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I'd seen The Ginger Man hanging around various bookshops for years but avoided a direct encounter until recently. That was probably a wise intuition as I'm quite certain that Sebastian Dangerfield, the ginger man of the title, would have driven my younger self to some extreme act such as burying the book in a deep hole after the first twenty pages. But if I had done that, I’d have thrown away a collection of curious artefacts. Donleavy's book is like the archeological site of literary Dublin and this review is an attempt at an excavation of that site. You won’t discover much about the plot or the characters here, just a comment on each find I unearthed, at least the ones I was able to identify.
So, this way the museyroom, folks, and don’t forget to clean your boots goan out!*

Although the terrain of The Ginger Man is strewn with appropriations from other works, their titles are never mentioned so the reader has quite a bit of digging to do to assemble them in a recognisable form. Fortunately, this reader has been getting lots of practice at that activity while tagging similar unattributed artefacts in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake so scraping through the clay of Donleavy's book was easier and more rewarding than it might otherwise have been.

The practice of not citing his references is but one of the parallels with Joyce’s work; fragments from all of Joyce’s writing are generously strewn about Donleavy’s worksite. Sebastian Dangerfield not only shares Stephen Daedalus� initials but he also shares the surname Dangerfield plus some other unsavory attributes with the scurrilous villain of Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard, a nineteenth century tale set in the Chapelizod area of Dublin and which Joyce built into the foundations of Finnegans Wake, also set in Chapelizod. However, the Hill of Howth in the north of the city, is even more central to the historical themes in Finnegans Wake. And where does Donleavy begin his tale? On the Hill of Howth, a great place for the history, as Dangerfield bluntly puts it. He also meditates on the 'coincidence of contraries', a pet theory of sixteenth century philosopher, Giordano Bruno, which along with his writings on metempsychosis, greatly influenced Joyce in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The Ginger Man opens with talk of tubs, and it’s difficult not to be reminded of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub which Joyce refers to frequently in Finnegans Wake. The Ginger Man ends with Dangerfield eating a mutton kidney exactly as Leopold Bloom is doing on the 16th of June, 1904, when we first meet him in Ulysses. In between there are many other allusions to literary Ireland, almost as if the Irish Tourist Board had commissioned the book as an advertising gimmick. Or perhaps not; the narrative is set in the late 1940s, a time when Dublin was home to an entire pubfull of literary men, more than one of whom had drinking talents to rival the Ginger Man, men such as Flann O'Brien, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin. The group used to meet in a pub called McDaid's in the city centre and when they were particularly short of funds, some of them lived in an infamous basement called The Catacombs where they continued their drinking and carousing. Both McDaid's and The Catacombs feature in The Ginger Man along with practically every other pub in the Dublin of the period. Guinness and Gold Label whiskey have starring roles too: When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter, Dangerfield intones from the bottom of his whiskey glass.

Certain sections of this book reminded me very much of Anthony Cronin's memoir, Dead As Doornails: A Chronicle Of Life, written much later than Dunleavy's book: There were some Americans, ex-service men who had come to Ireland originally to be Trinity students under the G.I. Bill and remained on when its bounty was exhausted, among them J. P. Donleavy, then supposed to be a painter but meditating a big book about Ireland to be called, I seem to remember, ‘Under The Stone'; and Gainor Crist, who was to provide the original for that book, subsequently called The Ginger Man (a curiously transformed and lessened portrait)... Most of this company assembled in McDaid’s every day...and almost every night the entire assemblage moved on to the Catacombs. These and what went on there have been described so often now, in works of apparent fiction like The Ginger Man, or alleged fact such as Ulick O'Connor’s Biography of Brendan Behan. The whole place smelt of damp, decaying plaster and brickwork, that smell of money gone which was once so prevalent in Ireland. Off the corridor leading out of the kitchen were various dark little rooms. Mine had, I think once been a wine-cellar. There was hardly space for a bed in it, and none for anything else except a few bottles and books.

Sebastian Dangerfield is a student in Trinity College when we first meet him, busily drinking up his G.I. money; he describes The Catacombs in similar terms to Cronin’s: A smell of damp walls and cavities. A feeling of long corridors and hidden rooms, tunnels in the earth, black pits and wine cellars filled with mouldy mattresses. In these corridors he meets a character called Barney Berry, a thinly disguised but hilarious double for Brendan Behan. Other characters may be based on real life people too, perhaps even Cronin himself, but if so the portraits are better disguised. I wondered if Dangerfield’s sidekick Kenneth O’Keefe, another Irish American G.I., was a portrait of the Dunleavy himself. O'Keefe exits the novel at one point to go and achieve his ambition of being a 'writer' in Paris; Dunleavy wrote The Ginger Man partly in Paris.

Among the other curious items found while excavating the site of The Ginger Man were some odd narrative strategies. Who is the narrator, we wonder in the early pages, and then it slowly dawns on us that the narrator is in fact the main character: Dangerfield sometimes speaks in the first person and sometimes in the third so that the reader gets nicely confused. The strategy is a little like the spider walk described on page 209 : I've been trying to perfect it for some time. You see, every two steps you bring the right foot across from behind and skip. Enables one to turn around without stopping and go in the opposite direction.

Songs and rhymes are threaded through the narrative as in Finnegans Wake, and Donleavy often concludes a chapter with a haiku-type verse, sometimes shaped like its subject:

In
Algeria
There is a town
Called
Tit

There are lots of religious references and an odd preoccupation with the days of the week: Come down God and settle on my heart on this triangular Friday
And: I’ve known Mondays come on a Friday
Much of the narrative is written in a kind of telegraphic style almost like stage directions but there are more eloquent lines too: Where is the sea high and the wind soft and moist and warm?
Or: clusters of men hunched in black overcoats sucking cigarettes, spitting and mean. With tongues of shoes hanging out like dogs' hungry mouths.
And this: Wednesday, a grey dreariness general over the city, reminding us of the last lines of Joyce’s The Dead, snow was general all over Ireland..
If it sounds like I’m complaining about such appropriation, I’m not. When you’ve read a book without echoes, a book of bare space and rough hewn furniture as I did recently, finding one which is full of rich furnishings from its author’s reading life, is very welcome.

Any writer who sets his novel in Dublin city must find it exceedingly difficult to avoid the shadow of the great authors who’ve gone before. Perhaps Donleavy is simply offering homage, not only to Joyce and the others he alludes to, but to the very practice of appropriation.

* Finnegans Wake, page 10