Bogmail by Patrick McGinley

First published: 1978

Type of work: Crime story

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: County Donegal, Ireland

Principal Characters:

• Tim Roarty, the protagonist, a publican and a murderer
• Kenneth Potter, a mining engineer and Roarty’s friend
• Nora Hession, Potters mistress
• Canon Loftus, Nora’s employer, a local clergyman

The Novel

The action of Bogmail, the author’s first published novel, takes place in a small fictional community in his native County Donegal, Ireland’s most northwesterly and most remote county. One of the book’s most immediately attractive features is its loving evocation of this environment’s terrain, social structure, flora, and fauna. Such material, however, is not included merely to pad the plot by means of picturesque but self-indulgent travelogue. On the contrary, it forms an explicit contrast to the dark doings at the heart of the narrative.

The author has coyly subtitled Bogmail “A Novel with Murder,” and the novel both begins and concludes with unexpected, if not entirely unplanned, deaths. From the opening page the reader is aware that the protagonist, Tim Roarty, plans to poison the barman who works in his pub, Dermot Eales. Roarty is prompted to carry out such drastic action by the strength of his revulsion at the suspicion that Eales may be having an affair with the daughter of the house, Cecily. The poisoning ploy fails, and, in a reversal of the novel’s slyly comic approach, Roarty finds himself accidentally dispatching Eales with a blow to the head, using a volume of his prize possession, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Roarty immediately disposes of the body in a local bog. Yet the evidently complete success of both murder and burial merely signals the beginning of the perpetrator’s troubles. These troubles are identified in the novel’s title: Roarty falls prey to a blackmailer who signs himself “Bogmail.” The novel depicts Roarty’s increasingly frustrated efforts to discover who his tormentor is, efforts culminating in the surprise second murder. It is an indication of Patrick McGinley’s larger purposes that this second murder resembles that of Eales.

Plot development is marked by the increasing daring and danger of the blackmailer’s demands, which Roarty matches with a steadily intensifying obsessiveness and air of claustrophobic paranoia. Such conditions, however, do not at all govern the prevailing atmosphere of Bogmail, as a result of McGinley’s deft and lyrical deployment of the locality’s natural attractions. Access to these is provided through the character of Kenneth Potter, an English engineer temporarily domiciled in the area. Potter becomes Roarty’s best friend and also his prime suspect for blackmailer, a duality which is typical of the novel’s articulation of its broader concerns.

Surprisingly, however, instead of contributing to an increase in the plot’s tension, Potter has the effect of making life in the world of the novel seem ordinary and relaxed, and in fact, he has quite as large a claim on the reader’s attention as Roarty. Potter serves to further the plot by his actions: his affair with Nora Hession and his plot to embarrass her employer, Canon Loftus, publicly. Yet Potter also has a vaguer, though paradoxically more crucial, part to play by embodying an unplotted, natural style of social existence. This is denoted by his nature rambles, his frequent but by no means compulsive visits to the pub, and his exhaustive discussions of arcane lore with the local idlers.

The ballast provided to the plot by such fidelity to ordinariness, besides its incidental felicities, reminds the reader that there is more to life than Roarty’s outlook. The reader is left in no doubt that Potter is the character who gets the most out of life. The loosely plotted material focused on Potter is as important as the conventional murder plot to an understanding of McGinley’s novel.

The Characters

A principle of duality is central to McGinley’s vision in Bogmail. Thus, in effect, the novel has two central characters. Roarty is undoubtedly Bogmail’s protagonist, in the sense that he either commissions, or is actively implicated in, the story’s significant action. His destiny is twinned, however, with that of the other main character, Kenneth Potter, who in certain important respects is Roarty’s equal and opposite. The implications of such twinning may be detected, in a preliminary way, by comparing Roarty’s and Potter’s choice of profession.

