An Age of Innocence (Irish Culture 1930-1960) By Brian Fallon

An Age of Innocence (Irish Culture 1930-1960)

By Brian Fallon

(Gill & Macmillian)

Brian Fallon, the semi-retired former chief critic of The Irish Times, has produced a book of cultural counter-revisionism, the central thesis of which is that the thirties, forties and fifties in Ireland were not nearly as bad as is universally accepted today, and that the country was not the cultural backwater or desert that everyone now seems to suppose.

Aside from cataloguing the literary, artistic and intellectual activity of these years, he also argues that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. He sets about putting us right by focusing on three main areas. Firstly, there was the power and authority of the Catholic Church during these years, and the unquestioning obedience of the majority to it. He makes the point that, ‘Unthinking clericalism has simply given way to unthinking anti-clericalism; the coin has been flipped to come down heads instead of tails - but it remains the same well-worn coin.’ Secondly, referring to the monomaniacal nationalism of the era, and contrasting it with the cosmopolitan image of itself Ireland is obsessed with creating today, he asks, ‘Yet is not a large part of this frenzied internationalism at heart inverted provincialism, the product of an unsure, partly-fledged culture lacking the courage to be wholeheartedly itself? Where once we looked to and deferred to Britain in so many fields, we now look to the EU to tell us what we should be thinking and doing.’ Thirdly, there was the notorious literary censorship of the period, but he finds its present day corollary in the all-pervasive phenomenon of Political Correctness, opining that, ‘Political Correctness indeed appears to be the official cant of out time - the contemporary equivalent of Victorian hypocrisy, or of the socio-religious conformity of a large section of the Irish public forty or fifty years ago.’ He also maintains that things were just as bad internationally as they were here. Indeed, this is this trump card again and again, and he refers to the hostile treatment meted out to D H Lawrence in England, and the Hayes rules which operated in Hollywood and the general atmosphere under McCarthyism in America. Joyce’s Ulysses was never actually banned in Ireland, as many people believe (it was just not readily available), while it was proscribed in England and America for some years.

While he admits that, ‘It goes without saying that all these accusations have a solid core of truth; the historical evidence is sometimes overwhelming, and it has been spelt out ad nauseam’, and there is no doubting his bona fides, since as he writes in the introductory chapter ‘In Perspective’, ‘How much more intelligent, and more constructive, it is to come to terms creatively with the past than to manipulate it like a diseased limb, or put it under interdict!’ However it does seem to this reader that in trying to redress an admittedly skewed balance, and provide a much needed corrective, he himself goes too far in the opposite direction.

First published in The World of Hibernia

My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead – Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead – Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

(HarperPress, £12.99stg hardback)

This wide-ranging and eclectic anthology of twenty-six short stories on the theme of love embraces its subject in many of its various forms: romantic, erotic, impossible, unrequited, undying and exhausted. However, conspicuous by their omission are happy love stories, or at least those with happy endings.

As editor Jeffery Eugendies, author of the wonderful The Virgin Suicides and the even more brilliant Middlesex, taking his cue from the Latin love poet Catullus, writes in his playful introduction in response to his own writerly recasting of Cole Porter’s famous question, ‘What is this thing called a love story?’: ‘…my subject here isn’t love. My subject is the love story…When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims – these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.’ Or, as Catullus, ‘…the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair in an extended way’ would have had it, given the brief trajectory outlined from poem II to poem III of the many he penned in honour of or frustration with his mistress Lesbia, in each of the stories here ‘…either there is a sparrow or the sparrow is dead.’ In other words, as far as eros or desire is concerned, we generally proceed from voyeuristic longing to disenchanted entanglement. It is only in agape or friendship, Eugenides seems to suggest, ‘When the body is no longer desired, when beauty has faded, when possessiveness has been relinquished, (that) real love shows its face.’

Our editor indulges himself in a rather ropey two sentence history of western philosophy to arrive at this insight. Personally, I can find little evidence of ‘...the earthiness of Judaism, a sense of the body and its sexual appetites as inherently good’ in Leviticus, for example, and his declaration: ‘Asceticism, abstinence, monasticism – you can blame it all on the Greeks’ is fatally compromised by blaming Plato for Neoplatonism. Let’s not even start on what that zealous revisionist, St. Paul, did to Christianity. Rather than looking for those culpable for perpetrating the excesses of the mind/body duality, maybe there is a more fundamental reason why there are no happy love stories: love is hard because life is.

