What’s in a metaphor?
It’s the kind of question that would have resonated with Laurence Sterne, the Anglo-Irish writer of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, whose eponymous hero, pace Shakespeare, is plagued by his father’s belief that being mistakenly named “Tristram” rather than “Tristam” could alter the course of his life for the worse. It slowly dawns on the reader that Tristram Shandy, described as one of the greatest “shaggy dog” stories of all time, is not about Tristram Shandy at all, as Sterne delights in calculating how many years it will take him to advance the narrative beyond Tristram’s infancy.
mockups-design.com
Similarly, Ciarán Ó Néill’s new book, A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being, is less about the literary or existential analogies to be drawn from quantum mechanics than the author’s desire to make a mark on the world before shuffling off this mortal coil, “to express my material existence such that it transcends its bounded nature, such that my wave ripples on after my particle has gone”. For Ó Néill, this is “a wish as ancient as it is futile”, prompting the subtitle of the book: A Memoir of Human Failure.
It’s a wish that has haunted intellectual gadflies everywhere – those of us with enough wit to appreciate the realms of gold that literature offers but without the wherewithal to add a kingdom of our own, whether from lack of opportunity, lack of discipline, or most cruelly, lack of talent. Part memoir, part quest, the book is the story of an everyman ensconced in the quotidian demands of work and home, trying to make sense of a world gone mad, to register dissent, to cast around for purpose and meaning.
Yet purpose has already found him. The book is strongest in tracing the narrative arc of an “honest philanderer” who discovers the joys of parenthood and partnership in middle age. Whether he succeeds in putting flesh on the bones of his quantum metaphor is irrelevant. Unlike 99 percent of gadflies around the world, he has managed to make his mark, both on life and on literature, using the proceeds from selling his house to complete a work that is “an assertion of being”.
If Ó Néill occasionally succumbs to the first-time author’s proclivity for prolixity and affectation, as he fears, there is no doubt that he can write, and write well. It will be interesting to read what he writes next.
What dreams may come.
—
Éamonn Toland is the author of The Pursuit of Kindness, which is available here. The Pursuit of Kindness will be available in a Romanian-language edition later this year.