Peter Cunningham

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Contrib.

‘The Trout: Fishing for the truth of clerical abuse’, in The Irish Times (18 Aug. 2016)

‘I decided to tell the story of a monstrous crime that takes place, almost casually, at a time of suppressed consciousness in Ireland’

‘[...] As adults, we all know the moments when we suddenly smell something, or taste something, or see or hear something, and for the tiniest second a memory floats up from our deep unconscious. It’s like a spark from a deep, deep cave. But we can’t grasp it, can’t keep it - and then it’s gone, just as our dreams defy our attempts to hold on to them. We are left with a feeling that we have just encountered something which we know intimately - that is part of us - and yet we don’t know what it is. We know it, yet we don’t know it. [...] In some cases - and this is what happens in The Trout - that tiny memory is so strong that it governs us. It can even terrify us. Alex, a man in late middle age, has been assailed by such flashes of memory all his adult life. His memory is horrifying. Alex thinks that as a young boy he murdered someone. But he does not know who, or why, or when. Denying that what we see is actually happening. [...] I decided to tell the story of a monstrous crime that takes place, almost casually, at a time of suppressed consciousness in Ireland. I set The Trout in the beautiful hinterland of my own south-east, in the midst of rivers and hills, streams and valleys I know so well, in a simple place populated by good people whose knowledge - whose consciousness of the truth - lies submerged deep beneath the surface. It remains there for decades, until one day, against all the odds, it bursts upwards out of the depths and into the daylight, where it hangs, dazzling, refusing to be ignored any more, like a beautiful, shimmering trout.

(Available online; accessed 18.11.2016.)

Note: The Irish Times (28 Jan. 2012), printed an apology for slanderous remarks made about Cunningham in the following form:

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Commentary
Kevin Myers, ‘Irishman’s Diary’ (Irish Times, 10 Aug. 1995), treats of Cunningham under subheadings, ‘Fine Novelist’, ‘largely Ignored’, ‘Completely Fictional’ and remarks, Tales of the River Delta [1995] is true to the reality of Waterford’.

Gregory Dart, review of Peter Cunningham, Love in One Edition (Harvill), 295pp.; concerns Kaiser, orphan of mysterious origin and currently maintenance man at Monument Gazette, in an Irish villages, the scene of love and obssession; co-narrator Jasmin, a young archivist who finds evidence linking him with the fate of the Penders, owners of the paper; her research brings up past crimes in Monument; Kaiser finally prints a rogue issue of the paper in an attempt to set the record straight; Quotes, ‘Thrust back upon only the sum of my own net resources, I discovered a dislike for myself which I assumed had always been there but which now, its hiding palce stripped bare by circumstances, was starkly obvious. I gorged on narcotics and palyed with the idea of the last great engorgement; but a residual sense of duty, it must have been for I can think of nothing else, held me back. I began wondering if I might have been better off never having met Jasmine, a thought that provoked a fresh spiral of despair, for my life seemed to be a succession of tragedies and the fact that love had once played a big part in it now seemed a cruel fabrication.’ Remarks: ‘as a thriller it works rather well … unforuntate preference for describing rather than demonstrating most evident in depiction of the two major characters’; ‘stilted’ language and ‘strange lack of conviction’; uninterested in the way the characters and their stories ‘express themselves in small town life.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 16 March 2001, p.23.)

Mary Leland, review of Peter Cunningham, Love in One Edition (Harvill), in The Irish Times (24 March 2001): the novel is set in Monument [Co. Waterford], in which Jasmine falls in love with the half-deaf handyman Kaiser and engages on excavation of his social past; ingredients include mental hospital as both refuge and penitentiary, close-mouthed local knowingness and conflict with the newspaper proprietor Boss Pender; reviewer crticises stylistic vagaries and complex time-frame but concedes that ‘once the clues to this cryptic crossword are understood and the lexicon established, the difficulties are forgiven and the tale is all.’

Sue Leonard, reviewing The Taoiseach, in Books Ireland (Feb. 2004), quotes: ‘People’s eyes shone for Taoiseach Messenger. Even those who would rather eat dirt than vote for him underwent a change in his presence. Women melted and their husband’s eyes shone. [...] they had been willingly seduced by power, many of them without even knowing it.’ (Leonard, p.14.)

Sue Leonard, reviewing Capital Sins, in Books Ireland (Sept. 2010): ‘Take one builder; a man so obsessed with the acquisition of - well, everything really - that he has ceased to enjoy anything that his wealth brings. Give him a violently temperamental trophy wife; an alcoholic father in law, who just happens to be Minister for Infrastructural Development; ally him with a megalomaniac banker, and wait for the structure to implode. It’s 2006, and the height of the boom. Albert Barr is constructing Goose Point; Dublin’s biggest and most extreme development to date. It’s billed as a paradise, but there are problems; the land starts to flood and more millions must be poured in. This causes the hypochondriac builder headaches (he thinks he has a brain tumour) but thanks to his friends in high places, it’s nothing that he can’t get bulldozed through.’ Leonard cites characters Fergus O’Dowd, Head of Risk (who gets the last laugh); Medbh Marie, Barr’s wife, Dr Erik Chester, the head of the bank, the feature-writer Lee Care - an ultimate empathic character working for Eddy and struggling to come up to his Eddy’s expectations, helped by his therapist, Gwen. (p.177.)

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Notes
Consequences of the Heart (1998): set in Monument, an Irish port dominated by two families, the Churches and the Santrys; triangular relationship involving admiration of Chud Church and Jack Santry for Rosa Bensley, the bookie’s beautiful daughter; acts of violence of which the real culprit it not revealed until the end of the novel [review].

Capital Sins (2010): Albert Barrr is constructing Goose Point, the biggest Dublin development to date, but the land is flooding; his tempermental trophy wife Medbh Marie is daughter of the Minister of Infrastructural developments but he has hypochrondriacal headaches and thinks it is a tumour; includes spoof of investment bankers and tabloid editors including Fergus O’Dowd, head of risks at the bank. (See review by Sue Leonard in Books Ireland, Sept. 2010 - as supra.)

Daddy, Daddy: Peter Cunningham writes that his father Redmond participated in the Normandy landing on 6 June 1944, aged 27 and serving as a captain and commander of a modified Sherman tank at Sword Beach, Ouistreham, nr. Caen. His tank was hit by German fire, he commandeered another and cleared mines to make a path through the sand dunes under heavy fire, bringing the remnants of his squadron off the beach, disabling a number of German guns, and taking 90 German prisoners. He was awarded the Military Cross, the only Irishman to have won the award in that day. ‘Although he often returned to France, he never revisited Sword Beach. He died on December 1st, 1999.’ (See Cunningham, ‘Retracing my father’s footsteps’, in The Irish Times, 6 June 2009.)

The Trout (2016): Alex [Smyth] and Kay began their relationship many years ago in Ireland. His father, a well-respected doctor, is immensely proud of him until the day Alex meets Kay, a meeting which changes Alex’s life and his relationship with his father forever. Rejected by his father and his friends, Alex and Kay eventually settle in Canada to lead a normal family life. Normal life, however, is only a thin veneer covering a world of childhood secrets and lies and a letter arriving out of the blue triggers a long-buried guilt in Alex, leading him to risk all to track down its secrets. In a spellbinding story of one man’s search for the crucial secret locked in his memory since childhood, The Trout bursts up through the conventions and falsehoods of the past and hangs, beautiful and shimmering, in the clear and vital light of truth. (Sandstone Press website notice - available online; accessed 18.11.2016.)

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