Eugenides is on far surer ground as a literary critic. Having gone through all the stories gathered here, from classics of the genre like Chekhov’s delightfully ambivalent ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and Maupassant’s ‘Mouche’ to rather more gritty contemporary fare like Raymond Carver’s arbitrarily inconclusive ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ and Denis Johnson’s ‘Dirty Wedding’, via contributions from Milan Kundera, Robert Musil, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore and Richard Ford, plus our own William Trevor and two from Harold Brodkey (the only writer so favoured), it is hard for this reader not to agree with this judicious anthologist’s equally bold assertion, ‘…rereading ‘Spring in Fialta’ reminded me how much better Nabokov is than everybody else.’ The lush lyricism seduces, the pencil is in hand to mark those incomparable phrases that will be savoured again. But however much the aesthete may propound his doctrine of art for art’s sake, the showiness is never for its own sake: a heartbreaking narrative of loss is unfolded here.

Not every entry is a hit: Gilbert Sorrentino’s ‘The Moon in its Flight’, which manages to be both retro and postmodern in its depiction of a pair of teenagers constantly thwarted by fully-clothed sex, is too annoyingly telegramatic in style to be truly affecting. Similarly, Eileen Chang’s ‘Red Rose, White Rose’, despite its length, is too telegraphed and simplistic to ever really get inside its central character’s motivations. That said, as with any anthology, this is hardly for reading from cover to cover, but is best dipped into from time to time, to discover a new voice, or revisit an old one. 

This assemblage is being marketed as the perfect St. Valentine’s Day gift, and it is indeed an elegant package, replete with dedication box inside the flyleaf. Caveat emptor, however, for the irony is that these often tortuous and sometimes tragic tales are as far from the fluffily reassuring, cosy complacencies of ‘chick lit’ or ‘rom-com’ as it is possible to imagine. The guy rarely gets his girl, or the woman her man, or if they do, it doesn’t work out quite as they thought it would. Just so you know…

First published in the Sunday Independent

What Are You Like? By Anne Enright

What Are You Like?

By Anne Enright

(Jonathan Cape, p/b, £10)

The colloquial, jokey inquiry, usually delivered when someone has done something unbelievable stupid, takes on a more sinister undertow in the title of Anne Enright’s fine new novel, as do many other casual phrases and situations we tend to take for granted in the everyday world. But then doubling, or a second thought bifurcating out of a first one, giving two thoughts at the same time (which is what a pun is), is integral to this work, no more so than in the fact that we have twin heroines, Maria and Rose, separated at birth and unaware of each other’s existence. The story alternates between Maria in New York, Rose in London, stopping off now and then at the home of their father Berts and his second wife Evelyn in Dublin, their mother having died when they were born, until the denouement, when all comes together.    

If shifting constructs of identity, and its ultimately arbitrary nature, are what preoccupy Mary Morrissy in The Pretender, so too do they intrigue Enright, and both women’s vision operates in a more personal, and therefore more universal way than the irritatingly narrow focus on post-colonial Irish identity we hear so much about from the Irish Studies Departments of universities, in their study of Irish literature (i.e. literature made by people who were born or live in Ireland). Indeed, the only place where Enright’s formally fluid and capacious book goes a little awry is in a section called ‘The Abortionist’s Restaurant’, where Rose ponders on her Irish identity, or lack of it. This reads like a graft that didn’t quite take, as though included as a sop to the academies, and is the only time when Enright’s cleverness and imagination become a trifle heavy-handed, instead of being both light and profound. When we read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are we worrying about Columbian national identity?

The twin motif has long appealed to the more metaphysical of minds, providing as it does an image of a lost self, or future, uncreated self, so that the self is not quite whole, or is not the whole self, which amounts to almost the same thing. Mistaken identities, and their resolution, often across class and gender lines, are a staple of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and were often filched wholesale by Shakespeare. Nabokov delights in it, and it is central to Banville’s Birchwood and Mephisto. Scottish writer Ali Smith covered recognisably similar philosophical territory, although concerning friends rather than twins, in her novel entitled, with succinct appropriateness, Like. But similarity is not identity.

