O p e n i n g s3 7He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the
explanations when they were called for.
I was born a long time ago. My father was a strong farmer and
my mother owned a public house...If the English of this passage reads slightly strangely, it may be
partly because O’Brien was a fluent Irish speaker who wrote some
of his work in the Irish language. So he is not exactly writing here
in his native tongue, though he spoke English at least as well
as Winston Churchill. Hiberno- English, as the kind of English
spoken in Ireland is known, sometimes gives an unfamiliar twist
to standard English speech, and is thus a fertile medium for gener-
ating literary effects. The name ‘Mathers’, for example, is
pronounced in Ireland as ‘Ma- hers’, as ‘th’ behaves differently in
Irish than in English. ‘I was born a long time ago’ is an unusual way
of saying ‘I am old’, and a wonderfully improved one at that. The
phrase ‘strong farmer’ in Ireland means not a muscular one but one
furnished with a large number of acres.
The language of these lines is as far from the opening of A
Passage to India as one could imagine. Whereas Forster’s prose is
suave and civilised, O’Brien’s is apparently artless and unadorned.
There is a roughness about the prose, as there is about the charac-
ters it presents. The rambling first sentence, which stretches over
several lines, is a case in point. It contains a number of distinct
segments but only two punctuation marks, which gives the effect
of a narrator who is growling or muttering his random thoughts
out loud. I say ‘random’ because there is something oddly inconse-
quential about a sentence like ‘Divney was a strong civil man but
he was lazy and idle- minded.’ The fact that he was lazy and idle-
minded does not seem to have much of a bearing on the matter in