation:
‘She smiles sadly then, at last, changing without warning. He feels there is a brittle liability to the moods of women and it functions defensively. Behind a sudden brightness, they sit watchful as a creature in a shell.’
Cormac can be cruel in his dismissal of the perceived neuroses of women, alluding with offhand derision to the ‘tanned anorexics’ as a collective noun for the female employees of a magazine on which he worked in his youth. It is only when Cormac gets involved with Caroline, a young dancer, that his assumptions about women begin to fall short, and he balks at the brave new world of female self-assurance and self-assertion.
The impression that develops of a generational discrepancy transcends the bounds of gender. Cormac has a tortured ambivalence towards the past that is rooted in horror at the passage of time, unresolved survivor’s guilt, and general nostalgia. At times, this attitude is rendered in hauntingly familiar terms, particularly given the intensely visual nature of Cormac’s memories, often presented in the form of cinematic flashbacks:
‘I can just see myself, he thinks now. There is a vertigo to going back and letting scenes compose themselves again, the rag and bone, the swallowing wallow of emotional recall.’
However, as a rootless and ageing enfant terrible, Cormac’s rearview gaze can become juvenile and pathetic, bubbling up as a petulance towards the next generation of artists and hipsters. It should be noted that Cormac’s veteran sarkiness produces achingly brilliant descriptions of a certain set in Dublin, particularly for readers familiar with the city:
‘His eyes fall on a group by the door, waiting with their coats for one of their number: all have wide spectacles, remedial haircuts, ankles indecent. They look like a punchline without irony and this recognition makes him feel softly resigned, and old, and forgiving.’
Caroline and her ilk are seen to possess a Gen-Z earnestness and self-confidence that, granted, can be highly irritating and grandiose. At one point, Alice explains this new consciousness by insisting that this generation has never been told that they are worthless by Church or State. This double-edged analysis is complicated by her assertion that these youths should be pitied, as the demands of social media and the zeitgeist require ubiquitous enthusiasm and craw-thumping self-scrutiny. Alice may well be correct; however, the heightened awareness of this generation lends itself to higher levels of emotional articulacy, and a resistance of victimisation. It is Caroline’s self-worth that terrifies Cormac: she can speak eloquently and reflectively about her romantic traumas; she and her friends eat with a gusto and lack of guilt that mystifies a man habituated to female self-hatred; and she refuses to accept sexual intrigue in place of emotional connection. The mutual incomprehension of the generational clashes make for a very interesting and complex narrative dynamic, particularly when characters like Nina, who is Cormac’s junior, is juxtaposed with her younger counterparts.
Campbell’s most ingenious achievement is to make Cormac an anti-hero rather than a villain, or even a hapless Bertie Wooster-esque cad. The use of free indirect discourse is fundamental to this achievement, and operates with amazing effect. Readers sympathise with Cormac as we encounter other characters and understand narrative events from his perspective – in many ways, we like Cormac, rogue that he is. At the same time, we are so alive to his frailties – namely, egotism and self-absorption. There is a moment of clinical scatology in the novel that is quietly mordant in its exposure of Cormac’s self-importance:
‘Cormac pardons himself to use the bathroom. He has drunk too much coffee and passes a stingingly liquid stool. He returns to the table feeling light-heatedly refreshed.’
This scientific curiosity about the most mundane of his own biological functions betrays a self-regard that reminded me of a particular brand of Straight White Male Author – the Hemingway types who insist on semi-journalistic, hard-nosed realism, who champion terse minimalism and thinly veiled misogyny as style, and who believe every aspect of their lives is worthy of remark. Campbell is far too careful and polished a writer for this effect to be casual. Such slippages from the third-person omniscience the narrator emulates are infrequent but well-executed when apparent, as in the jumbled pseudo-profundity of Cormac’s MDMA trip. Incidentally, this episode leads to an utterly exquisite, though concise, description of a comedown: ‘The world is viciously literal.’ As previously stated, Cormac sees himself as a somewhat liminal character; his relationship to his social and professional milieu is complicated by his socio-economic background. Nina, with astounding precisions sees and explains his fatal unbelonging:
‘You will let the world imprint upon you, instead of owning it with your camera and only ever immortalising a leisured class you have not been inducted to and never will be because the very fact of your needing to honour them declares your dependence on them.’
Although Cormac chafes at this analysis, he ultimately feels the truth of its implications, and berates himself for capitalising on local violences and working-class sensibilities to gain traction with an elite artistic clique that views him with fond tolerance as ‘a toughened messenger from the lesser social world’.
On the other hand, this somewhat peripheral experience renders Cormac particularly sensitive to the eccentricities and contradictions of Dublin at the time of the novel. The city is captured in a weird state of transition, a time of simultaneous self-satisfaction and crisis. Allusions to the depredations of the Magdalene laundries, the Richmond asylum that now houses the third-level institute in which Cormac teachers, and clerical abuse haunt the novel; when combined with descriptions of the insidious creep of the ongoing housing crisis, Campbell suggests a city that has not yet managed to be candid with itself, a city that will always have its sordid secrets:
‘This is the era: it’s not strange that doorways are wadded with sleeping bags and bodies that may or may not be dead; even this has become normal; men and women, propped up underneath the hoarding of another demolition site, look ruddy, only lately brutalised. Their numbers grow like an army in the opening weeks of a war from the last century. It is too fast to cogitate, or perhaps this thought is a defence against thought.’