Although not plot driven, what happens is that when Maria turns twenty, she falls in love, in the wrong city, with the wrong sort of man. Going through his things, she finds a photo of herself when she was twelve years old. She has the same smile, but she is wearing clothes she never had: she is the same, only different. Stepping through the mirror to tell the story of two women, both haunted by their missing selves, both unable to settle in their first choice vocations of engineering and musicianship, What Are You Like? is a deftly written disquisition on families and - dread word - identity. In its choice of topos, it takes on an almost mythic resonance. Coincidentally, again like Morrissy, it includes a revealing passage from a dead woman in her grave.

Perhaps the quirky, incongruous, oblique style favoured by Enright, and her Irish contemporary Aidan Mathews, is more suited to shorter forms, rather than full-length novels, just as they were more successful vehicles for someone who must surely be one of their mentors, Donald Barthelme, than were some of his longer prose works. What Are You Like? marks an advance on Enright’s somewhat airy 1995 novel, The Wig My Father Wore, but the eloquently laconic voice of the stories in the 1991 Rooney Prize winning collection The Portable Virgin still rings true with most assurance. But it’s novels that matter these days, apparently. However, writers from Lawrence Sterne to Flann O’Brien have shown that straight ahead narrative is not the only game in town when it comes to longer forms, and this is a noble tradition which it is to be sincerely hoped that Enright has the courage to persist in pursuing. It certainly makes a change from ninety percent of the material which passes for challenging new Irish fiction at the present time.

First published in Books Ireland

Crazy John and the Bishop By Terry Eagleton

Crazy John and the Bishop

By Terry Eagleton

(University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day, No Price Given)

Ever since he burst on to the scene some thirty years ago with Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton, now Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been both prolific and polemical, his mixture of literary scholarship, critical acuity, and social concern having the incendiary force of a hand grenade tossed into the stuffy, fuddy-duddy sherry party milieu of English academia back then, some of whose staid attributes and attitudes remain entrenched even today. Crazy John and the Bishop, following on from 1996’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, and his play Saint Oscar, continues Eagleton’s interest and inquiry into Irish cultural history, often confronting the vexed relationship between the Irish and the English.

Crazy John and the Bishop is made up of ten essays which stretch from the eighteenth century to the present day. Topics range from Augustan satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth century Cork to the philosophy of John Toland and Bishop Berkeley. Eagleton also moves between well-known, even celebrated writers to less familiar, even neglected ones.  

The opening essay aims for a close critical dissection of the little remembered eighteenth-century poet William Dunkin, calling him ‘at least as fine a poet as many of his English counterparts who have found their assured niche in the eighteenth-century canon’. There are also studies of Thomas Moore, W B Yeats and Samuel Beckett, the latter piece brilliantly illuminating some of the darker paradoxes that lie at the heart of Beckett’s work, and dealing with the problems it presents for traditional liberal humanist criticism. The title essay focuses on John Toland and Bishop Berkeley, and examines Irish eighteenth-century history of ideas in general. ‘The Good-Natured Gael’ explores concepts of ‘benevolence’ and ‘sensibility’, and includes a long segment on Oliver Goldsmith, as well as some wonderful insights on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, one of this reviewer’s favourite novels. ‘Cork and the Carnivalesque’ looks at notions of parody, comedy and plagiarism in relation to Irish writing, with particular reference to Frances Mahony (‘Father Prout’) and William McGinn. The theme of the Irish ‘internal émigré’ is featured in ‘Home and Away’, and discusses the work of a broad span of novelists including Maria Edgeworth, Kate O’Brien and Francis Stuart. The cultural and political stance of the book emerges most clearly in the pieces on the largely forgotten Irish socialist Frederick Ryan, ‘The Ryan Line’, and the concluding examination of the revisionist controversy, ‘Revisionism Revisited’. In this essay, full of ingenious juxtapositions, he argues that the debate between traditionalists and revisionists, or conservatives and liberals, is redundant, since what is being proposed is as good or as bad as what went before, and the impasse can only be solved by a radical alternative. ‘There seems little point in replacing the myth of the Celt with the myth of Europe’ he writes, while acknowledging that, ‘There is not much point in trying to convince a Dublin advertising executive that modernity can be every bit as emotionally devastating and spiritually mutilating as lounging unemployed and sexually guilt-ridden at the country crossroads’.

