A middle-aged English journalist, Caroline Wallace, is dispatched to Dublin by her literary editor to interview 90-year-old Desmond Fitzmaurice, in order to revive interest in this forgotten Irish writer. So far, so straightforward. First we are introduced to Caroline, partner for 10 years to a man who had never suggested marriage. He suddenly does so while emerging from the bathroom, and she is furious: “Don’t you realize, you bloody prick, we could have had kids.” She flounces off to Dublin, in tears, and finds herself caught up in the shenanigans of a bunch of “eccentric Irish people.”
This is the epithet she hurls at them, by the end — along with “lying toads.” Passions run high after a few days spent with Desmond and his women: current wife Anna and ex-wife Pamela, whom he meets in the local pub on Thursdays for a cozy session. I think this novel is about old age and the capricious nature of memory, but the title is deliberate, and there is a teasing suggestion that Desmond’s vaunted memories, which he is in the process of taping, are essentially imaginative. Caroline certainly thinks so. I was one jump ahead of her when my reaction to his tale of how he shot a Shakespeare-quoting Nazi on the day that “hostilities ceased” was one of irritated incredulity, and was glad to have her agree: “That was, of course, fiction.” Or was it? This is where the teasing nature of the ambiguity becomes tiresome rather than tantalizing. I wanted to know, one way or the other. But then Desmond is exasperating, and intended to be seen as thus. He is congenitally selfish, having apparently required both actress wives to subordinate their careers to his demands; and when, towards the end, Anna has a fall, he ignores her cries, goes to bed, sends next day for the by now maddened Caroline, and declines to visit the hospital.
Caroline becomes more and more fed up with her mission and with this bunch of oldies as the days progress, and she has the reader’s sympathy. But these are Jennifer Johnston characters — one has met their like before — and there may also be a spot of tongue-in-cheek satirizing of the visiting Brit unable to fathom the wayward Irish. Certainly she cannot cope with Desmond, who is able to switch from beguiling charm to bumbling elderly incompetence at the drop of a glass of whiskey — he is on his third of the first day by page 50. She sees him as whisking old age on and off like an actor changing costume. And then there is Pamela, also partial to a drink, caustic, witty, clearly a lot more fun than resident Anna, referred to by her husband as the banatee — Gaelic for woman of the house.
Desmond is obsessed with his mother; his brooding memories are filled with her singing nursery rhymes to him. He is driven to and from his pub meetings with Pamela by his old batman, whom he calls Phaeton. Actually, I don’t think you have to be a prosaic visiting Brit to have your teeth set on edge by that sort of whimsy. Though we are not meant to like Desmond, far from it — merely perhaps to acknowledge him as a card, to be entertained, to feel a frisson of sympathy. He is pretty game, for 90.
I pass, I’m afraid. I had had enough of him, by the end, and was on the plane back to London with Caroline. Truth or Fiction is short — a novella rather than a novel. Johnston can pack much into a brief space; her hallmark, as a writer, is stylish economy. That gift is plentifully evident in this book: succinct dialogue, neat establishment of the main characters. But here, telling brevity seems to teeter on the edge of sparsity, leaving me wondering if a short story had somehow got longer, or a novel had failed to match up to its promise. I could have done with more underpinning, some respite from the helter-skelter progress of the three days Caroline spends in Ireland. That said, there is artful writing here, even if by the end one fails to be charmed by Desmond and his circle, and is confused about questions of truth or fiction — much like the unfortunate Caroline, whose own first-person testimony serves as introduction and coda: “I should try to write about what had happened ... just for myself.”
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