Jamie O'Neill's at swim, two boys. (Briefs).

Mitzel, John

The title of Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys (Scribner) is a play on Flann O'Brien's title At Swim-Two-Birds, but the influence on this recent book is less O'Brien than it is James Joyce. From the opening pages, in which the middle-aged shopkeeper, Mr. Mack, walks the street of Dublin rumbling through his half-baked thoughts, it evokes Bloom's journey in Ulysses. But it is not Joyce's Dublin of 1904 but instead that of 1915, and the newspapers are full of accounts of death. It is no time for a young lad to be coming of age. The two boys of the title are Jim, Mack's adolescent son, and his pal and eventual lover, Doyler. Jim goes to school with snobs and is instructed by troublesome priests, while Doyler works a dung cart. Jim is fascinated with language; Doyler is cocky, protective, physically confident--though lame--and a socialist. O'Neill beautifully describes their courtship--swimming, playing flutes, and finally having sex. Their fathers are studies in contrast: Mack is full of aspirations for his fami ly, while old Doyle, once the smartest of the soldiers, is now a dying drunk. Jim and Doyler make a secret pact that after Doyler teaches Jim to swim, and after a year, on Easter 1916, they will jump off the hill cliff known as Forty Foot and swim the bay to the distant beacon on the Muglins rock. There they will raise the Green and claim the island for their country. As Ireland struggles toward an uncertain future, O'Neill unfolds a tender love story, an affectionate tale of boyish love in a time of trouble.