If there is a criticism to be made of this bravura performance, it is that perhaps Eagleton writes too fast. He is rich in ideas, but these are sometimes thrown out at the expense of style. But then again, he would probably have his own rather jaundiced view of essayists who have a reputation for fine writing, and find themselves dubbed stylists, the noun often preceded by the qualifying adjective ‘mere’.

This book is another fine contribution to ‘Critical Conditions’, the Field Day series of books of essays and monographs, whose general editor is Seamus Deane. It adds to Field Day’s reputation as one of the most worthwhile ventures in modern Irish intellectual life.

First published in The World of Hibernia

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi By Geoff Dyer

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

By Geoff Dyer

(Canongate, £12.99stg p/b)

Geoff Dyer’s new work is very much a book of two halves. Indeed, he was going to subtitle it ‘a diptych’, until his inner editor prevailed in its judgment of such a move as pretentious. Still, the structure of the new novel may prove disconcerting to some, reading more like two novellas than one novel.

The first ‘Jeff in Venice’ half is familiar Dyer territory: it features a third-person male narrator, Jeff, who is much the same age and height as Geoff, and works as a freelance arts journalist just like Geoff. ‘Junket Jeff’ goes to Venice for the 2003 Biennale, gets wasted on bellinis, grass and cocaine, and clicks with a very attractive, younger Californian gallery worker, Laura, with who he has an intensely carnal, hedonistic fling.

So, for the second ‘Death in Varanasi’ sequence, you are set up to expect some kind of continuation of Jeff and Laura's relationship elsewhere. Instead, you get a first-person narrative from an unnamed narrator, who may or may not be Jeff (it’s never made explicit, though you tend to assume they are one and the same) who accepts a travel writing gig to the holy city of Varanasi at the mouth of the Ganges in India. It’s not even clear whether the second half chronologically follows the first. By the time you realise that ‘love interest’ Laura isn't going to reappear, that she’s been abandoned mid-book, it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed. 

Dyer has explicated his methodology, rather fancifully, thus: ‘Just as everyone is an avatar of someone else in Hindu myth, so the characters are different incarnations of each other.’ Whatever; what is certainly clear is that what we have here is an attempt to write prose fiction that is not narrative-driven, that favours the byways of digression over a well-planned, or well-plotted, journey.

Consequently, although the slacker laureate, as he has been dubbed (it is surely something of a misnomer, since few ‘slackers’ are as prolific as he) has this time produced a work of what is ostensibly billed as fiction, his fourth to date, don’t be fooled: classification is always tricky with Dyer, as he is as adept at critical essay, reportage and travelogue as he is at fiction (if not more so), but happiest when fashioning them all into something entirely his own. This assertion, coupled with the diversity of his interests, is evidenced across a back catalogue which includes titles which range from: Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger; The Missing of the Somme; Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence; What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney; The Ongoing Moment, an idiosyncratic history of photography; and But Beautiful, an astoundingly wonderful synthesis of fact and fiction, with a penetrating critical essay as a coda, described by Keith Jarrett as, ‘The only book about jazz I have recommended to my friends.’ The downside of this magpie-mindedness, if there is one, is that because non-fiction for him is just another location on the fiction continuum, his fiction proper (forgive the crude categorisation) can feel a bit samey and lightweight. Again, Dyer on Dyer: ‘I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.’

In his defense it might be argued, with reference to writers who are connoisseurs of their own consciousness from Montaigne to Barthes: why bother trying to make stuff up, when your own preoccupations and obsessions, and what you make of them, are so riveting? Besides, no one actually believes in the elaborate fictive worlds created by the likes of Henry James anymore. (Jeff in Venice at one point compares himself ironically to ‘…some sad fuck in a Henry James’ novel.’) Novels are so over: read Geoff (Jeff) Dyer.

