The Well of Saints, 1905
Martin and Mary Doul are two blind beggars who have been led by the lies of the townsfolk to believe that they are beautiful when in fact they are old and ugly. A saint cures them of their blindness with water from a holy well and at first sight they are disgusted by each other. Martin goes to work for Timmy the smith and tries to seduce Timmy's betrothed, Molly, but she viciously rejects him and Timmy sends him away. Martin and Mary both lose their sight again, and when the saint returns to wed Timmy and Molly, Martin refuses his offer to cure their blindness again. The saint takes offense and the townsfolk banish the couple, who head south in search of kinder neighbors. |
Kingdom of Twilight, 1907
The central character is Willie Trevellyan, whom we meet as a 16-year-old passionately and romantically in love with his older cousin Eva, an intelligent and stoic young woman who serves the narrative as a backboard for Willie (and Reid) to bounce musings on Nature, Love, Class, Religion, Self and anything else that occurred to him against; he's self-indulgent in the way of adolescents, and in the way of Edwardian adolescents, completely ignorant of pretty much anything that matters. Willie's other friend is Nick, with whom he is also in love, passionately if not romantically, and who is undoubtedly in love with him. Later, Willie meets and is manipulated by an older woman who claims her child to be his, and who deserts them both within a year of the child's birth, Willie having done the honorable thing by marrying her. Reid's evocation of the child, a boy named Prosper, is luminous. |
Playboy of the Western World, 1907
Set in a pub in western Ireland in the early 1900s, the play tells the story of a young man who attains a hero-like status among the local villagers by telling a rousing story about having murdered his father. He relates his story in an engaging style using an Irish dialect known as Hiberno-English. When the play premiered at the Abbey Theater in Dublin on January 26, 1907, riots broke out as some felt the plot was immoral and offensive to Ireland. Even so, the play remains an influential work in Irish literary history. |
Rising of the Moon, 1907
This play explores Anglo-Irish relations at the beginning of the twentieth century. On a moonlit night, three Irish policemen gather at the quayside in a small, seaport town. Ireland is under British rule and the policemen are in the service of the British government. They put up posters for an escaped prisoner who is fighting for Irish independence. Convinced that the escaped rebel might creep to the water's edge to be rescued by sea, they all hope to capture him for the hundred-pound reward and a potential promotion. Left alone on watch, the Sergeant meets a ragged man who purports to be a ballad singer. They begin to talk and their conversation drifts to the past and moments in the Sergeant’s youth when he could have turned against British rule. The ragged man is revealed to be the convict he has been looking for, but the Sergeant has been moved by their discussion and memories of his own patriotic youth. He decides to let the prisoner escape and forgo the financial reward. The play’s title The Rising of the Moon is taken from the traditional Irish ballad of the same name, which depicts a battle between the United Irishmen, led by Theobald Wolfe Tone and the British Army during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. |
The Murder Machine and Other Essays, 1912
An essay by Patrick Pearse that condemned the existing Irish school system for excluding "the national factor". He also wrote that "The school system which neglects it, commits, even from the purely pedagogic point of view, a primary blunder. It neglects one of the most powerful of educational resources". He argued that "In a true education system religion, patriotism, literature, art and science would be brought in such a way into the lives of boys and girls as to affect their character and conduct". He wrote that "The main object in education is to help the child to be his own true self." and that the aim was "to foster the elements of character native to the soul, to help bring these to their full perfection, rather than to implement exotic excellense". He argued for reform that was no more than "a plea for freedom within the law". Teachers should be free to decide what pupils needed to learn without the burden of state examination system. In a future independent Ireland the school system would be bilingual. He opposed the state with the state emphasis on standardized curriculum and exams. Schools were largely church run, though he only referred in passing to Clongowes Wood College ( voluntary boarding school for boys near Clane, County Kildare, Ireland, founded by the Jesuits in 1814) and a passing reference to the church maintaining "a portion of the machinery". |
Pygmalion, 1912
When professor of phonetics Henry Higgins wagers with Colonel Pickering that he could teach even a gutter-mouthed flower seller how to speak like a duchess, little does he expect that his social experiment will be riddled with difficulties, and that behind her cockney parlance the girl in question, Eliza Doolittle, has a mind, ideas and aspirations of her own. Things come to a crux when the creature starts to rebel against her creator – and the scene is set for a play that questions the class system, social appearances and the role of women in society. Universally regarded as Shaw’s most successful work, Pygmalion – here presented in its definitive 1941 version, with footnotes indicating the textual variants from the first volume edition of 1916 – has spawned a great number of adaptations, among them the famous 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, and shows ancient myth’s undiminished ability to find new incarnations in modern life. |
Love Among the Artists, 1914
In the ambience of chit-chat and frivolity among members of Victorian polite society a youthful Shaw describes his views on the arts, romantic love and the practicalities of matrimony. Dilettantes, he thinks, can love and settle down to marriage, but artists with real genius are too consumed by their work to fit that pattern. The dominant figure in the novel is Owen Jack, a musical genius, somewhat mad and quite bereft of social graces. From an abysmal beginning he rises to great fame and is lionized by socialites despite his unremitting crudity. As a study of Bohemia and its clash with conventional society, the novel is revealing of Shaw's belief that the true Artist has wholly different criteria than the ordinary person for the living of Life. Written as "a novel with a purpose," according to its author's preface, Love Among the Artists is an ironic novel with a serious intent. |
Dubliners, 1914
Like many important artistic works of the early twentieth century (the paintings of Joyce's contemporary Wassily Kandinsky, for instance, or Louis Armstrong's music), Dubliners appears deceptively simple and direct at first, especially compared with James Joyce's later works of fiction: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. It is certainly his most accessible book — relatively easy to comprehend and follow, whereas the others mentioned tend to challenge even the most sophisticated reader. It was in Dubliners that Joyce developed his storytelling muscles, honing the nuts-and-bolts craftsmanship that would make the high modern art of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake viable. In Dubliners, he does not yet employ the techniques of mimetic narrative (characteristic of A Portrait) or stream-of-consciousness (Ulysses), but he paves the way here for those technical breakthroughs. Dubliners is somewhat comparable to Picasso's so-called Rose and Blue periods, in which the painter perfected his skills at realistic portrayal with paint before pioneering cubism and other abstract styles. Joyce even introduces characters (Lenehan from "Two Gallants" and Bob Doran from "The Boarding House," for instance) who reappear in his later books. Mainly, Joyce worked and played in Dubliners at plotting and characterization, description and dialogue, and (especially) point of view (the technical term for who is telling a story, to whom, and with what limitations). What is amazing is that such a relatively immature work succeeds almost without exception. And just as Picasso's realist works have not only lasted but are actually preferred by many museum goers to his more difficult-to-appreciate later paintings, Dubliners is the favorite James Joyce book of many readers. The setting of Dubliners is, logically enough, in and around the city of Dublin, Ireland. Though the capital city of Ireland, the Dublin in which Joyce grew up was a provincial place — far less cosmopolitan than a number of other Western European cities of similar size (Venice, for instance). Unlike France, Spain, and Italy, Ireland had never been a center of continental culture; unlike England and the Netherlands, it had never been a trade hub. Nor, in contrast to then recently united Germany, was Ireland yet industrialized. (In fact, the country would remain almost exclusively rural for decades to come.) It was a kind of third-world nation, really, before the term existed. Though Dublin was a genuinely urban locale, with electric lights and streetcars, competing daily newspapers and even a museum, the city remained fairly unsophisticated at the time when Joyce wrote about it. To some degree, this was a function of Ireland's geographical remoteness from the rest of the continent in the days before radio and air travel (much less television and the Internet). It is an island off an island (Britain) off the coast of Europe, and therefore somewhat inaccessible. James Joyce himself, however, blamed two other factors for the backwardness of his home city: the Roman Catholic Church and the neighboring country of England. According to legend, St. Patrick had brought Christianity to Ireland in the Middle Ages; ever since, most Irish have observed a rigorous and rather literal brand of the religion, one that is perhaps more superstitious than the Christianity practiced by French Catholics, for instance. In story after story in Dubliners as well as in the novels he wrote later in his career, Joyce holds the Roman Catholic Church accountable for the failure of the Irish to advance in step with the rest of Europe. He was particularly bitter about the way in which the Church often recruited intellectuals like himself to serve in the priesthood — rather than encouraging them to use their minds in the service of progress, as doctors, scientists, or engineers. Joyce also blamed England for what he saw as Ireland's backwardness. On July 1, 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne, the Protestant forces of King William III of England had defeated the Roman Catholic Jacobites of James II, causing the downfall of Catholic Ireland. Until 1922, when British Parliament granted independence to the country (while retaining control of what is to this day the province of Northern Ireland, the inhabitants of which tend to be Protestant rather than Catholic), Joyce's homeland would remain, in effect, a colony of England. Joyce and many other Irish saw this era of over 200 years as one of outright occupation by an overtly hostile enemy. The period during which Dubliners is set follows the brutal so-called Potato Famine of the late 1840s — for which many Irish held the British responsible — after which a movement for Irish independence (led by the nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell) occurred. This movement, however, failed ignominiously when Parnell was betrayed by his own countrymen, and in the Dublin of Joyce's novels, the defeat still stings. (For evidence of this, see "Ivy Day in the Committee Room.") The Irish Revival, a movement begun in the 1880s to foster understanding and respect for Celtic and Gaelic language and culture, is referred to in Dubliners as well (in "A Mother" and "The Dead"). From the very first story onward, the book is rife with examples, obvious and less so, of the treachery of England and the English, at least in the opinion of Joyce and his characters. The stories of Dubliners are united by the city itself — Dublin is rendered in Joyce's book with a concreteness and specificity that was unprecedented at the time of its writing. The other aspect that unites these disparate works of narrative prose is shared themes. Though the protagonist of "Araby" and that of "Clay" could hardly be more different with respect to age and temperament (the same goes for the main characters of "Eveline" and "The Dead"), all these stories are united by the ideas that the tales dramatize: paralysis, corruption, and death. In story after Dubliners story, characters fail to move forward, tending rather to forge outward and then retreat, or else circle endlessly. They are stuck in place. Examples of corruption — that is, contamination, deterioration, perversity, and depravity — occur throughout. Finally, Dubliners begins with a death and ends with a death (in a story titled, logically enough, "The Dead"), with numerous deaths either dramatized or referred to in between. All of this knits the book's many and varied stories together in a web of place, time, and meaning. Each successive story gains in momentum and weight by virtue of following those that came before. (For instance, Gabriel Conroy from "The Dead" is more completely understood if thought of as the grown-up protagonist of "Araby.") And after reading the book, it will be hard to think of one Dubliners tale without remembering others. |
Ulysses, 1922
Ulysses begins at about 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 16, 1904, in Dublin, Ireland, when one of its major participants, young Stephen Dedalus, awakens and interacts with his two housemates, the egotistical medical student, Buck Mulligan, and the overly reserved English student, Haines. The narrative ends some twenty-four hours later, when Stephen, having politely refused lodgings at the home of two other principal characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom, discovers he is no longer welcome to stay with Mulligan and Haines. During the sixteen hours of narrative time, the characters move through their day in Dublin, interacting with a stunning variety of individuals, most of whom are fictional but some of whom represent actual people. Ulysses stands as an inventive, multiple-point-of-view (there are eighteen) vision of daily events, personal attitudes, cultural and political sentiments, and observations of the human condition. It is written in a number of differing literary styles, ranging from internal monologue to first-person speculation to question-and-answer from a catechism to newspaper headlines. The work has eighteen chapters. When taken in context with James Joyce's grander design for it (a playful comparison to Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey), Ulysses gains complexity, irony, and dramatic intensity. Not only does Stephen Dedalus become all the more vivid because of his comparison to Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, King of Ithaca, in the Homeric epic. The other main character, Leopold Bloom, may be seen as the wandering Ulysses. In The Odyssey, Ulysses is seen returning to his wife, that symbol of womanly and cultural virtue, Penelope; in the novel, Joyce uses irony to represent Penelope as Molly Bloom, who that very afternoon had an adulterous encounter with her lover, Blazes Boylan. ncidents in the novel have counterparts in the Homeric epic, sometimes to a broadly farcical effect, other times to a more punning or humorous effect, and still others to fit Joyce's own sense of social or political irony. For instance, Chapter One in Ulysses, referred to as "Telemachus" by Joyce, establishes the link to come between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. It shows Stephen getting up and leaving for work. Those familiar with The Odyssey will be amused by the parallels between Mulligan and Haines and the suitors of Penelope. In The Odyssey, Telemachus, son of Ulysses, King of Ithaca, is persuaded to venture out in search of his long-absent father. Chapters Two and Three of The Odyssey show Telemachus meeting Nestor, an old windbag of a counselor to his father. In the novel, Stephen is shown in conversation with Mr. Deasey, headmaster of the school where he teaches. In addition to being anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, and wildly pro-British, Mr. Deasey is a repository of misinformation. The first three episodes of Ulysses focus on Stephen Dedalus, a problematically autobiographical character first introduced in Joyce's published work through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Chapter One, Stephen, Mulligan, and Haines prepare for the day. In Chapter Two, Stephen is teaching in a boys' school. While the class recites Milton's Lycidas, he broods about his life so far, his ambitions to be a great writer, and his doubts. In Chapter Three, Stephen walks along the seafront and reflects upon the things he sees — midwives, cockle-pickers, boulders, a dog, the body of a