The Past by Neil Jordan
Growing pains—a look back at the past of Neil Jordan
In his almost 40-year career, Neil Jordan has built up an impressive pedigree.
As a screenwriter and director, his works run the gamut from art house to blockbuster, with a few flops thrown in. He is probably best known for The Crying Game, which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 1993 Academy Awards.
As well, Jordan time and again proves himself adept as an interpreter of other works. Interview with the Vampire, though not a critical favorite, ushered in the new age of horror films, still imitated today by movies like Twilight. And as executive producer of current TV hit The Borgias, Jordan continues to expand his influence and prestige. He ranks as one of Ireland’s most accomplished contemporary artists.
Before his move to filmmaking, Jordan had an active career as a writer. He appeared first with 1976’s Night in Tunisia, then with 1980’s The Past, now newly released by Soft Skull Press after being out of print for many years.
After a long and established career, an author’s first novel can come back into print loaded with the baggage of what appeared afterward. It’s also a chance to reexamine output in a new light. By reprinting The Past, Soft Skull gives readers the chance to find the seeds of the major themes in Jordan’s work—memory, identity and the growing pains of Ireland as it moves toward independence.
Jordan’s debut novel unfolds like a mystery. An unnamed narrator searches through his mother’s past to discover the mysterious circumstances of his birth. But, as in all Jordan stories, nothing is as simple as it seems. As the narrator explores the places and people his mother knew, he also imagines motives or affairs that he can neither confirm nor deny. The answer he seeks about his birth remains only partially constructed—a fiction inside a fiction, like some Borges riddle.
The Past begins with Una and Michael O’Shaughnessy, the narrator’s grandparents, in the final months of Una’s pregnancy with Rene, his future mother. Using a set of postcards still in the narrator’s possession many years after being written, the first chapter sets up an amalgamation of truth and fiction.
In 1914, Una and Michael travel to Cornwall. They tell people it’s for a vacation. In fact, the trip conceals Una’s pregnancy. Two postcards depict their seaside retreat, each holding a quickly handwritten note explaining that Una will be home “in two weeks.”
The notes themselves are lies, of course, but between them they hold the truth of Rene’s birth, setting up the series of real stories and imaginings that will guide The Past. The narrator takes up his grandmother’s gift of fabrication with relish, coloring what he heard about his grandparents with how he imagines them.
The distinction between fact and fiction blurs from the start, but as The Past progresses, it grows even hazier. The narrator speaks directly to the book’s characters, describing their bodies or emotions as if the director of a play, although they may be long dead.
Then what at first might seem to be conjecture on the narrator’s part proves true based on conversations with people who knew his parents: his mother’s friend Lili and the local priest, Father Beausang (“good blood” in French, another nod to ancestry and family).