What we have here, I suppose, is a superior sort of Bloke Fiction, a male equivalent of the better Chick Lit. Thus, if Jeff is a bit like Geoff, he is also a bit like me. Jeff on freelancing: ‘If it were a proper job, I’d pack it in and do something else, but freelancing is the something else that you do after you’ve packed in your job so my options are kind of limited. It’s that or retirement – from which it is at times pretty much indistinguishable.’ Hey, I can identify with that. This being the Biennale, there is also some fun and penetrating contemporary art criticism. Even in Varanasi, the lack of Laura is compensated for by the excellent travel writing, and the new friends made. Hinduism is ‘the Disney of world religions’, and there follows a disquisition on the superiority of polytheism to monotheism. ‘There is no God but God, says the one place. There are millions of them, says the other.’ By the time our charming narrator starts losing it spectacularly, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for him, whoever he is.

Lots of guys who scribble would give their right arms to be Martin Amis, or some other supposedly serious great mind grappling with the weighty issues of our time.  Me, I wouldn’t mind being Geoff Dyer. With his deft insight and lightness of touch, he makes the self-important overachievers look rather foolishly earnest. What a great travelling companion – if we weren’t all lonesome travellers.

Whatever Happened to Margo? By Margaret Durrell

Whatever Happened to Margo?

By Margaret Durrell

(Warner Books)

Sister of the more famous and, it has to be said, more talented Gerald and Lawrence, Margaret Durrell’s memoir of her career as a landlady in Bournemouth in 1947, discovered by the author’s granddaughter 30 years after it was written, is a light and airy concoction. Margo is probably best known to readers through Gerald’s autobiography, My Family and Other Animals. Returning home after extensive travels in Greece and Africa, she found herself, divorced and with two young sons to support, in need of financial security. So she took the advice of her domineering maiden aunt Patience, and started a boarding house in the respectable seaside town.

But her snobby aunt’s vision of reputable, middle-class boarders was never to be fulfilled. Her first tenant was Edward Feather, a painter of nudes, and his voluptuous model wife. There followed Mrs Williams, a battered wife, and her precocious, over- weight son, Nelson, and a chauvinist bricklayer, Mr Budden, and his long-suffering wife. Then there were Blanche and Judy, student nurses; Gordon, a nervous bachelor who eventually comes into some money; jazz musicians Roger and Andy, the latter of whom Margo embarks on an affair with; and Jane, a prim ex-nurse, lusting after bohemia in revealing black negligees. Add to this mayhem the irregular visits of brother Gerald, who brings a posse of monkeys and a six-foot python into the human menagerie.

The claustrophobic atmosphere of the time, long before Philip Larkin’s annus mirabilis of 1963, is captured well, with two pence looking down on a penny, and nosy neighbours trying to rule people’s lives. Alas for the culture vultures, there is little mention of, and no appearance by, Lawrence. Margo comes across as a generous spirit, free of the pettiness so prevalent then, and with an appreciation of the comic side of life. But one still wonders if the adventures related here really merited a whole book to themselves. Nevertheless, she has produced a not too taxing confection of anecdote and incident, which should pleasurably pass a few hours.

Commissioned for Image magazine

A Star Called Henry By Roddy Doyle

A Star Called Henry                                                

By Roddy Doyle

(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

Well, it’s a long way from Barrytown. Or maybe not as far as you might think, since Henry Smart, the rumbustious hero of Roddy Doyle’s new novel, a man born in 1901 whose life therefore runs concurrently with that of the century, could well be the grandfather of one of those kids in The Commitments. But he is even more disenfranchised than they, and the poverty of his childhood makes the world of Angela’s Ashes look like sheer bloody luxury by comparison. In one particularly memorable scene, the young Henry and his younger brother Victor catch rats by smearing their arms and hands with soup made from boiling baby rats, and then sell them on to betting men. These punters: 

          ... paid me extra to put my hands into the sack. I always did it but

          I wouldn’t let Victor risk his fingers. I loved watching the faces

          of the men around the pit; I read their contempt, pity and admiration.