dog, "seaspawn and seawrack." The next twelve chapters take the reader on Leopold Bloom's Odyssey (the wanderings of Ulysses). His and Stephen's paths cross but they have no meaningful meeting until later on. In Chapter Four, Leopold Bloom is at his and Molly's home at 7 Eccles Street in the northwest quadrant of Dublin. He is preparing breakfast for himself and his wife (and his cat) before departing for Paddy Dignam's funeral. The jingling springs of the bed upstairs show that his wife Molly is awake. He goes out into the world like Odysseus in The Odyssey. Bloom's wanderings become the major part of the novel. In Chapter Five, Bloom walks through the streets of Dublin and performs several errands. In Chapter Six, Bloom and his fellow mourners travel to the cemetery for the burial of Paddy Dignam, which evokes from Bloom a wealth of meditations on birth, death, and human frailty, including his reminiscences on Rudy, his own dead son, and his father, a suicide. This theme and anti-Semitism, tactlessly arise in various conversations, with Bloom the target. In Chapter Seven, Stephen and Bloom (father and son, or Odysseus and Telemachus) meet in the newspaper office for the first time in the novel, although each knows who the other is. Bloom attempts (unsuccessfully) to complete an advertising contract, and Stephen (successfully) hands over the letter schoolmaster Deasy entrusted him with. Note the shift in narrative as newspaper headlines appear to interrupt straightforward narrative. In Chapter Eight, Bloom gets hungry and decides to lunch at Davey Byrnes's pub. The dominant motifs are related to food and eating. Bloom continues to wander, thinking about birth and family life, Molly, her previous lovers, and his own past. He is handed a religious pamphlet, sees Stephen's sister Dilly in the street, feeds some seagulls with cakes he has purchased, then starts noticing and thinking about advertising. Bloom meets Mrs. Breen, sort of an old flame, and sympathizes with her because of her "cracked" husband. (He had earlier sympathized with women's lot in general when thinking about families — "Life with hard labor.") He learns that a mutual acquaintance, Mrs. Purefoy, is in the maternity hospital. In Chapter Nine, at the National Library, in the office of the director, Stephen, A.E. (the pseudonym of noted Irish man of letters, George Russell), John Eglinton, and Lyster the librarian discuss Shakespeare. The others mock Stephen for his youthful enthusiasm for complex theories of literary creation. A.E. is a Platonist (an idealist), and mocks all readings of Shakespeare that suppose that Hamlet is a real person. After some banter about the Dublin literati, A.E. leaves and Stephen begins to expound his theory (it is a theory that must chart a course between the idealism of A.E. and the simple-minded, literal approach of Mulligan in order to define the ways in which art [the ideal] and life [the material] interact). Chapter Ten takes place at about 3:00 p.m. on the streets of Dublin. It's made up of eighteen small episodes, which makes it a sort of doubling of the book itself (which has eighteen chapters). In these mini-episodes, we meet Father Conmee, the Dedalus sisters, and Stephen (who, at the sight of one of his sisters, is wracked with guilt because she is so obviously in poor financial straits and he is doing nothing to help her), a one-legged sailor, and an arm that throws a coin and belongs to Molly Bloom. We also meet Blazes Boylan, and a host of other characters. In Chapter Eleven, it is about 4:00 in the afternoon, nearly time for Boylan's assignation with Molly. We are at The Concert Room Saloon in the posh Ormond Hotel. The barmaids at the Ormond Hotel see Bloom pass by. Simon Dedalus, Stephen's father, is there, and he turns his attention to the piano, which has just been tuned by the blind stripling. Bloom is elsewhere, buying paper. Boylan enters. Bloom spots his car outside and also enters with a friend, Ritchie Goulding. Boylan leaves, on his way to meet Molly. Simon sings, and Bloom thinks of Molly. In Chapter Twelve, it is nearly 5:00 and the locale shifts to Barney Kiernan's pub, where Bloom is going to meet Martin Cunningham and discuss the affairs of the Dignam family. The unnamed narrator (a debt collector) chats with Joe Hynes, and they meet the Citizen, a fierce nationalist with a dog called Garryowen, who does not take kindly to Bloom. Several characters enter the pub, including Bloom, behind whose back the Citizen starts throwing insults. Chapter Thirteen takes place at 8:00 p.m. Cissy Caffrey, her twin brothers, and her friends Edy Boardman and Gerty MacDowell (who sits a little apart), are on the Sandymount Strand. Gerty is impatient with the boys and their noise and mess, as well as her friends, who are a little common, and she daydreams at length about herself, her romantic aspirations, and her spiritual strivings. The twins kick their ball to Bloom, who is also on the beach, and Gerty weaves him into her thoughts (she notices that he is in mourning and constructs a tragic but romantic tale around him). Cissy cockily goes to ask Bloom the time, but his watch has stopped. A fireworks display begins. Her friends run along the beach, but Gerty stays near Bloom and leans back to watch the fireworks (she knows that men can be excited by immodest women, and she is allowing Bloom to see up her skirt). When she leaves, Bloom notices that she has a limp, and we learn that he has masturbated. In Chapter Fourteen, at 10:00, Bloom enters The National Maternity Hospital to check on the condition of Mina Purefoy, who went into labor in Chapter Eight. To reinforce the theme of childbearing, Joyce delivers a running analogy between the development of the English language and the gestation of an infant. While at the hospital, Bloom sees Stephen carousing with other young men and worries that doing so will spill and waste the seed of his talent. In Chapter Fifteen, it is midnight at Bella Cohen's brothel on Tyrone Street. This chapter is a series of fantastic events, partially the result of drunkenness on Steven's part, partially due to hallucinations induced by guilt and remorse on Bloom's part. Stephen and Lynch stagger in drunk and are mocked by the hangers-on and patrons of the place. Bloom follows, events and characters (Gerty, Molly, his father, and his mother) stimulating his mind and sense of guilt in a hallucinatory fashion. Bloom is arrested for committing an unnamed nuisance and undergoes a protracted trial in which he never knows for certain what the charges are. His identity constantly changes as characters from his past and personifications of perverse desires enter the court. Bloom speaks with one of the whores, Zoe Higgins, who knows where Stephen is. When Bloom finds him, Stephen, in his drunkenness, is attempting to settle his bill. Bloom ensures that he isn't cheated. The ghost of Stephen's mother appears, Stephen breaks the chandelier, and they end up on the street. A fight with some English privates (he has allegedly insulted the King) leaves Stephen prostrate on the pavement. The police appear, but Corny Kelleher and Bloom smooth things over. Bloom gazes at the unconscious Stephen and experiences a vision of his dead son, Rudy. The remaining three chapters, may be seen as Ulysses' homecoming to Ithaca. These segments cover the following events from The Odyssey: the hero's return, his slaying of the treacherous suitors of his faithful wife Penelope, and his joyful reunion with her. In Chapter Sixteen, it is 1:00 at a cabman's shelter. Bloom and Stephen drink coffee. A number of minor characters appear, and Stephen and Bloom interact with them. Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly, the implication being that Stephen's talents might be used to further Molly's career (and thus oust Boylan from her affections). They leave and discuss music as they walk. In Chapter Seventeen, it is 2:00 in the morning at the Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street. The narrative style is in the dry, question-and-answer style of the catechism. Stephen and Bloom are brought together for the last time here. Stephen seeks a father, Bloom seeks a son. At the same time, each of them is individual, yet harmoniously joined. In the text, they are united by a word play, becoming "Stoom and Blephen," but their union or reconciliation is ephemeral. They urinate in the garden, Bloom invites Stephen to stay, Stephen declines and leaves. In Chapter Eighteen, called "Molly's Soliloquy," Molly is in bed, just on the cusp of sleep. The entire chapter is from Molly's point of view, revealing Molly's thoughts. She is thinking about her husband, her meeting with Boylan earlier that day (in that very bed), her past, her hopes. Among other things, she suspects Bloom of having an affair, she thinks of woman's lot in the games of courting and mating, she thinks of her lovers, and she longs for a glamorous life. She thinks of beauty and ugliness, and her thoughts are interrupted by a train whistle. She thinks of her past life in Gibraltar and laments the drabness of her present. She thinks about her health and her daughter, she thinks about her visits to the doctor, and muses about Stephen. Her thoughts turn to Rudy and Bloom. She thinks of humiliating her husband, she recalls the time when she and Bloom first made love, letting the reader see she clearly prefers Bloom to Boylan. Punctuation, selection, comment, things usually associated with authorial control, are missing. Those familiar with The Odyssey will see the ironic comparison between Molly Bloom and with Penelope, who uses her knowledge of the construction of hers and Ulysses' bed to confirm the identity of her long-absent husband. This chapter begins and ends with the affirmative Yes. The yeses represent Molly's ongoing optimism to life in general, punctuating the choices she has made and the memories she has revisited during the entire soliloquy. The yesses also represent Joyce's belief that women are a positive life force, a notion he was at pains to demonstrate in this remarkable soliloquy. The key here is to be found in Molly's ultimate decision to serve Bloom breakfast in bed tomorrow. |
In the Shadow of a Gunman, 1923
Originally titled “On the Run,” it was the fifth play Sean O’Casey wrote but the first to be produced. The comic-tragic play is set in the tenement slums of Dublin in 1920 amidst guerrilla fighting between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the the British police force.The plot concerns the poet Donal Davoren, whose neighbors think he is an IRA hero. He shares an apartment with the peddler Seumus Shields. One day Mr. Maguire, another peddler and a real IRA gunman, leaves a briefcase containing explosives with them. When Maguire is shot and the Black and Tans raid the apartment, the pair are saved by Minnie Powell, an admirer of Davoren, who removes the case but is captured. Ironically, she is killed when the IRA ambushes the police vehicle that is transporting her to prison. |
Dymer, 1926
Dymer follows the adventures of its titular protagonist from his birth in a totalitarian state, mockingly referred to as 'The Perfect City', to the events leading to his death at the hands of a monster he begat. From the opening, Dymer grows to the age of nineteen under the control of the state, until, under the influence of spring and the sight of a songbird, he rises in his lecture-hall and murders the aged lecturer before his class, then leaves the stunned civilians behind as he wanders outside the city. Dymer casts off his clothing along with civilization, wandering in the forests until he comes upon an empty mansion with food prepared. After dressing himself again with finer clothing, and feasting alone at a banquet table, Dymer sleeps with an unseen female figure who comes to him in the darkness of the mansion. Upon awakening, Dymer steps outside of the palace and wanders blissfully in the woods. Returning to the palace in search of his lover, he finds every entry barred by a hideous old she-monster. After pleading with her to 'yield but one inch; once only from your law', Dymer approaches the woman with intent to fight his way past her. What happens at this point is uncertain, except that Dymer emerges wounded from the palace and limps into the woodlands. It begins to rain that night in the woods, and Dymer encounters yet another person he cannot see in the dark, this time a wounded man. This man also hails from The Perfect City, and tells Dymer of what happened in his absence, specifically that a revolutionary named Bran used Dymer's actions and name to instill violent protest in the citizens, who then went on to sack and raze the city. Dymer is dumbfounded at this information, and stays silent in the night until the man's wounds prove fatal, then sets out again for the wilderness. Dymer encounters another individual in the wilderness, a man who uses a liquid to put himself into an extended dreaming state. Convincing Dymer that the answer to his anguish is in the dreaming world, Dymer swallows a cup of the liquid. In his hallucination, Dymer encounters his former lover from the mansion, but realizes she is monstrous. Instead of accepting this as the truth, he flees the scene as demons rise to assault him. Upon awakening, Dymer is threatened by the dreaming man, and sets off into the wilderness again. Dymer later arrives at a cemetery where he encounters an angelic guardian who tells Dymer of a horrible monster lurking about. The monster was conceived by a union between a divine being and a mortal. Realizing that the beast is his own offspring, Dymer states he must face his own son in battle. Donning the guardian's armor, he prepares to fight the monster, which ends in his own death and the beast becoming a god. |
Friends and Relations, 1931
The novel concerns two sisters, two weddings – a few months apart, and the complicated web of friends and relations that unite the families. Ten years after these two weddings, tensions held politely at bay start to unravel over the course of one fraught week. Four families: the Studdarts, Tilneys, Meggatts and Thirdmans are connected by their relationships to the two couples who marry in the early part of the novel.Laurel and Janet Studdart are the sisters, Laurel marries first, Edward Tilney – a fine upstanding young man. He is slightly anxious, worries about the scandal in his mother’s past, which blighted his childhood. Edward’s mother; Lady Elfrida had an adulterous relationship and left Edward’s father for a man who then didn’t marry her. Having gained her divorce, Lady Elfrida, glamourous, beautiful and dissolute – in not having remarried has retained the taint of scandal and impropriety which poor Edward remains ever conscious of. When Janet announces her engagement to Rodney Meggatt it causes some surprise and no little comment, there is a sense that Janet is viewed as rather less conventional than Laurel, and yet here she is making a very conventional marriage. In typical Bowen fashion, both sisters are a little hard to get a handle on, but Janet seems rather different to her sister, hers is a darker, more sophisticated beauty, Laurel is a conventional young woman, the daughter of respectable people. There is a strange awkwardness between the sisters, times when they seem unsure how to deal with each other, so many things go unsaid. Rodney is a man of large fortune, his uncle’s heir and Janet is perfect for the role of his wife, mistress of the ancestral home Batts and organiser of ladies’ committees. We sense that Janet isn’t deeply in love with Rodney, and have to wonder whether there isn’t some feeling between her and Edward that there shouldn’t be. As Janet settles into a passionless but perfectly contended country marriage, her husband it seems genuinely adores her – Laurel and Edward living in London, are rather less comfortably off. Their marriage too is happy, there is more passion here perhaps. Edward (who I couldn’t quite like) has great need of Laurel, keeping his life on an even keel – here we have Edward musing on the nature of their marriage. |
Unicorn with Silver Shoes, 1932
King Ballor's Son has everything he could wish for-except freedom and happiness. With his companions Flame of Joy and the mysterious Pooka, he embarks on a journey of discovery that carries him between the world of ancient legend and twentieth-century Ireland. Along the way, he encounters a unicorn, the dragon-like Kyelin, a gigantic cat, a lake-monster, and twentieth-century airplanes. It's a wild and magical ride. |
The Anteroom, 1934