In Roarty’s case, it is more relevant to the novel’s overall ambitions to regard him not simply as a publican but also as what is called in Ireland (and in the novel) a “spoiled priest.” This label is attached to somebody who failed to complete his training for the priesthood, somebody who has probably been conditioned by the clerical mentality but who has declined to function socially under the duly ordained auspices of such conditioning. By virtue of choosing such a sociocultural identity for Roarty, McGinley facilitates the reader’s understanding of his unease and incompetence regarding matters of the flesh, his commitment to mental discipline and to theoretical models of human behavior, and the prompt and absolute nature of his moral judgments. McGinley, in a deft piece of poker-faced satire, adapts the New Testament parable about the publican by making Roarty somewhat pharisaical.

Potter, on the other hand, is an engineer, suggesting an empirical and pragmatic turn of mind. The name of his employer may be Pluto Explorations Limited, but Potter does not seem to be identified with the symbolic undertones of the company’s name. He is content with the world in its natural state, and perhaps his surname is intended to undercut his professional status.

Unlike Roarty, whose plans succeed all too brilliantly, Potter’s single scheme—the attempt to reduce Canon Loftus’ arrogance—is a total failure. Again, while Roarty fears that “in destroying Eales he had destroyed himself,” the culmination of Potter’s Donegal experiences, which in any case have been marked for the most part by exemplary geniality and camaraderie, is the possibility of having reproduced himself in the company of Nora Hession. By following his body’s inclinations, Potter enters life. Roarty, on the other hand, is goaded by the prompting of his intellect, which leads him to a desire to reorder the world in his own likeness. In the name of this desire he kills Eales and also has unexplained designs on the land of Old Crubog, a regular at the pub—designs which have a decisive bearing on the nature of bogmailing—though Roarty is, ironically, the last to discover this.

There is an inevitable distance between the two characters because of their inability to perceive each other as a total reality. The novel, however, enjoins the reader to unite imaginatively what is in fact separated. By doing so, the reader arrives at a totality superior to either of the two main characters but fundamentally dependent on both.

Critical Context

McGinley’s tactic of situating his philosophical interests in the fictional context of a violent death has led his work to be rather misleadingly classified as “crime fiction.” Bogmail resists generic classification even as it seems to invite it. While the core of its action is indeed a somewhat botched murder, and while the resolution of the plot occasions another murder, the intervening material is, if anything, a parody of the detective procedural, as the activities of the policeman, McGing, confirm. Rather than develop an intensifying air of mystery and suspense, as might be expected from a traditional crime novel, Bogmail offers a deliberate slackening of tension, and obtusely fails to thrill. As Potter notes, thrillers “lacked the imponderable ingredient that makes fiction truer than fact.”

Bogmail becomes a much more interesting and resourceful text if its nonmurderous elements are highlighted. Its vision is more far-reaching and sophisticated than that of the vast majority of crime stories because this drama of cognition probes questions of visibility and demonstrates that reality comprises myriad subjective individual perceptions.

McGinley’s work belongs to an Irish literary tradition of antirealism (epitomized in the novels of Flann O’Brien) in both his vision of the nature of the world and his view as to how it should be treated. This tradition typically satirizes epistemological procedures and aims to reveal mockingly the presumption of normalizing or fully knowing the world, with the objective of showing the individual mind in all of its frailty, in all of its innocence and delusions, and in all of its criminal pride. Appreciation of what Bogmail achieves as a first novel, and of what McGinley has to offer as a novelist, is more likely to derive from a consideration of its overall range and ambition rather than from an unexamined acceptance of its quirkiness as a crime story.

Bibliography

Adams, P. L. Review in The Atlantic. CCXLVIII (July, 1981), p. 90.

Callendar, Newgate. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXV (August 2, 1981), p. 27.

Strouse, Jean. Review in Newsweek. XCVIII (July 27, 1981), p. 66.

Sunday Times (London). Review. October 15, 1978.

Time. Review. CXVTII (August 17, 1981), p. 83.