I've enjoyed Cormac James' writing since I was first introduced to his
short stories by a friend and I've looked forward to reading his longer work it seems years now.
![](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/jamestrack+field.jpg)
The disingenuously titled Track & Field is
his first published novel and while his stories roll on the modernist
project with great energy, this work takes us back to the heyday of
modernism's birth, but in the country Joyce chose to flee--Ireland. The
Irish Civil War is in its sixth month, the British have pulled back to
the northern six counties, and the south is in the hands of conflicting
factions--those who want to seize the whole of Ireland for the
Republic, and those who accept the Treaty division. It's the aftermath
of a moment which has since become part of the Irish national myth, and
perhaps in opposition to this myth, Cormac James has evoked one of his
own: a Book of the Dead in which three brothers carry the late fourth
from Dublin to their homeland. The corpse crosses night country, but
must pass barriers and gatekeepers, his brothers rising to each
challenge with wit and cunning. Yet James' writing is scrupulously
realistic, narrated with a shellshocked, at times affectless, tone
which lets simple acts echo with meaning, as at the point when the
brothers attempt to slide the coffin from a room upstairs to the
groundfloor:
"There were lines and arcs tracked wherever on the wood we'd had to
shove and turn and swivel it. The weight of it was unbelievable. She
had already cleared out all of his things and once the books were gone
the only trace of him would be these lines and arcs on the wood where
we'd had to slide and swivel it and those would be worn away again in a
month. We couldn't believe the weight of it."
The context of the Civil War is felt but never explicitly described, as
if an event which has carried on for so long there's no memory of prior
times. James plays this up in images of unread newsprint come unstuck
from the page and attaching itself to things, first the truck's
windshield obscuring the driver's sight, then upon food--"until it was
turned the meat bore the news all mirrored and blurred like an
apprentice printer's, the print all gapped and broken and the ink
bleeding out of its assigned arenas." Closing the gap between headlines
and life, a mysteriously brutal process.
Track & Field inhabits a masculine world--one of fistfights, reticence,
and pissing out of doors--in a state beyond control. Women
remain small presences, providing tea and a subject for gossip, almost
outside the bounds of the brothers' ken. The ruptures in the novel are
scarcely those between English and Irish, but those between city and
country man, between the sexes, between brothers. It is by no means a
narrow book, and though still only available from Ireland and the UK,
this fine novel deserves a readership far beyond its native shores.