Set in a large country home; Roseholm in rural Ireland in 1880 – it is an intense family drama of repressed emotions. In some respects, it is a rather bleak novel – there is no real joy in this story or in any of the characters, the house is one expecting death to come to it at any moment – and indeed death is a recurring theme. The novel is set over three days of the Catholic calendar: The Eve of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints and The Feast of All Souls. However, O’Brien makes her story and these characters very readable – and while not a happy novel – the ending is rather shocking, it is beautifully written and perfectly balanced – it never descends into misery. The Mulqueens are respectable, wealthy Catholic merchants, a conventional nineteenth century provincial family. Teresa Mulqueen lies dying from cancer – she is keen to try anything to live a little longer – believing herself to be needed by members of her family. Her husband Danny Mulqueen is devoted to her but bewildered and helpless by Teresa’s condition. At night Teresa is nursed by the Blue Nun, a quiet calm restful presence through the dark hours of the night. During the day nursing duties are undertaken by Nurse Cunningham, an attractive, efficient woman whose life hasn’t always been easy, and who very much appreciates living in this gracious home, where she is treated with respect, often invited into the drawing room in the evenings. Agnes is the unmarried daughter of the household, an intelligent, religiously devout young woman, who is being seen more and more as the mistress of the house. Dr William Curran who comes to the house daily to see Teresa, has started to fall in love with Agnes, and would like to marry her. Another member of the household is Reggie – the second eldest son of the Mulqueens (his elder brother is a priest, so Reggie stands as heir in his stead). Reggie is a recovering syphilitic, and so barred from marrying under normal circumstances. He is his mother’s favourite; she worries about who will care for Reggie when she is gone. Reggie is a former playboy, idle and cowardly – Nurse Cunningham’s attractiveness has not gone unnoticed by Reggie – and Agnes wonders whether the nurse has guessed about the nature of Reggie’s previous illness. As the novel opens Agnes is awaiting the arrival of her married sister Marie-Rose and brother-in-law Vincent. Teresa’s imminent death is the real reason for the couple’s arrival from Dublin, though there is to be a family dinner to mark the Eve of All Saints to which Dr Curran will also be invited. Agnes is only a couple of years younger than Marie-Rose, and the two have always been close, but Agnes is suffering terrible emotional turmoil over her sister’s arrival. For, Agnes secretly but passionately loves Vincent – she knows the marriage is in some trouble too. The situation would be difficult and emotional enough, but for a woman who adores her sister and who holds the strong religious convictions that she does it is even worse. She believes she is risking the death of her soul. Agnes is made aware that Willian Curran loves her, marriage to him would be conventional and provide her with children and things to do – but Vincent has her heart – and we soon see he feels just the same. Agnes is ridden with guilt, and her emotional turmoil is palpable. Meanwhile Nurse Cunningham is taking a more pragmatic approach to potential marriage. Having begun to draw closer to Reggie Mulqueen their flirting not gone unnoticed by his concerned sister – Nurse Cunningham sees a way to secure her future. Reggie needs someone to care for him, and though not able to enter into a conventional marriage – a marriage of convenience and companionship would ensure he has the care that Teresa so fears he will lack with her passing. There is a lot that goes unspoken in this novel, a lot of emotion that exists beneath the surface of this conventional family. Agnes faces a terrible battle between her heart and her soul. |
Full House, 1934
he story of a decidedly dysfunctional family of Anglo-Irish landowners who live in a grand mansion, Silverue. The father is Julian, quiet, academic, ineffectual, and besotted with his wife, the terrifying Lady Bird. Lady Bird, serially adulterous, obsessed with her appearance, rules the household with a mixture of bullying and cruelty, and believes, quite mistakenly, that her children adore her. But teenage Sheena, in love with a neighbor Rupert who she hopes to marry, despises her mother and can't wait to get away. Her older brother John, who turns up at the start of the novel recovering from a serious mental breakdown, is the apple of his mother's eye, and plays along with her fantasy that they are twin souls for the sake of some peace and quiet. Little Mark, a beautiful, strong willed child, manages to go his own way, despite the best efforts of his sad little governess Miss Parker, who is treated more or less like a slave by Lady Bird. On a visit to the house comes beautiful divorced Eliza, an old friend of the family. She has always been in love with Julian, but though he is very fond of her and they have a good understanding, she knows she can't compete with his adoration of Lady Bird. The story, which takes place over a few weeks in the summer, is mainly focused on Eliza, who, not being a family member, is able to stand back and observe the complex and frequently painful interactions that go on in the house. There's little she can do to help, but she does take an important part in helping John to stabilize his mental state and ends by feeling pleased to have done so, even though at a small sacrifice herself. But we also follow Sheena's intense romance with Rupert, which is violently scuppered by some information she is given by Rupert's trouble making sister Silene. Luckily Eliza is able to put this right, though at some probable cost to Lady Bird's relationship with her daughter and with her husband. There's nothing she can do for the 'little bearded governess', Miss Parker, who suffers agonies over her disfiguring facial hair and who falls deeply in love with Nick, the boat-owning handyman. |
At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939
The main plot of At Swim-Two-Birds tells the story of an unnamed student who lives with his uncle in Dublin while studying literature. Much to his uncle’s annoyance, the student spends most of his time locked away in his room. In addition to occasionally attending lectures and regularly drinking large quantities of alcohol with his friends, the student is writing a novel. He asserts his beliefs about how literature should operate, referencing his knowledge of ancient Irish folk stories to demonstrate different styles of storytelling. The characters he invents provide the interconnected strands of the rest of the narrative. The student describes three plots he could use to introduce his novel. The first story involves a Pooka (a type of shapeshifting spirit from Irish folklore) named Fergus MacPhellimey. The second involves a young man named John Furriskey who is a fictional character in a novel written by a man named Dermot Trellis. The third story involves Finn Mac Cool, a hero from traditional Irish folklore. The student wants to begin his novel with all three stories because he doesn’t believe that novels should be limited to only one beginning. The student’s life becomes the novel’s framing device. His uncle criticizes him for spending so long in his room rather than at the university. The uncle, who is unmarried, is a clerk at a Dublin brewery. He considers himself an upstanding Christian man and is careful to ensure that he maintains his reputation in the community. He worries that his nephew’s laziness reflects poorly on his character. The student resents these criticisms but admits that he spends so long in his room that he has acquired a distinct smell. Any time that he does leave the house, the student frequents pubs with his friends and drinks to the point of making himself sick. Occasionally, he works on his novel and reads excerpts to his friends. As the student reads from his manuscript, the three stories become intertwined. John Furriskey realizes that he was born as an adult man because he was created by Trellis. Now, Trellis has gathered all his fictional creations in Dublin’s Red Swan Hotel so that he can keep an eye on them. When Trellis is awake, the characters must follow the instructions that he lays down in the cheap Western novels he writes. This means that men like Furriskey must commit crimes per Trellis’s instructions. Shortly after coming into being, Furriskey meets two other characters named Paul Shanahan and Antony Lamont. Like Furriskey, they exist at Trellis’s mercy and resent the author’s control over their lives. They begin to plot against Trellis. They use a sleeping draught to make Trellis spend increasingly more time asleep, which allows them to live their lives as they please. Lamont and Shanahan use their free time to go out drinking, while Furriskey settles down with a woman and gets married. He prefers the domestic life with his wife to the lurid criminal activities that Trellis makes him undertake. Meanwhile, Trellis creates a female character named Sheila Lamont. He plans for Furriskey to seduce Sheila but is so taken with the beautiful character he created that he rapes and impregnates her. Sheila gives birth to a boy named Orlick but dies in childbirth. Fergus the Pooka meets a fairy named the Good Fairy, and they travel together to Dublin. The two characters wrestle for influence over Orlick’s life. On the way to the Red Swan, they meet the other characters, including Finn Mac Cool and Mad Sweeny. After a game of cards, Fergus wins the right to influence Orlick’s life. Orlick seems to inherit his father’s talent for fiction. The other characters persuade Orlick to take revenge against his father by writing a new novel to trap Trellis inside. They use Orlick’s writing to inflict substantial pain and punishment on Trellis; eventually, they decide to put Trellis on trial for the influence he has held over their lives. Just as Trellis’s trial reaches its climax, however, the student pauses the narrative. He returns home from university after passing all his exams. He tells his uncle the good news and is surprised by his uncle’s sincere congratulations and praise. The student then returns to his story: A maid in the hotel burns Trellis’s writing by mistake, freeing him from the trial and the judgment of his own creations. |
Autumn Journal, 1939
Written between August and December 1938, this is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months and his feelings of the inevitability of war; the trivia of everyday life set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain. |
Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, 1939
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work. |
The Problem of Pain, 1940
As Lewis states in the Preface of The Problem of Pain, the work is an attempt to “solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering” . In theological terms, this is called theodicy, the presence of evil and suffering in a world created by a benevolent God. Attempts to reconcile God’s goodness with the evil and suffering in the world predate even the earliest Christian communities; indeed, much of the Old Testament deals directly with the Israelites’ desire to make the presence of both suffering and divine goodness make sense. After the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, this need only intensified, as the earliest followers of the heralded Messiah sought to understand how the Son of God could have fallen into the hands of vengeful men and been tortured and killed. The theory of the Fall is a direct result of this need to reconcile God’s benevolence with the presence of earthly evil: In the creation story in Genesis, the first created man, Adam, exercises his free will to disobey God in the Garden of Eden. Because of this act of willful disobedience, Adam and his partner, Eve, are banished from Eden, and humankind is consigned to suffer forevermore as penance. It is against this backdrop that Lewis attempts to make sense of pain. In doing so, he examines the nature of God’s divine love, of man’s evil, of heaven and hell, our relationship to animals, and what role suffering plays in the lives of animals. Ultimately, Lewis’s theory about pain boils down to this: we do have free will, and we often use our will to inflict pain on one another, but an omniscient and omnipotent God could stop us from doing this. Yet God does not, which suggests that pain has a purpose. Because our ultimate purpose, as God’s created beings, is to align ourselves with God in all ways (this alignment being our source of ultimate joy), that purpose, then, must be God-directed. Pain, then, must be God’s means of forming us into the people we were created to be. It is only by suffering that we develop empathy for the suffering of others, and it is only by suffering that we learn to become the best version of ourselves. Pain, Lewis argues, is evidence of God’s profound love for us. |
Cre Na Cille, 1949
In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it—apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection. |
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, 1950 Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie are four siblings sent to live in the country with the eccentric Professor Kirke during World War II. The children explore the house on a rainy day and Lucy, the youngest, finds an enormous wardrobe. Lucy steps inside and finds herself in a strange, snowy wood. Lucy encounters the Faun Tumnus, who is surprised to meet a human girl. Tumnus tells Lucy that she has entered Narnia, a different world. Tumnus invites Lucy to tea, and she accepts. Lucy and Tumnus have a wonderful tea, but the faun bursts into tears and confesses that he is a servant of the evil White Witch. The Witch has enchanted Narnia so that it is always winter and never Christmas. Tumnus explains that he has been enlisted to capture human beings. Lucy implores Tumnus to release her, and he agrees. Lucy exits Narnia and eagerly tells her siblings about her adventure in the wardrobe. They do not believe her, however. Lucy's siblings insist that Lucy was only gone for seconds and not for hours as she claims. When the Pevensie children look in the back of the wardrobe they see that it is an ordinary piece of furniture. Edmund teases Lucy mercilessly about her imaginary country until one day when he sees her vanishing into the wardrobe. Edmund follows Lucy and finds himself in Narnia as well. He does not see Lucy, and instead meets the White Witch that Tumnus told Lucy about. The Witch Witch introduces herself to Edmund as the Queen of Narnia. The Witch feeds Edmund enchanted Turkish Delight, which gives Edmund an insatiable desire for the dessert. The Witch uses Edmund's greed and gluttony to convince Edmund to bring back his siblings to meet her. On the way back to the lamppost, the border between Narnia and our world, Edmund meets Lucy. Lucy tells Edmund about the White Witch. Edmund denies any connection between the Witch and the Queen. All Edmund can think about is his desire for the Turkish Delight. Lucy and Edmund return to Peter and Susan, back in their own world. Lucy relies on Edmund to support her story about Narnia, but Edmund spitefully tells Peter and Susan that it is a silly story. Peter and Susan are worried that Lucy is insane so they talk to Professor Kirke. The Professor shocks Peter and Susan by arguing that Lucy is telling the truth. One day the children hide in the wardrobe to avoid the housekeeper and some houseguests. Suddenly all four Pevensie children find themselves in Narnia. Lucy leads them to Tumnus's home, but a note informs them that Tumnus has been arrested on charges of treason. Lucy realized that this means the Witch knows that Tumnus spared Lucy's life, and that the Witch has captured Tumnus. Lucy implores her siblings to help her rescue Tumnus from the Witch. Guided by a friendly robin, the children wander into the woods, and meet Mr. Beaver. Mr. Beaver brings them back to his home, where he explains that the children cannot do anything to save Tumnus. The only thing the children can do is join Mr. Beaver on a journey to see Aslan a lion. Aslan appears to be a king or god figure in Narnia. The children are all pleasantly enchanted by the name Aslan, except for Edmund, who is horrified by the sound of it. Mr. Beaver, Peter, Susan, and Lucy plot to meet Aslan at the Stone Table the following day, but they soon notice that Edmund has disappeared. Meanwhile, Edmund searches for the White Witch to warn her of Aslan's arrival and of the Beavers' plan. The Witch is enraged to hear that Aslan is in Narnia and immediately begins plotting to kill the children. The Witch wants to avoid an ancient prophecy that says that four humans will someday reign over Narnia and overthrow her evil regime. The children and the Beavers, meanwhile, rush to reach the Stone Table before the Witch. As they travel, wonderful seasonal changes occur. First they meet Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, who explains that the Witch's spell of "always winter and never Christmas" has ended. The enchanted winter snow melts and the children see signs of spring. Simultaneously, the Witch drags Edmund toward the Stone Table and treats him very poorly. Once spring arrives, the Witch cannot use her sledge anymore, so she cannot reach the Stone Table before the children. When the other three Pevensies meet Aslan, they are awed by him, but they quickly grow more comfortable in his presence. They love him immediately, despite their fear. Aslan promises to do all that he can to save Edmund. He takes Peter aside to show him the castle where he will be king. As