(Published by Methuen)
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Benedict Kiely, one of Ireland’s best-known broadcasters, storytellers and short story writers published The Captain with the Whiskers in 1960. Reissued now by Methuen, set at a specific era in Ireland’s recent history but is a story for all times. The young protagonist Owen Rodgers lives in a small village, based loosely on an Ulster country town where Kiely grew up. He hangs around with his pals, Jim Kinnear who wants to be a solicitor and Jeff MacSorley, an aspiring writer. Owen himself is bound for a career in medicine. The three young men, along with a handful of local characters spend their time talking, drinking, discussing world affairs, chasing girls and em, drinking.
The early part of the book outlines in beautiful detail the sleepy rustic town with its colourful characters, the lack of anything to do and introduces us to the Captain of the book’s title. Captain Conway Chesney is something of an English Lord wannabe who owns a large section of the town. Its original (and Irish) name is Magheracolton, but in a fit of colonialism, he changes it to the utterly unimaginative Bingen. The captain tells Owen in an early exchange:
“Shane O’Neill, the history books say, used to keep a lady of his, The Countess of Argyle, chained in a dungeon until he felt like having her up for wine and supper.”
The sentence sums up perfectly how the Captain, with his waxed whiskers, treats his own family. He is a patriarchal bully, a regimentally crazed disciplinarian who subjects his family to military style orders and drills along the lines of Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. We don’t even meet his wife until after he has died. He is anti-church and taunts Dr Grierson, a priest fond of a drink and a friend of the Rodgers’ family. The Captain is intrigued and fond of Owen Rodgers in a way that he isn’t of his own children. Owen is both attracted and repelled by the figure of the Captain but can’t comprehend his contempt for his own flesh and blood. As over-bearing as Captain Conway Chesney is, Kiely kills him off surprisingly early in the book (about a third in) but his spectre and influence dominate the narrative until the end. The family, bound together by his strictness, seem to fall apart without his rules and regulations. His cruel legacy to his children is that in trying to get as far away from what they’d become under him, each of them ends up messed up, lost and dysfunctional. Even Owen’s attempts to be free of the Captain and his effect on everything around him only get him as far away as the periphery.
While the Captain dominates the story, it’s very much Owen’s tale and in that sense, it’s a classic bildungsroman. We are led through the ups and downs of a young man’s coming-of-age and for all the darkness represented by the ex-army tyrant, there is much humour in the The Captain with the Whiskers. Kiely has a great ear for the way country people speak and interact. There is a sing-song quality to the narrative that is rooted in the oral tradition and his descriptions are lyrical and highly descriptive. He can conjure up the details and geography of a place in a way that I don’t think many writers can. It might not seem the most obvious of comparisons but I thought of E Annie Proulx when I was reading this book. Landscape is hugely influential for Kiely, in the same kind of way that Proulx personifies the land in her writings.
Despite being written in 1960, the story deals with many taboos of the time – pre-marital sex, children born out of wedlock and adultery. Kiely’s narrator is quite a humanist (an antidote to the monstrous Captain maybe?) and we are spared the over-bearing morality that was peddled by the church back then. The Captain with the Whiskers is a window onto a different time that’s not quite the Ireland of The Quiet Man but celebrates the good and bad of living in a small town. Benedict Kiely writes with a wit and warmth that makes it all come alive.
The DJ 
The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx
