Reflections on Irish Writing in 2010

Patricia A. Lynch

Netherland (2008)

by Joseph O’Neill

Brian G Caraher

Hand in the Fire (2010)

by Hugo Hamilton

Mairéad Conneely

Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts (2010)

by Christine Cusick (ed.)

John Eastlake 

J.G. Farrell – In His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries (2009)

by Lavinia Greacon (ed.)

Eoin Flannery

Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (2010)

by Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó (eds.)

Luz Mar González-Arias

An Autumn Wind (2010)                     

by Derek Mahon

“Tinkers”: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller (2010)

by Mary Burke 

The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume I: 1929-1940 (2009)

by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (eds.)

John L. Murphy

Ghost Light (2010)

by Joseph O’Connor

Tony Murray

Until Before After (2010)

by Ciaran Carson

Reflections on Irish Writing in 2010

Patricia A. Lynch

As incoming editor of the Irish Studies reviews for this prestigious journal, I am more than grateful to Rosa Gonzalez and the editorial committee of Estudios Irlandeses for entrusting me with the task.  It is with some trepidation that I take up in the footsteps of David Pierce, who in the previous issues fulfilled that role with distinction.  I am indeed grateful for the tips which he supplied to me to carry out the task, and for the examples given through the previous issues. 2010 has turned out to be a very interesting year for me, a retired faculty member in English Studies/Irish Studies from the University of Limerick, and one of the longest-serving members of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures). At times, this reviews editorship involved a learning curve, which I hope will benefit readers of subsequent issues. 

Over the years, I have had the double pleasure of becoming friends with many Spanish academics via IASIL, and also by acting as Erasmus Exchange teacher at the University of Alcalá de Henares for short periods over five years. There they have a thriving Irish Studies section which is the area of research choice for many of their postgraduates.  There was also the invaluable experience of hosting Spanish academics on return Erasmus exchanges to the University of Limerick.  Both formally and informally I have had many animated discussions of various Irish authors and critics with Spanish professors. Over the years there has been cooperative work with academics in Spanish in my own former School, that of Languages, Literature, Culture and Communication, at my home university.  All of these combined gave me a huge respect for various approaches to Irish Literature in English emanating from Spain.  In particular, I have had very interesting conversations and correspondence with Dr. Marisol Morales Ladrón.  Secondly, I have been in touch with another Spanish academic, Carolina Amador Moreno, about our mutual work in Irish-English (Hiberno-English) and the use of this dialect in Irish literature. Both her Analysis of Hiberno-English in the Early Novels of Patrick McGill (2006) and her second book An Introduction to Irish English (2010) will prove invaluable to any researcher interested in the subject.  A reference to Dr. Amador’s work would not be complete without sending sympathy to her and other friends of the late Dr. Anne McCarthy, which occurred very recently.  Though I never had the pleasure of meeting her, it is clear that her death will be a great loss to Spanish research into Irish Studies. 

The past year has seen devastating changes in Ireland’s political life, its economy, and in its concomitant loss of some sovereignty in money matters.  There were also other troubles such as volcanic ash preventing air flight, severe weather in December of both years, and massive emigration.  All make 2010 a year to forget, and to look forward to 2011.  However, not everything has been black.  In the matter of literature, there have been great achievements, as seen by the following examples.  Literary festivals have taken place and were adjudged as successful, for example, the Cúirt festival in Galway last April, which was opened by author Roddy Doyle. In spite of the aforesaid problems with flights due to volcanic ash, there were many great names in the world of books prepared to give readings from their works. Later in the same month, the sixth annual Heinrich Böll memorial weekend took place on his beloved Achill Island.   Journals of Irish Studies have appeared as usual. So many conferences in Irish Studies have been held, in Ireland, in various European countries and in places much further away that it is impossible to name all.  Books of original literature have won praise and awards.  These include Emma Donoghue’s Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, longlisted for the same award.  In my home city, I have had the experience of going to buy copies of both, hearing other customers making the same request, and finding that both books were sold out, awaiting new supplies.  In other fora, public readings by authors are as frequent as in previous years, and long may this continue.  Many works of literary and cultural criticism have also appeared, some of which will feature in the individual works reviewed below.  Postgraduate students in universities and colleges in Ireland and beyond are still applying in more than satisfactory numbers to research aspects of Irish Studies. These produce valuable informative books on a regular basis. 

It is always difficult to decide on particular works to review, especially in a field so prolific as Irish Studies.  In the texts chosen for this issue, I have attempted to go for a broad sweep, of original works of fiction and poetry, of literary and also cultural criticism, and of life-writing in the form of the correspondence of writers. I tried also to use a mixture of reviewers from different countries, both male and female, of new reviewers, and some who have already had work published in this journal.  Another factor has been the willingness or the opposite of publishers to supply review copies.  The reviewers in this issue are owed gratitude for their willingness to undertake the task, their hard work and patience, and for returning the pieces on time.  Any errors in this section of the journal should be attributable to me.   

Books I have especially enjoyed this year in fiction include Emma Donoghue’s Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, as mentioned above.  Inspired to some extent by the notorious Fritzl case in Austria, this begins nonetheless as a happy book because it is seen through the eyes of a five-year old boy.  With his mother he is imprisoned in a converted garden shed by a man referred to only as “Old Nick”.  She nonetheless provides the child with a very loving environment, shelters him from any contact whatsoever with their captor, and for him “makes one little room an everywhere”, as John Donne once said (“The Good-Morrow”).  In their room, their day is divided into time zones, and the child is taught literacy and numeracy to an advanced level.  “Ma” is extremely creative at using the very few resources at her command to teach Jack a variety of other subjects entirely through play.  To Jack, all of the objects which surround him seem an integral part of his life, so items such as Bed, Table, and even Room itself are referred to without a definite article, and seem to have a life of their own: “I stroke Table’s scratches to make them better; she’s a circle all white except gray in the scratches from chopping foods” (p. 7).  Pain, darkness and suspense appear when the boy’s developing mind and the captor’s threat to starve them prompt a change in the mother’s teaching.  Jack moves from protected child in an almost Oedipal relationship to one who must know about the dark side of his life.  Very quickly he is coached in preparation for a dangerous role, becoming his mother’s knight who will rescue them.  When they are eventually rescued, paradoxically some of their most unhappy experiences occur; the mother’s courage is at length eroded to the extent of taking an overdose.  Finally, with legal matters being carried out and a reunion with the extended family, Jack requests his mother to let him visit Room once more, but the happiness he experienced there is gone.  He summarises: “It’s not Room now” (p.400), and ceremonially says goodbye to every part of it. 

Family recurs as thematic in this novel as in many Irish works of fiction, but it is unusual as the father is seen as no more than a forcible sperm donor, and the child is not aware that he has a second biological parent.  “Old Nick” is also responsible for the death of a previous child, and altogether is at the extreme of patriarchal cruelty.  Secondly, in the mother’s own family she was an adopted child, and her stepfather is kinder to her than her adoptive father.  There are parallels here with Claire Keegan’s short novel, Foster, much of which I had the pleasure of hearing the author read at the IASIL conference in Maynooth last July. The child protagonist’s parents are either neglectful or positively indifferent towards her, and the couple who take care of her for a couple of months give her a whole new perspective on life and family contentment.  In this novel, too, all is seen through the point of view of the child.  Just as Jack has to leave behind a time of happiness to face an uncertain future, the girl in Foster has to go back to her previous state, but now with a vision of a happy home lost.  She does not accept it with equanimity, as in the final part of the work she races to cling to the departing foster parents in a way that demonstrates her loss.  In both novels, the Eden of youth has to be left behind.  The name of the Keegan novel also provokes thought.  Could it be a verb, to take care temporarily of a child from another family, or in another sense to foster thoughts and feelings that were barely there before? 