they are talking, they hear Susan blowing the magic horn that Father Christmas gave her to her, signaling that she is in danger. Aslan sends Peter to help her. Arriving on the scene, Peter sees a wolf attacking Susan, and stabs it to death with the sword given him by Father Christmas. Aslan sees another wolf vanishing into a thicket, and sends his followers to trail it, hoping it will lead them to the Witch. The Witch is preparing to kill Edmund as the rescue party arrives. Aslan and his followers rescue Edmund, but are unable to find the Witch, who disguises herself as part of the landscape. Edmund is happy to see his siblings, as he has accepted that the Witch is evil. The next day, the Witch and Aslan speak and the Witch demands Edmund's life because she says that Edmund is a traitor. The Witch says that according to the Deep Magic of Narnia, a traitor life's is forfeit to the Witch. Aslan does not deny this, and he secretly reaches a compromise with her. The Witch appears very pleased, while Aslan seems pensive and depressed. The following night, Susan and Lucy observe Aslan grow increasingly gloomy and sad. The sisters are unable to sleep, and they notice that Aslan has disappeared. Susan and Lucy leave the pavilion to search for Aslan. When they find Aslan, he tells them they can stay until he tells them they must leave. Together, Aslan, Susan, and Lucy walk to the Stone Table, where Aslan tells them to leave. Susan and Lucy hide behind some bushes and watch the Witch and a horde of her followers torment, humiliate, and finally kill Aslan. The Witch explains that Aslan sacrificed his life for Edmund. Susan and Lucy stay with Aslan's dead body all night. In the morning, they hear a great cracking noise, and are astounded to see the Stone Table broken. Aslan has disappeared. Suddenly Susan and Lucy hear Aslan's voice from behind him. Aslan has risen from the dead. Aslan carries the girls to the Witch's castle, where they free all the prisoners who have been turned to stone. Aslan, Susan, and Lucy charge join the battle between Peter's army and the Witch's troops. Peter and his troops are exhausted. Fortunately, Aslan swiftly kills the Witch and Peter's army then defeats the Witch's followers. Aslan knights Edmund, who has atoned for his sin of siding with the Witch. The children ascend to the thrones at Cair Paravel, the castle in Narnia. Aslan subsequently disappears. The children eventually become adults and reign over Narnia for many years. One day, in a hunt for a magical white stag, they arrive at the lamppost that had marked the border between Narnia and our world. The Pevensies tumble back out of the wardrobe to our world. No time has passed, and they return to Professor Kirke's house as children. The foursome tells Professor Kirke about their adventure, and the Professor assures them that they will return to Narnia again some day. |
Waiting for Godot, 1952
The play consists of conversations between Vladimir and Estragon, who are waiting for the arrival of the mysterious Godot, who continually sends word that he will appear but who never does. They encounter Lucky and Pozzo, they discuss their miseries and their lots in life, they consider hanging themselves, and yet they wait. Often perceived as being tramps, Vladimir and Estragon are a pair of human beings who do not know why they were put on earth; they make the tenuous assumption that there must be some point to their existence, and they look to Godot for enlightenment. Because they hold out hope for meaning and direction, they acquire a kind of nobility that enables them to rise above their futile existence. |
The Quare Fellow, 1954
A tragicomedy concerning the reactions of jailers and prisoners to the imminent hanging of a condemned man (the “Quare Fellow”), the play is an explosive statement on capital punishment and prison life. The play is set in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin. The anti-hero of the play, The Quare Fellow, is never seen or heard; he functions as the play's central conceit. He is a man condemned to die on the following day, for an unmentioned crime. Whatever it is, it revolts his fellow inmates far less than that of The Other Fellow, a very camp, almost Wildean, gay man. The Quare Fellow takes place in Mountjoy Prison during the early 1950s. There are three generations of prisoners in Mountjoy including boisterous youngsters who can irritate both other inmates and the audience and the weary old lags Neighbor and "methylated martyr" Dunlavin. The first act is played out in the cramped area outside five cells and is comedic. After the interval, the pace slows considerably and the play becomes much darker, as the time for the execution approaches. The focus moves to the exercise yard and to the workers who are digging the grave for the soon-to-be-executed Quare Fellow. The taking of a man's life is examined from many different angles: his fellow prisoners of all hues, the great and the good and the prison officers. The play is a grimly realistic portrait of prison life in Ireland in the 1950s, and a reminder of the days in which homosexuality was illegal and the death penalty relatively common (35 people were executed between 1923 and 1954, about one every 10½ months). The play is based on Behan's own prison experiences, and highlights the perceived barbarity of capital punishment, then in use in Ireland. The play also attacks the false piety in attitudes to sex, politics and religion. In 1962, the play was developed into a movie. |
The Barstol Boy, 1958
An autobiographical book by Brendan Behan. The story depicts a young, fervently idealistic Behan, who loses his naïveté over the three years of his sentence to a juvenile borstal, softening his radical Irish republican stance and warming to his British fellow prisoners. From a technical standpoint, the novel is chiefly notable for the art with which it captures the lively dialogue of the Borstal inmates, with all the variety of the British Isles' many subtly distinctive accents intact on the page. Ultimately, Behan demonstrated by his skillful dialogue that working class Irish Catholics and English Protestants actually had more in common with one another through class than they had supposed, and that alleged barriers of religion and ethnicity were merely superficial and imposed by a fearful middle class. The book was banned in Ireland for unspecified reasons in 1958; the ban expired in 1970. In 1967, the story debuted as a play, adapted by Frank McMahon and staged at the Abbey Theater. In 2000, it was adapted into a movie. |
The Hostage, 1958
The play, which is considered Behan’s masterwork, employs ballads, slapstick, and fantasies to satirize social conditions and warfare. In the play, an English soldier is held hostage in a brothel by members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who hope thus to prevent the execution of one of their own men. The Hostage depicts the events leading up to the planned execution of an 18-year-old IRA member in a Belfast jail, accused of killing a Royal Ulster Constabulary policeman. Like the protagonist of The Quare Fellow, the audience never sees him. The action of the play is set in a very odd house of ill-repute on Nelson Street, Dublin, owned by a former IRA commandant. The hostage of the title is Leslie Williams, a young and innocent Cockney British Army soldier taken hostage at the border with Northern Ireland and held in the brothel, brought among the vibrant but desperately unorthodox combination of prostitutes, revolutionaries and general low characters inhabiting the place. During the course of the play, a love story develops between Leslie and Teresa, a young girl, resident of the house. Both are orphans and foreign to the city. Teresa being from Ballymahon, County Longford. The play ends with news of the hanging in Belfast and armed Gardaí raid the brothel. Leslie is killed in the ensuing gunfight, by Garda bullets. In the finale his corpse rises and sings "The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling". |
The Country Girls, 1960
Caithleen "Cait/Kate" Brady and Bridget "Baba" Brennan are two young Irish country girls who have spent their childhood together. As they leave the safety of their convent school in search of life and love in the big city, they struggle to maintain their somewhat tumultuous relationship. Cait, dreamy and romantic, yearns for true love, while Baba just wants to experience the life of a single girl. Although they set out to conquer the world together, as their lives take unexpected turns, Cait and Baba must ultimately learn to find their own way. The book was adapted into a film in 1983. |
Hospital Station, 1962
Sector general is the home of many strange creatures, including humans! it is a vast sectionalized hospital, set up in space to care for all kinds of extra-terrestrials. Each section has a different atmosphere and habitat to cater for the many different species.. all the problems of the staff and patients are in this book. For example, how to design a spacesuit for a surgeon with eight legs? |
The Old Boys, 1964
The story concerns a group of elderly men on the board of a society for the old boys of an unnamed English public school and the power politics and old rivalries that come into play during the election of a new president for the Old Boys Association. The old boys themselves have developed various ways of coping with retirement and loneliness and life’s disappointments but they all take a keen interest in their old school, none more so than Jaraby, who desires and expects to be elected as the new president, but is nervous about the possibility of being opposed by Nox, his former rival. The book earned William Trevor critical acclaim and was the recipient of Britain’s Hawthornden Prize. Its success led Trevor to move to Devon, England, and write full-time. |
Death of a Naturalist, 1966
A collection of poems that was Sean Heaney's first major published volume and includes ideas that he had presented at meetings of The Belfast Group, a poetry group in Norther Ireland. Death of a Naturalist won the Cholmondeley Award, the Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The work consists of 34 short poems and is largely concerned with childhood experiences and the formulation of adult identities, family relationships, and rural life. The collection begins with one of Heaney's best-known poems, "Digging", and includes the acclaimed "Death of a Naturalist" and "Mid-Term Break". |
Loves of Cass McGuire, 1967
After fifty-two years of romping as a saloon waitress in America, Cass McGuire returns to Ireland. But her brother and his family to whom she turns have no need for her, and ship her off to a rest haven for old dreamers. Nothing is as Cass envisioned it. She begins living through past memories. Although her memories now have a bitter taste, we know that in time and with the telling they will be suffused with the aura of pleasant dreams. It follows her lonely struggle to re-discover the home she's dreamt of all her life and her eventual surrender to the make believe of Eden House, the boarding house her brother sent her. The role of the irascible Cass McGuire was created on Broadway by Ruth Gordon. In 1975, the play was adapted into a TV movie. |
Eva Trout or Changing Scenes, 1968
Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel, epitomizes her bold exploration of the territory between the comedy of manners and cutting social commentary. The novel opens with Eva's excursion to a lake in the neighbourhood of Larkins where she is staying as a paying guest since her father's death. The lady of Larkins, Iseult Arble, is a former teacher of Eva's whom Eva is very fond of during the school days. However, Eva does not presently fancy the Arbles' guardianship and often travels to the Danceys' house where she can enjoy the company of Catrina, Henry, Andrew and Louise Dancey. In the first section, readers get to know the two schools Eva went to as a young girl. The first school, owned by her father Willy Trout and administered by Constantine's lover Kenneth, is one of the rare places where Eva feels at home but it also has a traumatic effect on her insofar as Eva's roommate Elsinore attempts to commit suicide by drowning herself in the lake. It is in the second school that Eva meets Iseult Smith from whom she receives the attention she has craved all her life. As Eva approaches her 25th birthday after which she will be able to access the fortune her father left behind, both the Arbles and her legal guardian Constantine Ormeau question her capacity to take care of herself and her wealth. To escape the confining guardianship of both Iseult and Constantine, Eva rents a house in Kent. In a conversation with Iseult at Cathay, Eva tells her that she is to give birth to her baby and flees to America. By Eva's departure time, Iseult already suspects a sexual relationship between her husband Eric and Eva and she cannot help thinking that the father of Eva's child is Eric. This suspicion leads to the dissolution of the Arbles' household. The second part of the novel is infused with Eva's reconsideration of her past in her quest of becoming who she is. After her return from the USA with her child Jeremy, a boy both "deaf and dumb," Eva falls in love with one of the children she used to hang out with at the Danceys', Henry Dancey, who is now a student at Cambridge University. Although Henry does not feel the same way about Eva in the first place, on their mock hymeneal departure at Victoria station, Henry declares his sincere love for Eva. This unexpected declaration, which makes Eva shed tears of joy, is immediately spoiled by Jeremy who accidentally shoots Eva killing her instantaneously at Victoria Station. |
Ratman's Notebook, 1968
The book is set as a series of journal entries, where the unnamed narrator goes back and forth between his life with the rats and his work, in a low-level job at a company that his father used to own. In these entries, the young man dwells on the hatred he feels for his boss, the stresses of caring for his aging mother, a nameless girl he becomes fond of and above all the families of rats which he has befriended and which he uses for company and companionship. Eventually, the young man trains the rats to do things for him. His favorite is an Agouti Berkshire rat (normal wild rat color, only with white markings on the belly, who in the film adaptations was portrayed as a white rat) which he calls "Socrates". A rival to Socrates is "Ben", a large rat that the narrator grows to despise when it refuses to listen to him. The young man uses the rats to wreak revenge upon his boss and havoc among the local shop owners and home owners, whom he has robbed with the aid of his rats. His "ratman" robberies become a newspaper sensation in the area and the man makes quite a stash of money for himself and for the girl he is courting at work. After his mother dies, the young man inherits the house. When Socrates is killed at the young man's workplace by his boss Mr. Jones, he is forced to use Ben in his criminal escapades. He devises a plan to have the rats kill Mr. Jones, avenging Socrates' death. He then abandons all the rats at the scene of the crime, ridding himself of that part of his life. Eventually, as his relationship with the office girl moves towards marriage, Ben and his colony return, chasing the girl out of the house and trapping the young man in the attic. The book ends with the young man madly scribbling in his journal about the rats gnawing away at the attic door. It was the basis for the 1971 film Willard, its 1972 sequel Ben. |
Strumpet City, 1969
Set in Dublin during the Lockout of 1913, Strumpet City is a panoramic novel of city life. It embraces a wide range of social milieux, from the miseries of the tenements to the cultivated, bourgeois Bradshaws. It introduces a memorable cast of characters: the main protagonist, Fitz, a model of the hard-working, loyal and abused trade unionist; the isolated, well-meaning and ineffectual Fr O'Connor; the wretched and destitute Rashers Tierney. In the background hovers the enormous shadow of Jim Larkin, Plunkett's real-life hero. Strumpet City's popularity derives from its realism and its naturalistic presentation of traumatic historical events. There are clear heroes and villians. The book is informed by a sense of moral outrage at the treatment of the locked-out trade unionists, the indifference and evasion of the city's clergy and middle class and the squalor and degradation of the tenement slums. |
The Dregs of the Day, 1970
The final published work by the renowned Máirtín Ó Cadhain, this novella follows a widower as he attempts to plan his wife’s funeral arrangements without money, direction, or whiskey. Thrown into a desert of unknowing, he knows not where to turn or what to do. In a poignant meditation on regret, possibilities, maybes, and avoidances, the author portrays a man hopelessly watching as the people in the world go about their lives around him. With black humor sprinkled throughout, the book, a profound look at psychic loss and puzzlement by a writer at the height of his powers, illustrates Ó Cadhain’s conviction that tragedy and comedy are inextricably connected. |
Nightspawn, 1971
‘They took everything from me. Everything.’ So says the central character of Nightspawn, John Banville’s elusive, first novel, in which the author rehearses now familiar attributes: his humour, ironies, and brilliant knowing. In the arid setting of the Aegean, Ben White indulges in an obsessive quest to assemble his ‘story’ and to untangle his relationships with a cast of improbable figures. Banville’s subversive, Beckettian fiction embraces themes of freedom and betrayal, and toys with an implausible plot, the stuff of an ordinary ‘thriller’ shadowed by political intrigue. In this elaborate artifact, Banville’s characters ‘sometimes lose the meaning of things, and everything is just . . . funny’. There begins their search for ‘the magic to combat any force.’ |
How Many Miles to Babylon?, 1974
As a child Alec, heir to the big house and only son of a bitter marriage, formed a close friendship with Jerry, a village boy who shared his passion for horses. In 1914 both enlisted in the British Army - Alec goaded by his beautiful, cold mother to fight for King and Country, Jerry to learn his trade for the Irish Nationalist cause. |
The Leavetaking, 1974
A day, crucial and cathartic, in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who has returned to Ireland after a year's sabbatical in London where he married an American divorcee. As a result he now faces certain dismissal by the school authorities. Moving from the earliest memories of both the man and the woman, the novel recreates their breaking of the shackles of guilt and duty into the acceptance of a fulfilling adult love. |
The Children of Dynmouth, 1976
The plot follows Timothy Gedge, a socially inept yet intrusive teenage boy as he wanders around the dull seaside town of Dynmouth, spying on the town's residents. At first this behaviour is seen as merely annoying, even comical, until people begin to realise that his purpose may not be as innocent as initially thought. |
The Speckled Bird: an Autobiographical Novel, 1976
The Speckled Bird is an autobiographical novel by W. B. Yeats. The novel has been written in four versions, between 1896 - 1903, and Yeats has given this name to the last version, taken from the Old Testament, Book of Jeremiah, chapter 12, verse 9: "Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her; come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field, come to devour." The novel was never published during Yeats's lifetime. The first version, written in early 1897, is basically a tale of idealized love, informed by Plato's thought and a highly valuable work of art. It is set in the Aran Islands, where the young hero's peculiar father has built a house and keeps the customary prayer hours until, after the Virgin Mary appears in a vision, he dedicates himself solely to visions. A visit by the beautiful young heroine fills the hero with romantic love that accompanies the mystical reverence he has bequeathed from his father, although the hero himself does not see any Marian apparition, in contrast to his father's ones. The second version, whose name is The Lilies of the Lord, was written probably in the first half of 1897 and the summer and fall of 1898. It has eighty-five extant pages and is now missing only one page. Its location is a remote estate in the west of Ireland, but on the mainland rather than the Aran Islands. The father has a private chapel and, as in the earlier version, sees the Virgin Mary in visions. The visit of the young heroine is given expanded treatment. The son does not have any visions in either of the two earliest versions and there is no mention of ritual magic or occultism. Yeats probably did not do much work on the novel in 1899. The untitled third version, to which Yeats referred in his letters as "Michael," the hero's name in all versions of the novel, has 285 extant holograph pages, treble the length of its predecessors. The setting for the 1900 version is still on a remote estate in the west of Ireland, but the father is now only a minor character who, after spending his youth in art schools and womanizing on the Continent, is an irreligious recluse. The son, instead of the father, sees a vision of the Virgin Mary. The opening one-third of this 1900 version is an expansion of the two earlier versions, with considerable new attention given to the young hero's vision. The remainder of the 1900 version takes the hero to London where he and an occultist, who is closely modeled on MacGregor Mathers, begin to plan a mystical order. News that the heroine has married someone else overwhelms the hero, and, at the suggestion of the occultist, he goes to Paris to copy occult manuscripts, hoping that the change of scene will comfort him. Soon afterwards he receives alarming reports that the occultist has usurped control of their mystical order and has altered the rituals so that they no longer reflect the hero's artistic ideals. The 1900 version breaks off after the hero visits a bizarre old occultist who sunbathes nude in a coffin and rants about a supposed plot by Jesuits to subvert the mystical order. In the final version, The Speckled Bird is concerned with the artist’s quest for spiritual truth. The novel begins in the west of Ireland with Michael Hearne’s gradual discovery of the existence of a spiritual world through meditation, dream, trance, and vision, and his awakening to the spiritual significance of myth, art, folklore, nature, and woman. Later in London he attempts to found a mystical order which would unite religious, artistic, and natural emotions, or, to use the Platonic terms, truth, beauty, and love. He gathers a group of artists and mystics around him to help devise rituals which would evoke the supernatural, and the objects and instruments of which would embody artistic beauty. The novel concludes with the hero at a railway station in Paris, setting out for the East, now to Arabia, now to Persia, still driven by his dominant aim, and convinced that in the East he would surely find a doctrine that would “reconcile religion with the natural emotions and explain these emotions” |
The Sea, The Sea, 1978
The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Murdoch's novel exposes the motivations that drive her characters – the vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Charles Arrowby, its central figure, decides to withdraw from the world and live in seclusion in a house by the sea. While there, he encounters his first love, Mary Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since his love affair with her as an adolescent. Although she is almost unrecognizable in old age, and outside his theatrical world, he becomes obsessed by her, idealizing his former relationship with her and attempting to persuade her to elope with him. His inability to recognize the egotism and selfishness of his own romantic ideals is at the heart of the novel. After the farcical and abortive kidnapping of Mrs. Fitch by Arrowby, he is left to mull over her rejection in a self-obsessional and self-aggrandizing manner over the space of several chapters. "How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality... Yes of course I was in love with my own youth... Who is one's first love?" |
Call My Brother Back, 1979
It is 1918 and 13-year-old Colm MacNeill is living happily on Rathlin Island, when his security is suddenly shattered by the death of his father. The loss of the family breadwinner forces the MacNeills to leave their island home for Belfast, where they become caught up in conflict. |
Lamb, 1980
Brother Sebastian, who works in a Roman Catholic institution for troubled boys on the west coast of Ireland, referred to as "a finishing school for the sons of the Idle Poor" by its head, Brother Benedict. There, the Brothers teach boys to conform in a harsh, uncompromising regime which Brother Sebastian, whose real name is Michael Lamb, finds deeply distasteful. The Brothers teach the boys "a little of God and a lot of fear. When his father dies, leaving him a small legacy, the tie which kept him at the home is gone and he decides to leave and take Owen Kane, a bullied, unhappy 10-year-old boy with him. His decision is also affected by the fact that he has made a vow of poverty and Brother Benedict expects him to hand his inheritance over to the Brothers. Michael has formed an attachment to Owen. He is the youngest boy there and has been in the home for two years. Brother Benedict beats him for painting graffiti on the wall outside, because it ends with the word OK – Owen's initials – despite knowing that it was not Owen who did it. Owen comes from a broken family and a drunken, abusive father. Michael cannot see how he will survive there and wishes to give him his freedom. He secretly leaves the school and takes Owen with him to London hoping to be the boy's savior, although he knows he is committing a criminal act. They pass themselves off as father and son and move from hotel to hotel. Michael lets Owen smoke, play on gaming machines and takes him to a football match to see his favorite team Arsenal play, but Owen, an epileptic, has a fit. They have to slip away from the medical center before questions are asked. Owen sometimes prattles on and on and sometimes just sits silently. Michael feels embarrassed during the silences and recognizes that Owen controls the communication between them. As the days and weeks go by, Michael became more comfortable with the silences and they laugh a lot. As his money dwindles and news of the kidnapping reaches the English community, with Owen's picture in the newspaper, Michael finds himself running out of ideas on how to save the boy's life. About to fly back to Ireland, they come across a run down apartment. Michael returns to the hotel to find Owen in floods of tears, thinking Michael has left him. In an emotional scene, Michael tells Owen he loves him and man and boy hug and hold each other tight. Determined to save Owen from being forced to return to the home, but realizing he cannot look after the boy himself because of the frequency of the seizures and his inability on how to monitor them, Michael drowns him in the sea during Owen's next seizure, after hearing him describe the experience of a seizure as a form of joy. The drowning is portrayed as a baptism as Michael calls out to God while holding Owen under the water. Having murdered the boy, Michael tries to drown himself, but is unsuccessful. |
Other People's Worlds, 1980
What chance has a nice middle-class woman got against a determined conman? 47-year-old widow, Julia, is about to remarry, much to the delight and relief of her daughters. But her mother has suspicions about Francis which she keeps to herself. Perhaps wrongly: if she'd shared her feelings with her daughter the disaster might have been avoided. Meanwhile there are two other women who have a claim on the would-be bridegroom - and the way things are shaping up it might be one of them, rather than Julia, who comes off worst out of the situation. William Trevor's brilliant novel explores the small horrors that lie close to the surface of ordinary life. 'A constantly surprising work, pungent with the sense of evil and corruption' John Updike, New Yorker 'Trevor is a master of both language and storytelling' |
Good Behavior, 1981
Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St. Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace as their money and initiative dwindle during the 1920s. From the overweight daughter, to philandering father, a homosexual son and a cold mother the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem to lock her and her brother into ritual patterns of good behavior and social morality. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St. Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. |
Cal, 1983
Cal by Bernard Maclaverty follows the plight of eighteen-year-old Cal McCrystal in 1980s Northern Ireland. Cal's involvement in a murder sanctioned by the IRA threatens his freedom and his blossoming relationship. During the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, Cal and his father, Shamie, are the only Catholics at the Protestant Estate where they live. Cal's mother died when he was only eight, and his brother died while abroad, leaving Cal alone with his hard-nosed father. Struggling to belong somewhere, Cal is a member of the IRA along with a boy he knows from his school days, Crilly. While Shamie had gotten Cal a job at a slaughterhouse, Cal wasn't able to stomach the sight of blood and gave the job up, much to his father's annoyance. Crilly took on the job instead. On returning home one day, Cal finds a note on the door from his Protestant neighbors threatening to burn Shamie's house down. This note is the first of two, but Shamie refuses to yield to the threats, causing tension in the household. Cal sees an Italian librarian named Marcella and is attracted to her. He soon realizes that she is the widow of Robert Morton, the RUC officer Crilly killed while Cal was acting as the getaway driver for the IRA. Cal begins watching Marcella. He goes to her church a few times and visits her at the library, harboring guilt for his actions and hoping he can make amends. One day when Cal is selling some wood for Shamie, he comes upon the Mortons' farm. The elderly matriarch at the farm asks Cal to cut the wood into smaller pieces for her, and he complies. The woman, Marcella's mother-in-law, offers Cal a job digging potatoes. There, Cal hopes to see Marcella every day. Overcome with guilt over Robert's murder, Cal tries to distance himself from his IRA friends, Crilly and Skeffington. The men refuse to let him out of his job as a getaway driver, assuring him that he is in the moral right, though Cal is not convinced. On returning from the library one day, Cal finds that the Protestants have made good on their threat and his house is burning. He locates his father and the two stay at a relative's house for the night. Cal asks his father not to tell Crilly where he has gone and begins secretly living in an old cottage on Mrs. Morton's farm. After a while, someone at the farm notices him lighting a cigarette, and the Army is sent to investigate. Mrs. Morton allows Cal to stay in the cottage, as it is more convenient than having to brick the place up. Marcella begins visiting Cal at the cottage. They talk, have tea, and Marcella gives Cal some of her husband's old clothes. Cal learns that Marcella's marriage to Robert was rocky and that she feels isolated living with her in-laws. One afternoon while the pair is collecting blackberries, they hear an explosion and find a dead cow. Mrs. Morton leaves town for a week and Cal and Marcella are left alone on the farm. Marcella has Cal over to the house for dinner and they kiss for the first time. Given their ten-year age difference and the dangerous environment around Catholics and Protestants, Marcella doesn't think it is wise to continue, and she asks Cal to leave. A few days later, however, she shows up at Cal's cottage, apologizes, and initiates intimacy. Meanwhile, Cal has done a few driving jobs for Crilly and the IRA. He was the driver for a robbery, and they have recently included him in a plot to blow up the library. Worried about Marcella's safety, Cal tips off the police. Just as Crilly, Cal, and Skeffington are meeting, the police arrive. Cal manages to escape but is arrested at his cottage a few days later. Despite his intention to do so, he was never able to confess to Marcella. Though only around 100 pages, the novel focuses on some heavy themes. Isolation is a prominent theme; Cal and Shamie are isolated by their religion as Catholics in a Protestant community, and Marcella is isolated by her dependency on her in-laws. Cal separates himself from his only previous social engagement, that of the IRA, when he decides they are morally reprehensible. The book also discusses a tumultuous time in Irish history when the IRA were acting against the Protestant civilians of Northern Ireland. A bomb going off in a field and killing a cow illustrates the senseless violence the political and religious divide had caused. Crilly and Skeffington are two sides of the IRA coin, Crilly with a predilection for needless violence and Skeffington who considers himself a patriot acting for the benefit of Ireland. |
Devoted Ladies, 1984
Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months and are devoted friends - or are they? Jessica loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness; Jane is rich, silly, and drinks rather too many brandy-and-sodas. Watching from the sidelines, their friend Sylvester regrets that Jane should be 'loved and bullied and perhaps even murdered by that frightful Jessica', but decides it's none of his business. When the Irish gentleman George Playfair meets Jane, however, he thinks otherwise and entices her to Ireland where the battle for her devotion begins. |
Fighting with Shadows, 1984