There is an unmistakeable, though subtle, political urgency to the narrative that stems from the jarring discrepancy of a crisis hidden in plain sight; Campbell stares down the artists, academics, and bleeding heart liberals with whom Cormac socialises, wondering how they can make theatre of the Magdalene laundries and castigate the hypocrisy of their parents’ generation while remaining silent on the housing crisis. This set is satirised, fondly for the most part, but not toothlessly. Although Alice often sees through Cormac’s weaknesses and pretences, she and her husband Garrett, the self-proclaimed parents of the set, are regularly targeted, as in this description of their teenage son Ambrose:
‘Ambie’s doing Frankenstein, Alice says as she smiles on her so. They boy raises a paperback ruefully. He’s enrolled at an intensely academic school but bowing and shy. Or at least Cormac thinks. It’s been a while since he’s seen the boy, who is frequently sent on enriching missions to stay with country and continental relatives. Just now he is also giving off a disquieting Death in Venice pang that is new – clear-skinned, slight-waisted, devoid of any apparent artfulness – and probably accidental.’
Cormac’s unspoken but self-elected role as an intermediary between certain social sensibilities is further drawn out in comparisons between himself and his brother Patrick; Patrick is as intelligent as Cormac, and has ascended to the cold heights of the financial services sector, but is shown to be less culturally sophisticated (or perhaps simply more honest) than his younger sibling. Their relationship is expertly teased out in subtle battles and ritual sparring matches; Campbell suggests that Cormac’s sense of superiority in matters of taste and politics is edged by Patrick’s aggressively heterosexual, macho dominance. As he describes the Magdalene play to Patrick, Cormac feels ‘a flutter of shame’ when his brother asks him if an actress was ‘hot’, ‘but answers anyway, Little bit’, and agrees that the experience was ‘very fucking stressful’. The brittle moral high ground Cormac and his milieu occupy is also undercut by Patrick’s direct involvement in trialling solutions to the housing crisis:
‘Patrick smokes thoughtfully for a moment and then says, We’re backing a data analysis intervention, with academics, on vacant properties in Dublin. He refers to Deloitte. Making a database, he continues, to categorise them as derelict, habitable, private, probate, protected, things like that. So it’s humanitarian. He speaks this technical language fluently. It is one of his registers: the others are bawdy, boyish and profound.
Humanitarian?
It’s towards solution-based approaches to the housing crisis. It’s, you know, co-funded by UCD.
As opposed to what, destruction-based approaches?
To what? Oh, right. Patrick says: As opposed to nothing at all. It gets results.
It gets profit, I’m sure.
Same thing, darling, Patrick says. But, you know, your shtick is always cute.
My shtick?
Noble. He drains his glass. Beautiful soul.’
The exposure of Dublin’s fault-lines and the mockery of its intelligentsia are rooted in a primal love for the Hibernian metropolis, which is brought to life in We Were Young with amazing vibrancy, and a geographical precision that James Joyce would envy. The city springs vividly from the page with photographic intensity, mugged in its undying tribal closeness, at once oppressive and collegiate, nurturing and suffocating. The novel is Dublin to the core, steeped in the deliciously earthy tones of the city’s dialect; I marvelled at seeing the phrases ‘scaldy’ and ‘bang of’ in literary fiction for the first time, and the authenticity this brought to the text. Similarly, Campbell’s dialogue is brilliantly executed, totally natural, and highly engaging. The novel is without quotation marks (and there the stylistic similarities to Sally Rooney end), but there are relatively frequent disruptions to characters’ conversations: the flow of speech will be interrupted by habitual ‘likes’, and Campbell often breaks up sentences of dialogue with some variation of ‘he/she says’. This quirk, which can only be deliberate, enforces a kind of distance or dissonance in the narrative, which, when read aloud, acquires the cadential texture of native storytelling.
Generally speaking, Campbell’s style is breathtaking, her sentence construction enviably gorgeous – the ‘calamitous flash of a passing ambulance’ is redolent of John Updike at his finest (one of my favourite sentences comes from the Rabbit tetralogy: ‘A whirling light, insulting in its brilliance, materialises in Rabbit’s rearview mirror and as it swells acquires the overpowering grief of a siren’). Examples of passages and sentences that actually made me exclaim in admiration are too many to count, but a random sample is worth quoting here:
‘The sky was bare and the sea a curdle of commas beneath him’;
‘Cormac feels the stillness of the evening and the world transformed, slightly but uncompromisingly, by this quiet loss. There is something careless to a person disappearing from the margins of your life: you feel at fault.’
‘Sitting in the cab to the docklands – the driver is an unsmiling elderly man with a tracheal tube, his breathing like the last scuttling bubbles at the bottom of a straw – Cormac watches a grey heron rise with uncanny, Jurassic drama from the tidal flats. The cab is silent. It’s kind of trippy. The heron that is. Our father told me, Cormac says, that a heron taking off is a sign of luck. Never heard that, replies the drama, in a wheeze so soundly other it makes Cormac feel a quality of discomfort he is able to investigate. The feeling is fear, but a thin, intuitive fear: a childish fear, a surge of objection smothered by civil strategies. It is not sympathy yet. It is a horror of what could become of his own life. He can see this dispassionately because he is still high.’
At times, the prose is over-egged somewhat, choked with similes and sub-clauses, but Campbell’s style enforces a slower, more careful reading, which is no bad thing. Overall, We Were Young is profoundly affecting and beautiful, incisive in its politics and psychology, and heartwrenching in its implications. The novel is wry but haunted, darknesses skirt its edges painfully and familiarly, often intruding onto the prose without sentiment in a manner that probes the unavoidable tragedies of Ireland’s past and present without descending into the kind of maudlin sententiousness Cormac so loathes. In all honesty, having come to the novel with mixed expectations, I cannot speak highly enough of its artistic and moral merit. It is a long time since a story and character resonated so emphatically with me, and I have high hopes for Campbell’s future work.