IT HAS been said that contemporary Irish fiction writers tend to attack the past with relish - the Ireland of Christian Brothers and cowsheds and dark family secrets - but to be a little too gentle with the present.
Someone recently asked me why so many new Irish short stories are about nice middle class people making their way in a Dublin apparently devoid of criminals or Polish people; in other words a Dublin that does not exist and perhaps, unlike the cowsheds and Christian Brothers, never existed?
Well, Barbelo’s Blood by Capt Joseph W Barbelo (published by Galway Print, €11.99 ) is perhaps the answer to that person’s prayers.
To paraphrase what George Orwell said of TS Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, it achieves the difficult feat of making the contemporary world seem worse than it actually is. If your idea of relaxation is reading internet articles about bankers, Zionists, Donald Rumsfeld, and world government, then this novel is for you.
The narrator, Capt Joseph W Barbelo, is a maniac of a character, who becomes obsessed with the elite group of Illuminati who allegedly rule the world one of these Illuminati presumably being the aforementioned Rumsfeld.
To “cull” the population, the Illuminati keep the world in a state of perpetual war. Like most elite groups they delude themselves as to their real motives: “They actually think they’re saving civilisation, and from an even greater evil…a world without them to take care of you all, to save you from yourselves.”
This is an almost exact description of the basic guiding tenet of American Neo-Conservatism, a philosophy which has in recent years done more than its fair share to keep the recent boom in both war and conspiracy theories going.
From the first sentence: “The scent of ionised concrete; the underpass, dripping the evening rain, thundering a hundred regrets into my brain”, the novel’s manic prose style gets down to business. It’s obvious the author had great fun writing this monumental ramble of a novel which drips with irreverence and ends up being the place where The Da Vinci Code meets A Clockwork Orange and Mein Kampf.
The casual violence of the closing chapter is devastating: “My walking stick slaps into his groin – my pen drives hard into his eye socket.”
On a train journey to Limerick we meet Roberta, a holocaust denying, fanatical republican student with “two legs up to her arse, mad corkscrew red hair, green eyes”. Roberta believes that those in on the world government conspiracy have, down the years, included Augusto Pinochet, Kurt Waldheim, Heinrich Himmler, the Rothschilds and, of course, Tony Blair.
This novel left me in no doubt of one terrible truth: the real Roberta is out there somewhere and waiting to accost me on a train journey any day now. It will probably happen in the run up the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in October. And she’ll start by telling me about something she read on the Net…
Barbelo’s Blood is a novel that often overreaches, but once it’s had its way with you, you’ll never be quite the same again.
