Nothing Happens in Carmincross by Benedict Kiely

First published: 1985

Type of work: Quest

Time of work: 1973

Locale: Ireland

Principal Characters:

• Mervyn Kavanagh, also called
• Merlin, the protagonist, who is on a journey from Shannon to Carmincross in Northern Ireland to attend a wedding
• Deborah, a companion of Mervyn on his journey
• Mr. Burns, an old friend of Mervyn, who runs a hotel in Shannon

The Novel

Mervyn, sometimes called Merlin, winds his way from Shannon in the Republic of Ireland to Carmincross in Northern Ireland and then back to Dublin. It is a very leisurely and circuitous journey, punctuated by Mervyn’s running commentary on the state of Ireland in the 1970’s; he contrasts again and again the pastoral Ireland of his youth to the murderous division that has marked the Ireland of his adulthood. Much of the novel is a monologue by Mervyn, and his speech is full of references to songs, poems, and speeches which counterpoint and contrast the heroic and the ideal of the past to the meanspirited and fanatical ideas of the present.

When Mervyn arrives in Ireland at Shannon, he is reunited with an old friend, Mr. Burns, and an old love, Deborah. After a brief rest, Mervyn sets out for Carmincross with Deborah for a niece’s wedding. The first pause in the journey is to visit a hero of 1916 with two travelers they have joined, Killoran and Jeremiah. Killoran is very respectful to this nameless hero, but Jeremiah mocks him and what his kind have created, a climate for murder and destruction. The hero’s talk is about not only the Troubles of 1916-1921 but also the battles and defeats of the sixteenth century. “On such bullshit were we raised, says Jeremiah. No wonder we are the way we are.” Mervyn and Deborah are caught in the middle of this conflict and say little; the division of the group into three separate parts is, perhaps, a reflection of the division in the country.

The next part of the journey is more peaceful as the two pass over mountains and through the countryside. Mervyn tells Deborah the Celtic tale of Grainne and Diarmuid, who fell in love and were pursued by Fionn MacCool. The tale is not chosen randomly; Deborah is being followed by the husband she has left, and Mervyn is bombarded by phone calls and messages from the wife he has left behind in New York. They detour to see a bit of Deborah’s youth, a quiet village and an aristocratic mansion. The village is still quiet, but the aristocrat has left the mansion. Deborah once played there, but now it is guarded by dogs. The current occupant is merely a caretaker and is busy cutting down the trees. His view is clear: “The gentry are gone and good riddance....” He looks forward to the estate being broken up into tract houses for the workers at the new factory. It is another sign that the old Ireland has been replaced by a meanspiritedness.

Mervyn and Deborah stop at a small town to visit a boatbuilder friend of Mervyn; he is not there, but Deborah’s husband is. The abandoned husband is called Mandrake for his appearance, and he asks Mervyn “to put in a word for me.” It is an unlikely scene, but the two act civilly and politely. Mandrake continues his search for his wife while Mervyn and Deborah “haste to the Wedding in Carmincross.” When they arrive at the border of Northern Ireland, however, they notice a great change in the mood and landscape. The first thing that they see is a soldier pointing a gun at them. They manage to get by this obstacle, and, in the town next to Carmincross, they meet a charming old friend of Mervyn, Cecil Morrow, who is now a policeman. They talk about the old days and note the differences they see in Ireland. Jeremiah and Mr. Burns show up, and there is dancing and echoes of poems and songs and great anticipation of the wedding. In the third chapter of the novel, however, called, ironically, “The Wedding,” Mervyn is in Dublin; something has happened in Carmincross, but the nature of this unexpected event is not revealed until near the end of the novel.

What happens in Carmincross is revealed in a letter by Mervyn rather than in the main narrative. Mervyn’s niece, Stephanie, is killed by a bomb placed in a postal box, and other bombs kill and maim many more. Mervyn’s mother is saved by Cecil Morrow but dies a few days later; Cecil is shot and killed by a gunman who rides through the town. Mervyn flees the destruction with Deborah only to witness the murder of a soldier at the border, and Deborah, who blames Mervyn and his book of old tales, has a car accident that evening. Nearly everyone in the novel is touched by the catastrophe, whether as friend, spouse, child, or parent.