Dermot Healy’s Fighting with Shadows (1984) features a broad array of technical innovations: the narrative focus shifts, temporal frames vary, and the inner and outer worlds of the characters frequently interchange, all generating a sense of a world that forever lies just out of sharp focus. Far from being a failure of observation, this registers a way of seeing that extends beyond merely linear modes of representation and is suggestive of a world that is not a neat, easily observe set of phenomena. In this, Healy’s first novel, a compelling interdependence between complex narrative experiment and deeply-felt social and political engagement with the Northern Troubles is already evident. Healy’s work has always been firmly about resistance to received forms, political fixities, social malaise, and the limits of consciousness itself – and all in a richly-textured Irish landscape. |
Echoes, 1985
Set in the fictional Irish seaside resort town of Castlebay, the novel follows the lives of several local families between the years 1950 and 1962. The primary three families act as a counterbalance to one another: the wealthy Powers, whose father is the local doctor and mother is a city girl from Dublin; the struggling O'Briens, who eke out a living from the eleven-week long summer season in their grocery-confectionery shop; and the charming but secretive Doyles, whose father runs the local photography concession. Their children's lives are guided by their social class and expectations: young David Power goes off to Dublin to earn his medical degree, following in his father's footsteps, while young Gerry Doyle stays in the town and inherits his father's business. Only Clare O'Brien seeks to advance beyond her station and go to college. With the help of a local schoolteacher who was herself a scholarship student, Clare earns scholarships to secondary school and university, and ends up at University College Dublin to pursue her degree. There she falls in love with David Power and they move in together, unbeknownst to their families; but when she becomes pregnant, they are forced to marry. They return to Castlebay so David can begin taking on his father's practice, but Clare is desperately unhappy being relegated to a second-class position in the Power family and in the town. Gerry, who has a secret passion for Clare, tries to entice her away from David but the book ends with his dramatic death and the strengthening of Clare's marriage. Subplots revolve around Clare's teacher, whose brother Sean, a priest, has married and had children with a Japanese woman but is unable to obtain a laicization from Rome; Clare's brothers, who go to work in England and one of whom ends up in jail; and upper-class summer visitors from Dublin who become involved with the locals in intimate ways. In 1988, the story was made into a TV movie. |
The Ragged Astronauts, 1987
A novel in which interplanetary travel by hot-air balloon is possible between twin planets that share the same atmosphere. The feudal residents of Land have to migrate to the nearby planet of Overland due to overexploitation of resources on their homeworld. The story is told from the perspective of nobleman Toller Maraquine who clashes with a military Prince before and during the chaotic evacuation accelerated by rioting and a global pande. |
Amongst Women, 1990
Set in the years following Ireland's War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, it is a family story centering on Michael Moran, a mercurial, disillusioned veteran of the Irish Republican Army, who terrorizes his wife and children. They exist in an uncomfortable gray area between adoring Michael and being terrified of him as he attempts to make the transition from guerilla fighter to head of a family. The book begins with Michael as an old man in failing health. His daughters care for him on the rural County Leitrim farmstead where they grew up. Though they have lives of their own away from the family farm, the daughters feel like their true place is with their father. In an attempt to boost Michael's flagging spirit and mounting health woes, the daughters reconstruct a family event from their youth, called Monaghan Day. On Monaghan Day, Michael's old friend McQuaid would visit, and the two would trade stories about their time together in the war. Though flashbacks, each female member of the Moran family reflects on Michael's life and the journey that has brought him to this crossroads. In the early 1920s, Michael Moran is an outspoken Republican advocating for a free and independent Ireland. After the wars, he lives on a farm called Great Meadow, where he raises two sons and three daughters as a widowed father. He remembers his years in the IRA as the most fulfilling and exciting of his life. Now thrust into a caretaker mode in a wild rural setting, he longs for the structure military life provided, where he knew the rules and knew who was in power. Both on the farm and within the family, power structures are forever changing, susceptible to the whims of nature and the human spirit. During a previous Monaghan Day when the family is much younger, Michael displays his natural domineering personality. He and McQuaid get into an argument when Michael refuses to acknowledge McQuaid as an authority on at least equal par with his own authority, if not more so. This is a watershed event in Michael's life. After McQuaid storms off and severs their long friendship, Michael sets out to prove just how much of an authority he really is. He starts isolating the family from the outside world and exerting greater control over the lives of each of its members. When the kids are in their teens, Michael marries Rose Brady. Against her own mother's warnings that Michael's personality will change when he's behind close doors, Rose marries him anyway. She proves to be a grounding force for the family as Michael keeps everyone on edge, and she often serves as a buffer between Michael and the kids. Even in the face of his verbal abuse, she quietly and stoically puts up with her husband's moods. Still, those moods aren't enough to turn his family away from him. Through it all, Michael's children, especially his daughters, remain devoted and respectful. This, in spite of the iron fist with which Michael rules the home. He demands attention, orders the children to follow the strict values he's laid out for them, and forces his worldview on everyone under his thumb. It isn't difficult to see where Michael's rage comes from. As his story unfolds, so too does the bloodshed Michael witnessed and participated in as a guerilla fighter in the IRA. Yet, he looks back on that period as the best time in his life, only because it was understood who had the power, what orders to follow, and who were the good guys and who were the bad. In civilian life, things are never so clearly defined. As the children grow up and leave, Michael grows even more demanding of their attention. Though the children return home from time to time to visit, Michael's loss of control over them eats away at him. Only his eldest son Luke stays away for good, and it is a departure that pierces Michael to the core. The youngest son, also named Michael, leaves the home as soon as he can. The senior Michael instead focuses his energies on his daughters, no matter where they live, even though they have also taken the only route to empowerment they had available: Escape. His daughters still find themselves wanting his approval but fearing his anger. As he ages, Michael places great emphasis on family togetherness, which may be the only thing that keeps the daughters coming back home again and again for visits—that, and the feeling of identity and purpose they find in being attentive daughters. But all of Michael's talk of family unity is ultimately nothing more than an attempt to exert his authority over his children. At the novel's end, Michael Moran dies. The family buries him under a yew tree at Great Meadow. But he will live on, too, in the hearts and minds, in the memories and moods, of his children. On some level, they will never really be free of his dominance. In 1998, the story was turned into a TV mini-series. |
Circle of Friends, 1990
The popular and prolific Irish novelist Maeve Binchy published Circle of Friends in 1990. Spanning a decade in 1950s Dublin and its surroundings, the novel is a coming-of-age story that follows the lives of several girls as they grow into young women, navigate romantic relationships, and try to come to terms with who they are as people. Using a series of shifting perspectives and a wide lens that accommodates a variety of secondary and tertiary characters with their own arcs and journeys, Binchy paints a realistic portrait of teens and twenty-somethings in the middle of the last century. Since publication, the book has been made into a well-received movie starring Minnie Driver and Chris O’Donnell. When the novel opens, we meet the two young women who will be the anchors of the “circle of friends” that will eventually grow around them: Bernadette Hogan, known as Benny, and Eve Malone. The two have grown up together in the fictional town of Knockglen, and although they are very close, their family lives are polar opposites. Benny is the daughter of warm, loving, and overprotective parents who own a clothing business – Hogan’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters. Benny is kind and outgoing, but is overly tall and overweight, which makes her feel anxious about her looks. Eve, on the other hand, is pretty and thin, but has been an orphan since infancy and has grown up in a convent raised by nuns. She does have distant aristocratic family on her mother’s side, but they are estranged from her because they look down on her mother’s marriage to a middle-class man. Benny and Eve have just graduated from school and are trying to figure out their college options. Benny’s family can afford to send her to the University College of Dublin – but they want to control her as much as possible despite her increasing independence, so they insist that she comes back home to Knockglen from Dublin every night. Meanwhile, despite the efforts of the convent Mother Superior (Mother Francis), there isn’t enough money to send Eve to college. Instead, the plan is for her to work as a servant in a Dublin convent while going to secretarial school. Unhappy with this option, Eve overcomes her resentment of the upper-class Westward family who abandoned her mother and asks her wealthy cousin Simon Westward to pay for her college education. To everyone’s surprise, he says yes. On the first day of a school, a classmate’s accidental death links Benny and Eve with a few other students, including Nan Mahon and Jack Foley. Nan was born to a working-class Dublin family and is stunningly beautiful. She has been raised by her mother to be an ambitious, status-conscious striver who wants to marry well in order to escape her family (particularly her alcoholic father). Jack is a good-looking and popular young man. This circle of friends is shocked when Jack falls in love with Benny – ostensibly, he is way out of her league. Benny’s overbearing parents are dismayed at the news. But no one is more annoyed than Sean Walsh, a smarmy and creepy young man who works in their shop as an assistant and whose plans include marrying Benny in order to inherit the family business – a plan that is completely in line with what her parents imagine for her. Nan meets Eve’s cousin Simon and is impressed by his seemingly high social position as a member of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy class (as opposed to the other characters who are all Catholic and purely Irish). Nan and Simon have a relationship and she even has sex with him – a shocking idea in the very religious society of their time. Unfortunately, what Nan doesn’t realize is that although they have been putting up appearances, Simon’s family is no longer very wealthy. (In fact, the reason he paid for Eve’s college tuition was to keep up the ruse that they have money to burn.) Rather than thinking of Nan as wife material, Simon wants to marry someone with significant wealth. Nan gets pregnant, and when she tells Simon, he dumps her and gives her money for an abortion. While this is happening, Benny’s father dies. Forced to come back to Knockglen for long periods of time to oversee the business, Benny at first plans to agree to a partnership with Sean, who claims that her father was just on the cusp of signing over half the business when he died. But then she realizes that there is something deeply off about the accounts that Sean has been keeping. It turns out that he has been embezzling funds from the company and Benny fires him. All the time that Benny spends in her small town creates a rift in her relationship with Jack, who has always acted in a way that makes it clear that he takes her for granted. After all, isn’t a girl like her lucky to be with a guy like him? Annoyed that she isn’t at his beck and call, Jack starts cheating on Benny with Nan. Nan quickly sleeps with Jack and then tells him that he is the father of her baby. In keeping with the mores of the time, Jack feels obligated to propose and he and Nan get engaged. The news shocks the friend circle and Benny feels heart-broken. At a party, Benny confronts Nan, and pieces together the truth about everything that Nan has done. In the middle of the fight, Nan falls through a glass door and is injured enough to have a miscarriage. Now that she is no longer pregnant, Jack calls off their engagement and tries to get back together with Benny. The novel ends with her realization that she deserves to be treated better than an always-available door mat, and she concludes that she no longer thinks of Jack as anything other than one of the many members in her circle of friends. |
Dancing at Lughnasa, 1990
Set in the summer of 1936, the play depicts the late summer days when love briefly seems possible for five of the Mundy sisters (Maggie, Chris, Agnes, Rose, and Kate) and the family welcomes home the frail elder brother, Jack, who has returned from a life as a missionary in Africa. However, as the summer ends, the family foresees the sadness and economic privations under which they will suffer as all hopes fade. The play takes place in early August, around the festival of Lughnasadh, the Celtic harvest festival. The play describes a bitter harvest for the Mundy sisters, a time of reaping what has been sown. The five Mundy sisters (Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rosie, and Christina), all unmarried, live in a cottage outside of Ballybeg. The oldest, Kate, is a school teacher, the only one with a well-paid job. Agnes and Rose knit gloves to be sold in town, thereby earning a little extra money for the household. They also help Maggie to keep house. Maggie and Christina (Michael's mother) have no income at all. Michael is seven years old and plays in and around the cottage. All the drama takes place in the sisters' cottage or in the yard just outside, with events from town and beyond being reported either as they happen or as reminiscence. Recently returned home after 25 years is their brother Jack, a priest who has lived as a missionary in a leper colony in a remote village called Ryanga in Uganda. He is suffering from malaria and has trouble remembering many things, including the sisters' names and his English vocabulary. It becomes clear that he has "gone native" and abandoned much of his Catholicism during his time there. This may be the real reason he has been sent home. Gerry, Michael's father, is Welsh. He is a charming yet unreliable man, always clowning. He is a travelling salesman who sells gramophones. He visits rarely and always unannounced. A radio nicknamed "Marconi", which works only intermittently, brings 1930s dance and traditional Irish folk music into the home at rather random moments and then, equally randomly, ceases to play. This leads the women into sudden outbursts of wild dancing. The poverty and financial insecurity of the sisters is a constant theme. So are their unfulfilled lives: none of the sisters has married, although it is clear that they have had suitors whom they fondly remember. There is a tension between the strict and proper behaviour demanded by the Catholic Church, voiced most stridently by the upright Kate, and the unbridled emotional paganism of the local people in the "back hills" of Donegal and in the tribal people of Uganda. There is a possibility that Gerry is serious this time about his marriage proposal to Christina. On this visit, he says he is going to join the International brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War, not from any ideological commitment but because he wants adventure. There is a similar tension here between the "godless" forces he wants to join and the forces of Franco against which he will be fighting, which are supported by the Catholic Church. The opening of a knitwear factory in the village has killed off the hand-knitted glove cottage industry that has been the livelihood of Agnes and Rose. The village priest has told Kate that there are insufficient pupils at the school for her to continue in her post in the coming school year in September. She suspects that the real reason is her brother Jack, whose heretical views have become known to the Church and have tainted her by association. There is a sense that the close home life the women/girls have known since childhood is about to be torn apart. The narrator, the adult Michael, tells us this is indeed what happens. In 1998, the play was turned into a film starring Meryl Streep, Michael Gambon and Gerald McSorley. |