In a third novel which featured also on the Man Booker list, Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, families are remote from most of the action.  At 655 pages it is rather long, and seems to divide into two sections.  In the first part, it is a comedic portrayal of fourteen-year-old boys in a fee-paying middle-class school, which has a high profile in social and educational circles.  These are counterparted by the similar girls’ school divided from the boys by a wall, a sort of St Trinians in duplicate.  (People who know south Dublin may possibly think of a location.)  The schools are mirror images of each other, and this is highlighted by the experience of three boys who break into the girls’ school in pursuit of a mythic ghost-ridden locked room: “Everywhere they look there are analogues of their own school – classrooms with cramped benches and scrawled blackboards, printouts on the notice boards, trophy cabinets and art-room posters – almost identical, but at the same time, somehow not, … as though they’ve entered a parallel universe ….” (p. 380).  The action and dialogue are often reminiscent of comic features such as “The Bash Street Kids”, or boys’ fiction, with incompetent abusive teachers who are there to be defeated by smart kids, stereotypes such as the nerd who also has resemblances to Billy Bunter, the bully and the bullied, the sports heroes and studs (in their own minds), nicknames and casual cruelty, midnight adventures, explosions, and hormonally charged encounters with girls in the other school.  The most hilarious episode is the happening at the Hallowe’en Hop of the second-years from both schools, when two supervising teachers take off for a tryst, and return to find a truly carnivalesque scene, rampant sexuality due to drug-poisoned punch.  Paralleled with this are the attempts of the school prodigy and his friends who experiment with trying to find a portal into an eleventh universe, using computers but also mythology and ghost stories, in an absurd combination of science and various beliefs. 

The hinge of the action lies paradoxically in a prologue, in which the boy Skippy dies.  As readers still do not know the personages involved, the tragedy does not take full hold of their imagination, so the story then takes up with the events leading to this intrusion of horrific reality.  The second part of the novel is much darker, though still with some comedy.  Many of the young people are now forced to confront guilt and punishment, death and the meaning of life.   So do the teachers, as the complexity of causes and responsibility for the boy’s overdose have to be faced.  

The type of mirroring mentioned above is a constant feature of the novel.  Deeds and misdeeds of the pupils are repeated by the teachers, many of whom are old boys who were in the same school class.  The situation of the triangle of lovers occurs in both. The teachers have a local pub, and the boys have “Ed’s Doughnut House”.  There is an ironic coincidence in that the song “Another brick in the wall”, which the acting principal and his group once sang at their school concert, is replicated by the present-day counterparts.  The latter part of the novel shows the school to be a microcosm of many institutions in Ireland which are self-perpetuating systems of the wealthy, and who all band together to protect themselves and hide their falsities and abuses. 

In poetry, Seamus Heaney’s Human Circle lit up some of the dark days of the Christmas period for me.  Readers familiar with Heaney’s work will find many of the previous themes given a new perspective.  Just as in other collections, he uses older Irish customs redolent of Irish Catholicism such as wakes (“Death of a Painter”), crafts (“Eelworks”), placenames (“The Riverbank Field”), and images of children of his family flying kites (“A Kite for Aibhín”).  However there are more contemporary references, such as in the title poem “Human Chain”, in which he celebrates aid workers in a third world country passing sacks of food, but conversely sees this as reminiscent of farm harvest tasks of his youth (O’Riordan).    The route to Hades takes place through a Belfast Saturday shopping scene: “Then racks of suits and overcoats that swayed/ When one was tugged from its overcrowded frame/ Like their owners’ shades close-packed on Charon’s barge” (“Route 110”).   

As ever, in many poems there is the closeness to Nature first evoked in the young child, though it has a more modern perspective.  Driving through the countryside of Co. Donegal, near Mt Errigal, he is not homesick as it is “[a] grant-aided, renovated scene“ (“Loughanure”).  The passing of time for a septuagenarian sees him look back in perspective at the natural surroundings of his youth, his parents, and forward to his grandchildren.   There are many references to the world of his schooling in the local primary school, and at boarding school for second level education. Relationships with his family and his wife are often featured, and adapting a New Testament story, he shows his gratitude to his wife and those who took care of him in his illness (“Chanson d’Aventure” and “Miracle”). There are the inevitable references to the recent political history of Northern Ireland, but these are few when compared to his use of ancient Latin classics, new translations of old Irish poetry, and older writers in English whom he revered. 

There is also in this collection a revival of a medieval type of poetry in his nineteen short poems contained in “A Herbal: after Guillevic’s ‘Herbier de Bretagne’”.  In view of my own interests in traditional healing, I approached it looking for the use of plants as medicine, but the only example was that of the dock-leaf to heal nettle-stings, as I remember doing in my childhood.  Instead, he shows other ways in which plants are important to humans. At first the relationship is not friendly.  The grass in the graveyard is always restless, the bracken is secretive, and nettles are “enemies … / Malignant things, letting on to be asleep” which cannot be understood by young humans, though they are aware of the remedy.  This relationship with plants is complex, however; sunshine sometimes tempts plants to trust, there are also refuges where one can confess private thoughts and feelings, the smell of crushed herbs can soothe, and finally the child’s connection with this world of growing things is natural: “I had my existence. I was there./ Me in place and the place in me”.  It is now “an elsewhere place” which in a Wordsworthian way the adult can no longer access.  Finally, plants are conventionally seen as natural goods to feed people or cure them, but in a paradoxical way the poet sees humans as nourishing and giving strength to them instead: in the cemetery the plants are “[s]inking their roots/ In all the dynasties/ Of the dead.”   A younger Heaney would be unlikely to have expressed this analogy.  

In history I have read with great interest John O’Callaghan’s Revolutionary Limerick: The Republican Campaign for Independence in Limerick, 1913-1921.  It is a detailed exploration of the happenings in these years, backed up by an impressive range of sources, from books to witness accounts, contemporary newspapers, police and military reports, and recent dissertations.  The author states that his book is one of the first to use the work of the Bureau of Military History (p. 8).  There is a very rare photograph on the front cover, of local republicans in uniform standing in a semi-circle, while in front of them sit a group of Cumann na mBan; inside the book, names of everyone in the photograph are given in order.  It is throughout written in a cool and objective way, with occasional touches of humour: in one small town’s ballot, “there was extensive impersonation, and even some of the dead rose to vote for Hayes” (p.77).

The author provides a helpful summary of the events leading to 1913 to provide context.  In particular, it becomes clear that the tradition of revolution, especially that of the Fenians in the 1860s, local education, the handing-down of attitudes in families and in small local areas all provided the seeding ground for later events.  This account, while concentrating on Limerick city and county, often makes us aware of the general situation of contemporary Ireland, and how one area compared and contrasted with the rest.  The strongest impression is of the complexity of the situation, the British Army and British-regulated police being opposed in 1914 by “the Irish Republication Brotherhood (IRB), the Citizen Army, the Ulster Volunteers, the National Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers” (p.1).  These groups divide and sub-divide, and include also the Irish Parliament Party, the Sinn Féin party, which itself evolved from four different sources, as well as the IRA, with links with other organisations such as the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), and even in the case of Limerick, the local rugby clubs.  Over the years, there were so many permutations and combinations between all these groups that it is almost defeats the memory of the reader trying to keep track of them all. As a non-historian, it was the first time that I fully realised that the Irish judicial and local authority systems evolved from the republican groups. 

To those of us used to modern means of communication, such as radio, TV, internet, email, and Twitter it seems impossible for the groups to have maintained the degree of contact which they did.  The local newspaper, the Limerick Leader, played a prime role, as did networks such as local grapevines, the clergy, and despatches by train.  In the latter of these, the women’s arm of the movement, Cumann na mBan filled a prime role.  While the book is not a history of this group, many pages refer extensively to their essential back-up role, which in at least one case included partaking in combat.  The sisters of the Daly family, in particular, were heavily involved.  As to the clergy, their role varied, from being outspoken defenders as in the case of Bishop O’Dwyer, to differing degrees of support or condemnation by lesser clergy.  In the matter of sectarian attacks, the book shows that there were few or none in Limerick republican groups, in contrast to other counties in Ireland. 

In the main part of the book, many of the incidents remind us of events which took place in more recent times in the North of Ireland, especially guerrilla activities, the use of violence, punishments for women who consorted with the British Crown forces, some “shoot to kill” decisions by the aforesaid forces, and the execution of spies and informers.  Women fared better in Limerick then than in the later twentieth-century North, in that female spies were not executed but ordered to leave the country, and punishments for dating British soldiers were confined to cutting off their hair. 