In Dublin, Mervyn meets Jeremiah once more; Jeremiah continues his by now familiar rant against the bloody forces that are stalking modern Ireland. Mervyn does not respond in kind but visits Deborah and goes to a far different wedding from the one he had anticipated. The wedding is that of Stephanie’s sister to her sister’s intended groom. There are other suggestions of renewal at the end of the novel. Deborah is reunited with her husband, and Mervyn heads for the hotel where his estranged wife is staying. Thus, the forces of life and renewal defy, if they do not overcome, the catastrophic events. In addition, the journey of Mervyn has been completed; he ends where he began his journey, in a taxicab in New York. The novel has made a complete circle, and within that circle the opposed forces of death and life are contained.

The Characters

Mervyn Kavanagh is not only the main character but also the dominating presence in the novel. The reader sees everything through his eyes and listens to his external and internal monologue on the past and present condition of Ireland. His range of reference is startling: He alludes to the Bible, Irish myths, poems, stories, speeches, and tales, as well as to newspaper and radio reports. His attitude toward Ireland is also strategic; he is somewhere between the mindless patriotism of Killoran and the total cynicism of Jeremiah. Furthermore, he does not so much change his character in the course of the book as confirm his view about what has happened in Ireland with the division between Protestant and Catholic.

Deborah is an appealing character; she seems to be full of humor and is invariably good-tempered. She listens with interest to Mervyn’s tales and songs and adds a few of her own. She is a less complex character than Mervyn, but, in contrast to him, she does change. She responds more directly to the terrible events that she has witnessed than Mervyn does when she throws his book into the fire. By doing this, she seems to be blaming history itself for the catastrophe in Carmincross. Although she is, finally, reconciled with Mervyn and her husband, she seems subdued at the end; she has become a part of that history, not someone outside it.

Jeremiah is a familiar Irish type, the cynic. He is unflaggingly sarcastic and satiric. He has created a Revised Irish Minstrelsy in which all the patriotic songs are turned on their head and made to seem absurd. Jeremiah’s indictment seems to be absolute and has become automatic. In addition, he has no part in all the suggestions of renewal, reunion, and marriage. He remains at the end as he was in the beginning.

Critical Context

Benedict Kiely is the author of eight novels, four collections of short fiction, and a number of nonfiction books; until the publication of Nothing Happens in Carmincross, however, he was not widely known outside Ireland. He is, as Thomas Flanagan suggests in the introduction to a Kiely collection of short stories, The State of Ireland (1980), a man who is rooted in an area, the small towns and villages near Omagh in County Tyrone on the Northern Ireland border. His early fiction celebrated the links between the people and the place. As the sectarian and regional violence has increased in Ireland, however, his vision has become “more somber.” Nothing Happens in Carmincross is Kiely’s darkest work. The narrative voice records the events that are described in the newspaper, seen on television, heard on the radio, and, finally, personally witnessed; the reader must acknowledge the inhumanity in Ireland and around the globe. Kiely’s antidote to this situation is more personal than political. The young man who marries the sister of his dead fiancee is part of the only real renewal that can take place in Kiely’s shattered world.

The critical reception of the novel has been mixed. While Paul Hutchinson went so far as to call the book “a classic of Irish and world literature,” John Updike was not impressed by the narrator’s range of allusions: “It rushes ponderously about, feathered in quotations and wildly glowing, like an angel beating its wings but not quite getting off the ground.” Conor Cruise O’Brien’s judgment is more balanced and to the point; he praises Kiely’s ability to “put horror into its place; that place remains terrifying, but it’s not allowed to take over everything.” In what is perhaps the most acute comment on the book, O’Brien notes that Kiely’s novel “conveys, better than any book I can think of, a sense of the relationship of modern Catholic Ireland to its past, and the bearing of that relation on the future.”

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXII, November 1, 1985, p. 376.

Boston Review. X, November, 1985, p. 21.

Hutchinson, Paul E. Review in Library Journal. CX (November 1, 1985), p. 110.

Kiely, Benedict. The State of Ireland, 1980.

Kirkus Reviews. LIII, September 1, 1985, p. 894.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 20, 1985, p. 3.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. XC (October 27, 1985), p. 7.

O’Brien, Conor Cruise. Review in The New York Review of Books. XXXIII (May 8, 1986), p. 42.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVIII, September 13, 1985, p. 125.

Times Literary Supplement. November 1, 1985, p. 1229.

Updike, John. Review in The New Yorker. LXI (October 27, 1985), p. 146.