Discovering Ireland

Abstract

Dermot Bolger’s novel, A Second Life, first published in the early 1990s and reissued in a ‘renewed’ version in 2010, opens with protagonist Sean Blake in an apparently fatal car accident. The perspectival shorthand of the soul looking down upon the body from an elevated unearthly position allows Sean to observe himself dying. Yet rather than marking the end of his life, the vantage point captures a moment of renewal, the inevitable reuniting of body and soul in order that an incomplete task may be faced. Following Sean’s survival of the near-death experience, the second life of the title takes on multiple meanings. It is at once a life regained and an (after)life to come, as well as an awareness of alternate parallel lives that might have been. For Sean, a Dublin photographer and father of a young family, this involves unpicking the secrets of his adoption. As the novel progresses, discovering his birth mother’s experience of unplanned pregnancy in the 1950s allows Sean to glimpse the alternate second life he might have otherwise led. While Sean’s imagined second life provides a vital commentary on this important aspect of Irish social history, early twenty-first-century readers of the novel will be struck by the title’s echoing of an altogether different example of doubling and duality. The infamous virtual world platform, Second Life, was launched in 2003, coming between the two versions of Bolger’s novel.

Whoever had resprayed the ambulance had missed the top rim of the doors [...] The top of the paramedic’s hat was speckled with flecks of dandruff and when he lifted his head from my chest I could see my face staring up, crisscrossed with streaks of blood.

(Bolger, 1995, p.1)