The Portable Virgin, 1991
A collection of short stories that combines the formal with the miraculous, such as the film editor who edits his life. It includes various betrayed and traitorous women whose struggles are reinterpreted using a repertoire of fancy and metaphor. The characters in this fierce and witty first collection of stories stand at an oblique angle to society. Full of desire, but out of kilter, their response to a dislocated reality is mutinous, wild, unforgettable. |
Song of a Raggy Boy: a Cork Boyhood, 1991
In 1939, on the brink of World War II, the St. Judes Reformatory is a ruthless Irish school for boys. Grey, gloomy and ruled by the sadistic Brother John, the school prefers punishment to rehabilitation. But new lay teacher William Franklin, fresh from the frontline of the Spanish Civil War, fights to liberate the boys from their oppressors. Patrick Delaney, #743 arrives at the school aged 13 and a half. He, like all the boys, is allocated a number which the brothers use. Franklin, however, always uses the boys' names. Delaney is an attractive boy and he receives the unwelcome attentions of a pedophile brother, Brother Mac, who molests and rapes the boy in the school toilets. The boy tells of his ordeal to a visiting priest in confession only to be told not to say a word to anyone. Word of Delaney's confession reaches Brother Mac who punishes the boy by forcing him under a cold shower naked, then giving him his clothes so they are also wet. Liam Mercier 636 (John Travers). Mercier is one of the few boys who can read and write, but is otherwise a hard case. Franklin befriends the boy and interests him in poetry, some of it written by communist sympathisers. Mercier and Franklin both challenge the authority of Brother John - Mercier by protesting at the vicious beating of two brothers on Christmas Day, and Franklin by stepping in and actually stopping the whipping. Brother John bides his time and, having tricked Mercier into coming out of class, beats him continuously in front of Brother Mac in the refectory. Franklin is eventually told by Brother Mac that Mercier is in the refectory, after which Franklin discovers Mercier's dead body. He carries the corpse out of the room. Livid, Franklin attacks Brother John, calling him a murderer. Brothers John and Mac are taken from the school by the Church authorities. At Mercier's funeral, Franklin tells the other boys that his death was murder, before kissing the coffin. Franklin decides he has to leave the school, but is persuaded to stay at the last minute when he is moved by Delaney reciting Eva Gore-Booth's poem "Comrades" across the playground. Franklin drops his bags and Delaney runs towards Franklin and jumps up to hug him while all the other boys gather round in love and affection for their savior. A film, based on the book was released in 2003. |
The Van, 1991
The Van is the story of two friends, Jimmy Rabbitte, Sr. and Bimbo Reeves, who operate a chipper van on the outskirts of Dublin. Bimbo uses money he got when he was laid off from his job to buy the van and he invites his buddy, Jimmy Sr. to be his partner. They work very hard to get the van cleaned up and working. With the help (or leadership) of Maggie Reeves, Bimbo's wife, they work out their menu, which is basically fish and chips, burgers, and sausages, and, with the help of Veronica Rabbitte, Jimmy Sr.'s wife, learn how to cook it. They open and begin to catch on very well, but Jimmy Sr. soon feels that Bimbo and Maggie are making all the decisions and not listening to him. The friendship begins to falter, then goes completely off the rails. After one final and thoroughly nasty fight, Bimbo drives the van into the Irish Sea. The book begins by introducing Jimmy Sr. and his family, and shows how he spends his days. Until Bimbo is laid off, Jimmy Sr. spends his days aimlessly visiting the library or playing Pitch and Putt golf. He is lonely and a little scared. After Bimbo is laid off, Jimmy Sr. at least has someone to hang out with. Bimbo is more ambitious and wants to find a new job, or something to do that would be more productive than just doing nothing. He notices that a chipper van that used to be outside their favorite pub, The Hikers, is no longer there. That gives him the idea of running a van. He tells their friend Bertie about it, and Bertie finds one that is available. Bimbo buys it and asks Jimmy Sr. to be his partner. They shake on it. Through a lot of hard work they get the van ready to open for business. They tow it to The Hikers (the van has no engine), and right from the first night they begin doing good business. Bimbo's wife, Maggie, is an active participant. She keeps the books, helps them plan what to serve, finds out how to buy it, and gets them a license for a spot by a beach near where they live. Gradually, Jimmy Sr. begins to resent Maggie's involvement. When Bimbo tells Jimmy Sr. he is going to be paid a weekly wage, Jimmy really starts acting out. He purposely does things he knows will annoy Bimbo, and pushes him to the point where they begin to have serious fights. After one such fight Jimmy Sr. says he is quitting and storms out of the van. Bimbo chases after him and begs him to come have a couple of pints. That is an invitation that Jimmy Sr. can never refuse, but he does continue to resist Bimbo's pleadings. Bimbo even offers to make Jimmy a partner and share everything fifty-fifty, but Jimmy Sr. will not take his hand. Finally, Bimbo, who by this time is pretty drunk from several rounds of pints, says he is going to kill the van. Taking Jimmy Sr. with him, Bimbo drives out to the beach and drives the van into the water until it will not go any farther. Jimmy tries to pull Bimbo back out of the water, but Bimbo wants to keep watching the van. Jimmy Sr. walks home alone. |
The Butcher Boy, 1992
Set in a small town in Ireland in the early 1960s, it tells the story of Francis "Francie" Brady, a schoolboy who retreats into a violent fantasy world as his troubled home life collapses. The Butcher Boy won the 1992 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. The novel is written in a hybrid of first-person narrative and stream of consciousness, with little punctuation and no separation of dialogue and thought. The reader must constantly examine and reassess Francie Brady's psychological (in)stability. The reader is never quite sure to what extent Francie's perceptions are delusions or are incisive commentary on the narrow community in which he lives. The crisis of identity which Francie experiences throughout the novel stems from the "unbalanced state" of Ireland and Irish identity. In particular, it emphasizes that the instability of the community during the sixties—a time of rapid change and political violence within Ireland—shapes his dysfunctional family, and Francie's dysfunctional relationships with other characters such as Joe Purcell, and ensures that Francie does not feel part of the larger community, effectively turning him into the insider looking in at the community. The book was adapted into a feature film directed by Neil Jordan in 1997. |
Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha, 1993
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a coming-of-age novel written in 1993 by Irish author Roddy Doyle. Ten-year-old Patrick Clarke narrates a year of his life as he transitions from carefree prankster to man of the house when his parents’ marriage falls apart. With his use of clipped dialogue, Irish vernacular, and stream-of-consciousness narration, Doyle vividly depicts the small but meaningful everyday experiences and emotions of his naïve child narrator. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is set in the late 1960s in the fictional north Dublin community of Barrytown. Patrick is the oldest child in a working-class family. His ma maintains the home routine, playing the role of comforter while looking after Patrick’s younger sisters, toddler Catherine and infant Deirdre. Patrick is named after his da, who works in the city. Da’s moods keep Patrick on his toes. Patrick says that da would “be mean now and again, really mean for no reason…He was always busy. He said. But he mostly sat in his chair.” Francis, nicknamed “Sinbad,” is Patrick’s quiet younger brother, whom Patrick torments mercilessly, kicking him, pinching him, getting him in trouble at home, and even helping his friends set Sinbad’s lips on fire with lighter fuel, saying “It went like a dragon.” Patrick delights in running with his friends, Kevin, Liam, and Aidan, causing no end of mischief in their small community. Kevin is the leader of their gang, and together they take joy in playing with their pretty neighbor’s knickers on the clothesline, setting fires, shoplifting for the thrill of it, giving each other dead legs and Chinese burns, and scuffling to maintain their group hierarchy. |
Fishing the Sloe-Black River, 1994
A collection of stories that serve as a literary meditation on travel and displacement, both within Ireland and from Ireland. The collection is a formal admixture of first-person realism and omniscient magic realism, a confection of approaches that captures the anxieties of its thematic foci. |
A Goat's Song, 1994
Jack Ferris, playwright, drunk, is mired in contemplative misery in a fisherman's cottage on the windy bleak west coast of Ireland. Mourning his love affair with Catherine Adams, an actress and Protestant from the North, he summons her instead in his imagination. In doing so, he tells the story of her father Jonathan, failed parson and retired Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.) man, shamed into exile by a moment of violence in Derry years ago. Masterly, elegiac, A Goat's Song conjures the contrasting landscapes and opposing myths of a nation divided. |
House of Splendid Isolation, 1994
The novel depicts the relations of an Irish Republican Army terrorist and his hostage, an elderly woman. The novel brings elements of the thriller genre to O'Brien's ongoing explorations of Irish society. It is based on the life of Dominic McGlinchy, whom O'Brien interviewed while incarcerated in Portlaoise Prison. |
Stir Fry, 1994
Seventeen and sure of nothing, Maria has left her parents' small-town grocery for university life in Dublin. An ad in the Student Union-"2 females seek flatmate. No bigots."-leads Maria to a home with warm Ruth and wickedly funny Jael, students who are older and more fascinating than she'd expected. A poignant, funny, and sharply insightful coming-of-age story, Stir-fry is a lesbian novel that explores the conundrum of desire arising in the midst of friendship and probes feminist ideas of sisterhood and non-possessiveness. |
The Cure, 1995
A hundred years ago, in a land of myths, a woman named Bridget Cleary was in need of curing. Married for over a year now, with pregnancy still eluding her, Bridget hoped that a renowned fertility rite would bring an end to her barren spell. But as further childless years went by, the good people of Tipperary came to the conclusion that other forces were at work. There was talk even of possession, and fairies, and the need for a second cure to free her of her burden. A hundred years later, the story of Bridget Cleary is recalled in a final attempt to account for the extraordinary. But as the story again casts its curious spell, a spell that has obsessed generations before him, its latest author finds the unravelling of myth to be an unexpected avenue to the furies of his past. Carlo Gebler's The Cure is an example of a skill which sometimes seems the exception rather than the rule in modern fiction: the art of telling a good story well. Gebler blends Irish folklore with universal truths in a novel that is acute, shocking, and brilliantly accomplished. |
The Dead School, 1995
Set in small-town Ireland, 'The Dead School' tells the intriguing story about two interacting characters: Raphael Bell, an old schoolmaster, and Malachy Dudgeon, a young teacher. Like other novels by Patrick McCabe, both of the two main characters had troubled childhoods. The intertwining of the two results in the destruction of Raphael and the dramatic change of Malachy. Malachy Dudgeon comes from a small suburban Irish town, from a dysfunctional family, existing under the guise of happiness, using the facade of happy Sunday mornings, whilst the adulteress mother and suicidal father continue to make devastating blows to their son, from which he never truly recovers, and chooses to escape into his world of imaginations, dreams and Americanisms. On the other hand, Raphael Bell comes from a small rural Irish town, and is the apparent picture of perfection. Raphael constantly seeks attention, from singing: "Wee Hughie" at any available moment to succeeding at school. However Raphael's world is gravely affected when Black and Tan soldiers shoot his father in the chest before his eyes. From this moment on Raphael strives to uphold the virtues and traditions of old Ireland, and it is inevitably this inability to transgress and adjust into modern living that leads, unsurprisingly to his suicide. The two protagonists become inextricably linked when Malachy joins the teaching staff at Raphael's prestigious boys boarding school, which he sees as his whole life's worth. An unfortunate science trip leads to the drowning of school boy, Pat Hourican and the unravelling of both Malachy and Raphael. Malachy loses his job, and then his girlfriend, Marion, to a wild member of a rock-band, and Raphael loses his job and mind, and then subsequently his wife, Nessa dies. Whilst Malachy becomes a waster and alcoholic and moves to London, Raphael opens what he calls 'The Dead School'. With black bin bags at the windows and an uncontrollable amount of mess and disorder. He begins to teach imaginary classes about his own life, as madness becomes inherent in his everyday life. As the novel concludes, Raphael's suicide occurs, as does his unattended funeral. Malachy returns to his hometown to care for his incapacitated mother, whom he once loathed, and there is a general air of depression, as the golden age of Ireland which Raphael had once loved is exchanged for stripjoints and graffiti. A downright thing. Throughout the novel the narrator becomes more of a character in his own right, making allusions to his opinions, which constantly change, as the omniscient voice chooses to blame a variety of people for the disastrous events. The colloquial narrative is also crucial in building the narrators persona, and also adds to the idea of base culture, something around which the novel is centered. Many critics have hailed McCabe's novel as a member, or rather cornerstone of the subgenre "Bog Gothic". This refers to the specialist Irish Gothic, which has been penned for McCabe's novels. |
Watermelon: a Walsh Family Novel, 1995
Claire has everything she ever wanted: a husband she adores, a great apartment, a good job. Then, on the day she gives birth to their first baby, James informs her that he's leaving her. Claire is left with a newborn daughter, a broken heart, and a postpartum body that she can hardly bear to look at. She decides to go home to Dublin. And there, sheltered by the love of a quirky family, she gets better. So much so, in fact, that when James slithers back into her life, he's in for a bit of a surprise. |
Angela' Ashes, 1996
The narrator, Frank McCourt, describes how his parents meet in Brooklyn, New York. After his mother, Angela, becomes pregnant with Frank, she marries Malachy, the father of her child. Angela struggles to feed her growing family of sons, while Malachy spends his wages on alcohol. Frank’s much-loved baby sister, Margaret, dies and Angela falls into depression. The McCourts decide to return to Ireland. More troubles plague the McCourts in Ireland: Angela has a miscarriage, Frank’s two younger brothers die, and Malachy continues to drink away the family’s money. Frank’s childhood is described as a time of great deprivation, but of good humor and adventure as well. When the first floor of the house floods during the winter, Angela and Malachy announce that the family will leave the cold damp of the first floor, which they call “Ireland,” and move to the warm, cozy second floor, which they call “Italy.” Although Malachy’s alcoholism uses up all of the money for food, he earns Frank’s love and affection by entertaining him with stories about Irish heroes and the people who live on their lane. Over the course of a few years, Angela gives birth to two sons, Michael and Alphonsus. Alphosus is called “Alphie” for short. As Frank grows older, the narration increasingly focuses on his exploits at school. When Frank turns ten, he is confirmed (Confirmation is a ritual that makes one an official Christian or Catholic. When Frank was growing up, people were confirmed around ages seven to ten). Right after his confirmation, Frank falls ill with typhoid fever and must stay in the hospital for months. There, he gets his first introduction to Shakespeare. Frank finds comfort in stories of all kinds, from Shakespeare to movies to newspapers. By the time he returns to school, his gift for language is obvious. In particular, Frank’s flair for storytelling gets him noticed by his teacher. With the onset of World War II, many fathers in Limerick go to England to find work and send money back to their families. Eventually, Malachy goes as well, but he fails to send money home. Frank begins to work for Mr. Hannon. This is the first in a series of jobs. Frank will go on to work for Mr. Timoney, Uncle Ab, the post office, Mrs. Finucane, and Mr. McCaffrey. Frank enjoys the feeling of responsibility he gets from working, and he dreams of saving enough to provide his family with food and clothes. The McCourts get evicted from their lodgings and must move in with Angela’s cousin Laman. Angela begins sleeping with Laman, an arrangement that makes Frank increasingly uncomfortable and angry. He also begins to feel guilty about his own sexual feelings. The priests’ strict mandates against masturbation make Frank feel guilty when he masturbates. While working as a messenger boy, Frank begins a sexual relationship with a customer, Theresa Carmody, who eventually dies of consumption, leaving Frank heartbroken. Frank saves enough money to get to New York. On his first night there, he attends a party and sleeps with an American woman. Though sad to leave behind Ireland and his family, Frank has great expectations for the future. |
