Winter 2027 – Bronté van der helm – Where are the kings

ACT I: TIME THE DEVOURER

If you look past Sliamh Felim’s rocky spine, along the winding countryside road and turn at Hogan’s Pass, you’ll find yourself on the narrow boreen to Knockagowny. Beyond the strings of mist emerges a slatted house that once sheltered cows but is now a workshop containing its own discrete universe. Inside labours a pair of twin kings, working to fix cars and certain hearts. Outside we find a basket by the door in which ever-watchful Dougie rests. The main house lies just beyond that, warm light streaming through cracked curtains, the smell of Nana’s dinner making its escape into the garden. Once upon a time, a girl named Grace lived here. If you look closely now, you can still see her in the reflection of the window, hear the echoes of her feet running down the stairs, feel the dent she left in the living-room couch. And even closer; you’ll find her remains, in the simple silver urn on the shelf below the electric glow of the sacred heart.

In Where Are the Kings, Donal Ryan introduces us to Jack, a thirteen-year-old boy taken in by his mother’s eccentric family after her suicide by drowning. Throughout the novel, Ryan likes to depict Jack’s mother, Grace, in fragmentary style; bits and pieces left behind; a life reduced to matter, a concept Jack spends the larger part of the novel trying to understand.

But Jack’s story did not start with Grace’s urn; it started in water. With our young hero cycling after the Fiat carrying his mother, past Portroe Hill, running across the otherwise deserted car park to the lakeshore. Jack was hot, burning, too late. And his mother’s body, bobbing in the water, was ice-cold.

Reading Ryan’s novel left me unconvinced by Jack’s voice, which seemed to carry an extra layer that felt out of place. I sought answers in the novel’s epigraph: the final moments of Yeats’ 1903 play On Baile’s Strand. It presents King Cuchullain, who, after unknowingly killing his son, goes mad with grief and starts fighting the waves. But Jack’s grief is not like Cuchullain’s; it’s quiet and observant, almost matter of fact. Where the king turns outward, Jack turns inward, thinking of the happy moments he shared with his parents. Yet Ryan seems to fashion Jack after Cuchullain, making him, too, a figure so struck by grief that his emotions become ungovernable.

In On Baile’s Strand, the roles of victim and grieving parent are embodied by two separate characters: the son is killed by the father, who in turn is left behind to confront the grief and guilt of his actions. In Where Are the Kings, Ryan collapses those two roles into one body. Jack embodies both the son, a child hurt by his father’s wrongdoings, and the king, crushed by the emotional weight. Jack’s father’s destructive behaviour leaves him to carry the consequences of actions he had nothing to do with. Reading the story made me question if this might be why Jack’s voice seemed too big for his body: because how could a twelve-year-old speak for a king and a corpse without borrowing some words?

ACT II: TIME FLIES

There once was a boy who borrowed the voice of a mythical king. He tried his words, but they proved to be too large for his small frame, he tried his timbre, but it weighed too heavy, he tried his syntax; it was too complex. Where did his voice ring true, where did it falter, and what does it bring to light?

Jack’s voice is most believable when he borrows words from the people around him, which he does all the time. Jack is an incredibly bright boy with an IQ of 127 and a hunger for new words, and Ryan makes sure to emphasize this on multiple occasions over the course of the novel.

However, Jack isn’t collecting words purely because of his own interest in them. Being a young boy, he has not yet developed the vocabulary to describe and verbalise the complicated feelings he holds regarding his mother’s suicide. Neither is he able to talk about his father’s institutionalisation following the funeral. Ryan illustrates this beautifully when Jack learns the word “guillotine”:

There’s still the terrible question of his sadness. Where it is, why he can’t feel it. He imagines it to be like a guillotining. The French didn’t invent it to be cruel; they invented it to be kind. . . . So Mam was guillotined from Jack, leaving him headless and dead with no pain felt. . . . He wonders if he’ll ever get to say that sentence out loud. He lies in bed and . . . imagines himself saying it to Rose: Guillotining is as good an analogy as any for my experience of grief, you know, Rose.

Jack isn’t showing off his vocabulary in real life. In this excerpt we see him rehearsing the sentences he cannot say, words belonging to a shy child craving connection as much as understanding. However, over time, Jack’s grief catches up with him, and his hunger for words fades:

The only thing he really wonders about these days is his own lack of wonder. He’s even stopped looking things up in the Lexicon Webster. He heard a word on telly the other day, limerence, and he was getting up to cross the good room to take the first volume of the giant dictionary from its lofty perch, when he realized he didn’t want to expend the energy it would take to do so. . . . Anyway, the fella that said the word sounded like a posh prick. Let him keep his uppity word.