          I stared at the rich ones, the ones I knew already felt guilty about 

          being there, with the worst of the scum of the slums; I’d stare at 

          them as I sank my hand into the sack and felt the fury in the rats’

          backs and the men would look away. I’d let them see the little boy

          being asked to maim himself for their entertainment.

As you can gather, while the Barrytown trilogy presented a somewhat sentimental view of urban working class life, which in this reviewer’s opinion often seemed little more than an updated version of the ‘rare ol’ times’ codology, here we get the real thing, and any mawkishness is quickly undercut by another kick in the teeth. Not that there aren’t huge swathes of humour running through A Star Called Henry, but the hue is decidedly blacker than before. In effect, what we have here is a judicious blend of light and shade, The Snapper crossed with The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, or The Van with Family, and delivered all in one.

Henry’s father, also Henry, was a doorman at Dolly Oblong’s brothel, and also settled scores for her partner, the mysterious Alfie Gandon. He obligingly bumped off Gandon’s enemies, preferably with a good clout from his wooden leg, and then got rid of the bodies piece by piece in the rivers, streams and canals around Dublin. His mother, Melody, was married at sixteen and had succumbed to consumption and alcoholism by her early twenties. When she became too sick to look after her children, they took to the streets. One day Henry goes back to check on her, but she’s moved on. He never sees her again. Then there’s Granny Nash, an omnivorous reader of female fiction, and repository of family secrets. The depiction of childhood here excels that in Doyle’s best previous novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

But it is in its radical beyond revisionist expose of the shibboleths of the 1916 Rebellion, the War of Independence and the Civil War, that the book stands out.  Henry is present in the GPO on Easter Monday (like all the best people), but as a member of the Irish Citizen Army rather than as a Volunteer.  

          Jesus, I hated the Volunteers. The poets and the farm boys, the 

          fuckin’ shopkeepers. They detested the slummers - the accents

          and the dirt, the Dubliness of them. 

His mentors are Jim Larkin and James Connelly (who teaches him how to read and write). He also manages to lose his virginity in the GPO, with his ex-primary school teacher (he went for two days) and future wife, Cumann Na Ban member Miss O’Shea. This puts a whole new perspective on the Easter, ahem, Rising.

On a serious note, here is a novel that shows how 1916 was, like the French Revolution, ultimately a bourgeois affair, since very little changed for those who had nothing to begin with. Towards the end a former rebel leader presents Henry with his death warrant:

          -Why?

          - Well, he said.  - If you’re not with us you’re against us. That’s the 

          thinking. And there are those who reckon that you’re always going

          to be against us. And they’re probably right. You’ve no stake in the

          country, man. Never had, never will. We needed trouble-makers and

          very soon now we’ll have to be rid of them. And that, Henry, is all you

          are and ever were.         

In this reading of events, and in its acknowledgement of the often forgotten number of Irishmen who joined the British army, A Star Called Henry echoes Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, although perhaps it is with Sean O’Casey’s jaundiced treatments of the time, and his use of the demotic, that Doyle has most in common.

There are a couple of technical quibbles, such as why aren’t we told how old Henry is and where is he when writing the book, and how does he know so much about his parents’ courtship, if he wasn’t there at the time and nobody told him about it? But the best way to cope with these minor irritations is to close one’s eyes and be swept along, since the ride is well worth it.

 This is the work of a man who knows a thing or two about human nature, and also about how the world works, and is using that knowledge as a force for good. With his early books he captured a wide audience, many of whom would not be regular readers. In a sense they have grown up with him, and I sincerely hope he keeps them. The blurb calls this, correctly for once, ‘a vastly more ambitious book than any he has written before’, and at the end of the day it is that very ambition which is what is most  impressive about it. It is, after all, only the first instalment of a projected trilogy, The Last Round Up, and Henry is still only twenty when it concludes, and Liverpool bound. I can’t wait for Volume Two. With its wonderfully well integrated and unshowy use of historical research, and its wealth of detail and marvellous descriptive passages, its anger and exuberance, this is one of the most important novels written by an Irish writer in the past thirty or forty years, a major achievement and an instant classic.

Nice one, Doyler. Or, as they used to say in Barrytown, ‘Deadly’.

First published in Books Ireland