Bend for Home, 1996
One day, years after he's moved away from his childhood home in rural Ireland, Dermot Healy returns to care for his ailing mother. Out of the blue she hands him the forgotten diary he had kept as a fifteen-year-old. He is amazed to find the makings of the writer he has become, as well as taken aback at the changes his memory has wrought upon the events of the past. Here is the seed of his story-the vision of the boy meets the memory of the man-which creates a stunning, illusory effect. The strange silhouettes who have haunted his past come back to inhabit these pages: his father, a kind policeman who guides him back to bed when he stumbles down the stairs sleepwalking; his mother, whose stories young Dermot has heard so often that he believes they are his own; or Aunt Masie, whose early disappointment in love has left her both dreamy and cynical. In this billowing and expansive series of recollections, Healy has traced the very shape of human memory. |
Open Ground: Selected Poems of Seamus Heaney, 1966-1996, 1996
As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Seamus Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry." |
Grace Notes, 1997
Grace Notes takes a poignant look at the life of a female composer whose life has begun to unravel. Short listed for the Booker prize, Grace Notes offers a look at the state of a depressed female mind in a male dominated profession. The novel is a moving exploration of music in the mind of an artist for whom music is her only salvation. Catherine McKenna is a composer whose life seems to be unraveling. She is battling postpartum depression when she learns that her father has died of a heart attack. Now she must return to Ireland to comfort her mother and renegotiate the terms of their relationship. Since Catherine has been estranged from her parents for well over two years, she has not told them that she has a child. Her father dies never knowing he has a granddaughter, which adds further guilt to Catherine's already troubled mental state. Catherine comforts her mother as best she can. She attends the funeral and burial of her father and accepts the condolences of friends and family. While in Ireland, Catherine visits with her first music teacher, Miss Bingham. She learns that Miss Bingham is dying, and Catherine is glad she got the chance to discuss music with her teacher one last time. Catherine also tells her mother about the baby and is met with a very poor reaction. Mrs. McKenna is shocked that her once good daughter is now a single mother with an illegitimate child. She cannot reconcile that her child would go against all that she was taught to believe. Catherine, for her part, tries to get her mother to understand that times are different and that a life like hers is not considered evil or wrong anymore. The two form an uneasy truce, and Mrs. McKenna offers to let Catherine and the baby move in with her if they want. Catherine returns to Glasgow to find that her daughter has said her first word. She is so excited to see Anna that she does not put her down even to use the bathroom. Catherine, who has never been religious, experiences a spiritual joy at seeing and being with her child. Part 1 ends with the musical notation "Credo." Part 2 begins with a still-pregnant Catherine contemplating music and procreation. She goes into labor and is flown to the hospital to give birth. Catherine's initial joy and excitement at giving birth to Anna are immediately eclipsed by a crushing depression. She is afraid that she will hurt Anna. She is afraid something will happen to Anna, and it will be her fault. She worries that she won't be a good mother because she doesn't love her child as much as she should. Catherine has more to worry about. Her relationship with Anna's father Dave is falling apart quickly. He constantly drinks and is either leaving the house with a hangover or arriving at the house drunk and stumbling. After Anna is born, Dave becomes abusive. He hits Catherine on several occasions, always claiming to not remember doing so the next morning. It is not until he tries to break Catherine's fingers that Catherine works up the courage to leave him. Catherine moves into the basement apartment of her friend Liz's house. There, she begins working on a commission for the BBC's Cutting Edge series. The piece is Vernicle, a title she takes from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Vernicle is unique in that Catherine is Roman Catholic but heavily uses Protestant drums in the music. The composition is a complete success and goes out live over the radio. |
The Untouchable, 1997
One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation? As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell's co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity. |
Last Boat to Camden Town, 1998
Naturally enough it was murder that brought them together... The body of Doctor Edmund Godfrey Berry is discovered at the bottom of Regent's Canal, in the heart of Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy's patch of Camden Town. Did Dr Berry jump, or was he pushed? And does his death have anything to do with the mysterious demise of teacher, and one of Berry's former patients, Susanne Collins? It soon transpires that beneath the surface of comfortable respectability, there lurks a secret more terrible than even Kennedy could imagine. Last Boat To Camden Town combines Whodunnit?, Howdunnit? And Love Story and Paul Charles' trademark unique-method-of-murder to produce a detective story with a difference. |
The Long Falling, 1998
Grace Quinn is a woman lonely and lost, yet actually not alone. First there is her husband, a man who likes to drink so much he killed a local girl in a hit and run. Secondly are the ghosts of her past lives, the one she had before she became Mrs Quinn and the one that she had with her sons; Sean who died, an accident but one she feels very much responsible for partly through her husband’s and the locals responses, and the other who left for Dublin as soon as he could after he had told his mother and father he was gay. As you get to know Grace and learn of the sorrow at the center of her life, which is really all encompassing, you don’t feel that things could go much worse for her. She decides to visit her estranged son Martin and the big city life of Dublin. Yet the mother and son bond that was once so tight seems to have become elastic and awkward and there is the fact that both of them are trying to keep their lives rather secret from the other, only projecting the side of themselves that they think the other wants to see. Once in the city, and in Martin’s world, initially we see just how much the distance has grown between them. Dublin is a city that is trying to modernize itself whilst in the papers and on everyone’s lips is the case of a 14 year old girl who is being banned from leaving the country to abort a pregnancy caused by rape. Martin’s gay lifestyle is also completely alien to his mother, even though they take her to a gay pub, not only that but Martin is madly, almost recklessly, missing his lover Henry, a feeling Grace has no idea of. The more we read the more we see they are at odds yet the more we know this relationship and its bonds will be important as the book, plot and indeed characters unravel. |
A Monk Swimming, 1998
In 1952, traveling steerage, Malachy McCourt left a childhood of poverty in Limerick, Ireland, heading for the promise of America. This is the story of what he brought with him, and what he thought he left behind. Larger than life, a world-class drinker, McCourt carved out a place for himself in New York City: in the saloons, as the first celebrity bartender, mixing with socialites, writers, and movie stars, on stage and on television, where the tales he spun made him a Tonight Show regular. He had money and women and, eventually, children of his own; and that's when he found he had not left his memories as far behind as he had thought. He had no choice but to stop and turn and face his past that included poverty stricken childhood and the painful memories of a drunken, absent father and humiliations of his mother, Angela. |
The Blackwater Lightship, 1999
Set in 1990s Ireland and takes place, predominantly, in an old house perched on a crumbling, seaside cliff in County Wexford. Two lighthouses once stood within view of the house. Now one of them – the Blackwater Lightship – is gone, and its absence resonates with the loss that haunts the family at the center of the story. Helen O’Doherty’s younger brother, twenty-eight-year-old Declan, is dying. At his request, Helen joins Declan and their estranged mother, Lily, at their grandmother’s home for five days. During this short reunion, longstanding grievances come to light that afford Helen newfound understandings of love and family. Thirty-something Helen is, by all appearances, successful. Her career serving as Ireland’s youngest school headmistress is impressive, and her husband, Hugh, is easy-going and affectionate. With their two young sons, Helen and Hugh reside in Dublin in a comfortable, middle-class house. While Helen often struggles to overcome her emotionally reserved nature and is subject to gloominess, Hugh’s affability and warmth offset her moods. To celebrate the end of the school year, Helen and Hugh host a dinner party at their home. The next morning, Hugh and the two children head off for a holiday in Donegal. Helen anticipates a few quiet days to herself, but her solitude is soon interrupted by a knock on the door. The stranger on her doorstep introduces himself as Paul, a friend of Declan. He tells Helen that her brother is gravely ill with AIDS and wants her to visit him in the hospital. Although Helen knows Declan is gay, she is stunned to learn he is suffering from AIDS and has been for some time. At the hospital, Declan expresses his wish to return to their grandmother’s seaside home, where he and Helen lived for a brief time during their childhood. Their mother, Lily, and their grandmother, Dora, are not aware that Declan is gay and have no idea he is ill. Declan asks Helen to deliver them the news, along with his request that they all gather at Dora’s house. Two of Declan’s close friends, Paul and Larry, who have cared for him throughout his illness, will also join them. As Helen drives to her grandmother’s home, she reflects on her estranged relationship with her mother. Helen and Lily have not seen one another for ten years. Lily did not attend Helen’s wedding and has never met Hugh or her daughter’s two sons. Helen has not discussed with Hugh her “bitter resentment against her mother,” and “for a long time […] had hoped she would never have to think about it again.” Having distanced herself from her family and her past, Helen is now plunged into their midst again. So it is that that Helen, her estranged family, and two strangers convene, uncomfortably, at Dora’s rickety house to see Declan through the last stage of AIDS. As Helen says, Declan “felt that at a time like this we would all forget our differences.” However, their differences run deep and tap into personal perceptions of betrayal as well as generational assumptions about gender and sexuality. Although Dora is in her eighties, she is remarkably plucky and progressive, but cannot bring herself to say the word “gay.” Her daughter, Lily, is more conservative and less tolerant toward the two gay outsiders, Paul and Larry. These men have become Declan’s surrogate family, however, and have “mothered” him in his sickness. Their skillful and compassionate care for Declan during the agonies of his disease undermines Lily’s sense of importance, and she eventually tells them to leave. Paul refuses to abandon Declan, assuring Lily that Declan loves her and advising her to “stop feeling sorry for” herself. Although Larry speaks freely with Helen and Dora about his family’s refusal to accept his homosexuality, Helen develops a richer rapport with Paul. During their lengthy conversations, Helen finally addresses the event that fractured her family. Twenty years ago, when Helen was eleven, she and Declan were deposited at Dora’s house while their mother and father went away to Dublin. Months passed with no word from their parents or any explanation for their disappearance aside from cryptic references to medical tests. Finally, Lily returned alone. Helen’s father had died from cancer, and her mother was shattered. As Lily withdrew emotionally from her children, Helen, lacking a proper model for coping with loss, buried her feelings of grief and abandonment. Helen tells Paul, “When my father died, I was left alone by my mother and grandmother. […] I got no comfort or consolation from them. And these two women are the parts of myself that I have buried.” With her brother’s impending death and his friends’ attendant demonstration of love and compassion, Helen achieves a new clarity about the failings that followed her father’s death. Like Helen, Paul is guarded, but he reciprocates her candor by talking about his husband, François, and how they secretly married. He reveals that he met François when he was a teen and before he understood his own sexuality. Their friendship evolved into romance after they traveled to France, François’ homeland. Actively faithful Catholics, they found an accommodating priest in Belgium who married them in a clandestine, but lavish ceremony. Declan, “like a small boy,” sought refuge with Paul and François whenever he needed to be “looked after and listened to and protected.” Declan was afraid his mother would refuse him, but, in his final need, she does not. His physical condition worsens and, overwhelmed with pain, he cries out for Lily. She holds him and sings to him. As he faces death, Declan finally secures the love and acceptance he wants from his mother. After many missed opportunities, Helen and Lily open a dialogue about their broken relationship. Helen speaks of the abandonment she felt following her father’s death. She confesses that, although “irrational, […] I thought you had locked him away somewhere […], that it was all your fault.” In response, Lily, at last, acknowledges the all-consuming grief she experienced when her husband died, along with anger that her faith in the endurance of love had been betrayed. By finally sharing their feelings, Helen and Lily begin to remedy years of mutual misunderstanding and move toward reconciliation. The vigil at Dora’s house ends when Declan becomes so ill he must return to the hospital. During the drive, Lily and Helen sing to Declan, hoping to give him some comfort as his life dwindles. Helen invites her mother to her house for the first time, and Lily accepts. The Blackwater Lightship was a finalist for the 1999 Booker Prize and in it was turned into a TV movie produced by Hallmark in 2004. |
'Tis, 1999
'Tis, the story of Frank's American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this "classless country," and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports. It is Frank's incomparable voice -- his uncanny humor and his astonishing ear for dialogue -- that renders these experiences spellbinding. When Frank returns to America in 1953, he works on the docks, always resisting what everyone tells him, that men and women who have dreamed and toiled for years to get to America should "stick to their own kind" once they arrive. Somehow, Frank knows that he should be getting an education, and though he left school at fourteen, he talks his way into New York University. There, he falls in love with the quintessential Yankee, long-legged and blonde, and tries to live his dream. But it is not until he starts to teach -- and to write -- that Frank finds his place in the world. The same vulnerable but invincible spirit that captured the hearts of readers in Angela's Ashes comes of age. |