Jack doesn’t lash out and never causes drama; this is his mind reporting on its own exhaustion. Jack isn’t just using big words. Rather, his borrowing is part of his person. He never looks up the word limerence; dismisses it. In this case, the narration is honest, even about his hunger for words dying.

However, Jack’s voice seems to falter or contain something unlike the boy that he is supposed to be when he gives conclusions.

Every single particle in the universe exerts a force on every single other particle. Nothing exists in isolation. Every single particle that made up Mam still exists. There are bits of her all over the house at home, in the carpet, on the couch, on the countertops and cutlery and the handles of pans.

This quote is beautiful, thematically central, and doesn’t sit right for one reason: it’s the syntax of explanation, not Jack’s experience. He isn’t borrowing here; he’s dealing out a full conclusion that made me question who it is we’re listening to.

Jack’s voice is braided by the two roles he inherits from the Yeats epigraph. However, during my reading I discerned the echoes of a third strand.

The truth of things is encoded for ever in time. Information is always preserved. […] The truth swirls down now from the canopy of the forest […] all the things kept secret from Jack, all the things that everyone knew but him, or so they thought, but they were wrong, because he knew all along, he knew, but held it inside the vastness at the back of his mind, his knowledge of his father’s sins, what he did with the sister of his wife, her younger sister, and she hardly more than a child at the time, oh Dad.

The end of Where Are the Kings reveals a dark family secret and the reason for Grace’s eventual suicide: Jack’s father had an affair with Grace’s sister Rose, who was still very young at the time, and it’s implied that the boy whom Jack calls his uncle JJ is actually his half-brother. Jack tells us he has known all along, and the erotic feelings and accompanying guilt he holds toward his aunt are supposed to function as proof of that. But it still leaves one wondering how a child could possibly just know a secret like this.

One possible answer to this question can be found in an August interview Ryan did for the Country and Town House, in which he said that “[g]rief can be absorbed, inherited, assumed, appropriated, long before it’s directly experienced.”

“I was always aware of it, bracing for it, as a child,” he told Country and Town House. “I had a happy childhood, though.”

Jack seems to understand things before he has actually experienced them. Are we then hearing not just the boy living the story, but also the writer who knows what it means to experience grief before having the words to describe it?

The story itself presents another answer.

He hears his own voice, the voice of his older self, or his younger self, or the self that exists outside of time, outside of space, the version of him that knows the truth of what he did and what he failed to do, and that wise Jack is telling him what has to happen, how this has to end.

Jack tells us that the voice has several owners and is refusing to choose. Perhaps the third strand I’ve been looking for in this braid has been Jack’s future self all along. Ryan loves playing with time; he switches back and forth between Jack’s past and present without warning and has already played with the idea that “time doesn’t exist as we perceive it, but rather as a mechanism that allows, or shapes, perception” before.

But maybe, the reason Jack’s voice seems too big for his body is because it’s not entirely his own, but belongs, to some extent, to everyone who speaks through him.

ACT III: TIME THE RULER

“Where are the kings? What are the kings doing?

They are shouting and running down to the shore.” — W. B. Yeats

Donal Ryan, the best-selling chronicler, repeated winner of the Irish book awards, Booker prize nominee; one of the most crowned living novelists of rural Ireland alive today, has given us a book asking where all the kings have gone, because apparently, it takes a king (or two) to save one.

In the final pages of the novel, we find Jack, like his mother, trying to drown himself. He hears his own voice telling him, “How everything for him must end, the way it ended for Mam, to do now what he should have done that day, and follow Mam down into the dark.” This is where Ryan’s story breaks away from the epigraph: in Yeats’ play, the onlooking kings are powerless and unable to help, but Ryan’s twin kings, Jack’s uncles, reach into the water, full of compassion:

They’re pulling him from the water, they’re pulling him into the cold world, into his life, those kind men, Theo and Haulie, those kings of men, they’re lifting him out and taking him gently from his mother, and holding him in their arms.

This still leaves us with the third strand mystery. Is it Ryan the novelist hiding his own experiences with grief within the third strand, or is it Jack’s older self, making us believe the drowning boy is narrated by the man who survived him? But then why would Jack tell himself to commit suicide after surviving?

I believe the third strand might be less of a voice and more of an emotional inheritance, a knowledge of grief that is neither fully Jack’s nor Ryan’s. But perhaps this is the point; we don’t need to know whose voice it is exactly we’re hearing. What matters more is how many voices, how many experiences can live inside one person, and that sometimes you might need help from the outside when dealing with them.

And thus, at the very end of Ryan’s tale, did our young king Jack, backed by his uncles, finally take off his heavy crown and return it to Yeats, who had been waiting for him on Baile’s Strand.

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