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Autistic man’s view of small town
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Ten years ago, when Mark Haddon’s “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” turned up on the best-seller list and won a number of literary awards, the novel’s autistic narrator beguiled readers with his unconventional point of view. Today, even as controversy surrounds the revised classification of autism in the latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the quirky yet remarkably perceptive points of view of autistic narrators have become increasingly familiar in every category of fiction, from young adult to science fiction to popular and literary fiction.
Like Haddon’s Christopher Boone, the narrator of Ciaran Collins’ remarkable first novel, “The Gamal,” has been encouraged by a mental health professional to write his story for therapeutic purposes.
Charlie McCarthy, 25, is known in the West Cork village of Ballyronan as “the gamal,” short for “gamalog,” a term for a fool or simpleton rarely heard beyond the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland. He is in fact a savant, a sensitive oddball whose cheeky, strange, defiant and witty monologue is as disturbing as it is dazzling.
Charlie rarely goes more than a few pages without reminding us of his struggle to set down his story word by word in order to fulfill his obligation to describe the history of his friendship with a young couple named Sinead and James, whose doomed romance ended in tragedy five years earlier. There was cruel duplicity, there was a death and another death, there was a trial, and Charlie was in the middle of every bit of it, though we must wait for the rather diffuse ending before all is revealed.
At times the narrative features a few too many dictionary definitions and self-indulgent, associative bits of wordplay, while at other moments drawings and photographs are unnecessarily scattered through the text. We are warned on the first page: “Don’t be expecting any big flowery long-winded poetic picturesque ... passages in this book explaining the look of something. If I have to go into that much detail, I’ll take a photograph or draw a picture. This is for people like myself who hate reading.” But just the opposite is the case: Charlie’s deadpan, vivid descriptions of the people and habits of Ballyronan make “The Gamal” quite worth the many detours for people who love reading, especially those for whom the journey, not the arrival, matters.
The novel’s greatest gift is the playful language that celebrates the thrill and desperation of living in this small country town. “By midnight everyone was messy drunk,” Charlie says of the crowd in the local pub. “Faces were red and foreheads were beady sweaty. Spirits were good. The drink was making theorists of them all one minute, comedians the next. ... Things they were cross about sober mattered no more.”
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