The Hard Life

The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor

First edition
Author	Flann O'Brien
Country	Ireland
Language	English
Genre	Comic novel
Publisher	MacGibbon & Kee
Publication date	1961
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	157 pp.

The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor is a comic novel by Flann O'Brien (pen name of Brian O'Nolan). Published in 1961, it was O'Brien's fourth novel and the third to be published. (He wrote The Third Policeman in 1939, but it was published only posthumously, in 1967). Set in turn-of-the-century Dublin, The Hard Life is a satirical Bildungsroman that deals with the education and upbringing of the narrator, Finbarr, and his brother Manus. The novel offers a mocking critique of certain representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, the development of Irish identity and the functioning of formal education. The novel was initially very popular, with its first print run selling out within forty-eight hours (p. 271), and it has been republished several times in Ireland, Britain and the United States, both as a stand-alone work and, most recently, in Flann O'Brien: The Complete Novels (Everyman's Library, 2007).

The story opens with the narrator, Finbarr, recalling the death of his mother in 1890, when he was around five years old. He and his brother Manus (often referred to simply as "the brother") are raised in the home of their half-uncle, Mr Collopy. Collopy lives with his partner Mrs Crotty - it is unclear if they are married and the narrator can only speculate as to why she retained the name of her first husband - and Annie, Collopy's daughter from an earlier marriage. Finbarr describes Collopy's home as a squalid environment where the boys are served greasy meatballs for dinner, a household with a "dead atmosphere" offering little opportunity for amusement. Collopy and the parish priest, a German Jesuit domiciled in Dublin and bearing the comical name of Father Fahrt, frequently indulge in long bouts of drinking, and none of the adults exhibits much concern for the child's welfare.

Finbarr attends Synge Street Christian Brothers School, the former school of O'Brien/O'Nolan himself, while Manus attends Westland Row Christian Brothers School. Both schools are run by the Catholic Christian Brothers, both boys detest their schools with equal passion, and O'Brien mocks both with equal contempt. Finbarr's first impression of his school is that it resembles a prison: he describes the horrors of corporal punishment by "the leather" in detail, and refers to "struggling through the wretched homework, cursing Wordsworth and Euclid and Christian Doctrine and similar scourges of youth".