Differences in social class appear.  The blue-collar workers and rural workers were the most active in service and often were members of hurling clubs, while the landlord and merchant class, the rugby club set, were less active in Limerick city.  In the matter of industrial relations, the book gives details of the nature and extent of what was called the “Limerick soviet”.  Famously, the Limerick battalions did not take part in the 1916 Rising, and one battalion voluntarily handed over their arms to the British authorities, but O’Callaghan’s book shows that the activists were far from being cowardly.  Here as in many other parts of Ireland, the general failure/contradictions in communications of that weekend had a strong role to play. 

This book raises questions.  Towards the end of the book, O’Callaghan suggests grounds for another book of history which could evolve from a consideration of whether the IRA was the army of local areas and groups rather than the army of the Republic (p. 204).  He himself states in his brief biography that his next book, on the Civil War in Limerick, will take up from there the present leaves off.  In conclusion, this book is of interest not only to historians, and to people who live in Limerick, but provides some background to Kate O’Brien’s novels, which feature the landlord/merchant class of Limerick of those times, whose values are religious-based rather than nationalistic.  In her novel The Land of Spices (1941) based on her own childhood, Bishop O’Dwyer features in a less favourable light, in that his nationalism constricts the feminist and cosmopolitan attitudes of the French order of nuns who run the school.  Secondly, it sets some of the context for understanding Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), who came to live in the city two decades later than the period covered in O’Callaghan’s book, and may help readers to understand place and attitudes in this memoir. 

In my own current research interest, Irish traditional healing, works are continuing to appear.  The one which impressed me most in recent times is a new book by Ronnie Moore and Stuart McClean (eds), Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and Ireland: Stethoscopes, Wands and Crystals.  Most of the books and journals which I have read concentrate on specific folk healing practices in countries across the world, or are more historically based.  This book focuses on England, Wales, and Ireland, but there are examples from at least six countries.  However, its great value for me is that it explores the theoretical aspects, the complex relationship between folk-healing, CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine), and scientific medicine, and differing views on the placebo effect.  In the editors’ own words: “[Folk medicine] is at once a familiar and shared socio-cultural phenomenon, but it also evokes something magical and other, distant and irrational … ” (p.1).  The authors show that folk-healing has a great deal of similarity to CAM, and that scientific medicine (which they refer to as “biomedicine”), has borrowed aspects of folk knowledge in its practice.   They all overlap in some ways, with biomedicine and CAM largely operated in similar fashion, each in their own regulated field, but folk medicine tends to be more personalised, more rooted in the individuality of the practitioner.  

The different articles by the nine authors explore the revival of folk healing and herbal remedies, which were the original remedies used since antiquity all across the world, and are still prevalent in places.  They look at its place in a post-scientific world, its links with religion, magic and spirituality in different countries and cultures, where they differ (p.32) from the classic views of Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).  Its relationship to CAM is examined.  Specific examples are shown of its use in Wales, Staffordshire, the North of England, and Ireland. They also explore the status of folk healing, where payment is not usual or is very small, in a world where medicine is commercially and academically rated, and finally its position with regard to law and regulation.  Most of the contributors give their own definitions of the term.  All pay attention to the way in which this knowledge is transmitted, seeing that there is no formal academy; it most often passes down through generations of the same families, and is sometimes learned from others through apprenticeship.  Many of the chapters describe how the skills descend through oral archives, where the secret aspects are passed on only to designated successors. Other topics are familiar from previous literature, for example its use of amulets, crystals, transference of illness to other items, and distance healing.  In the case of Northern Ireland, it explores its use in one traditionally Catholic area and one traditionally Protestant area.  In spite of the very large differences in culture, religion, history and politics, all share the use of methods referred to as “ ‘the cure’ or ‘the charm’” (p.111), which are ironically pre-Christian earth-goddess traditions (p.30) in origin (p.115). 

Moore and McClean mention a topic of especial interest to me, in which the so-called placebo effect can be used to allow the body to repair itself in a way that is much stronger than the normal human capacity to self-heal (pp. 40, 120).  This ties in with the work of specialists such as Prof. Benedetti and others, for example an article in The Lancet entitled “Biological, clinical, and ethical advances of placebo effects”, published in February 1910.  These authors all seek to rescue the placebo effect from implications of deception, and advocate the harnessing of its power to improve patient welfare.  If this type of study could be developed more, in my opinion folk-healing might then be able to take its place alongside CAM and scientific medicine. 

Works Cited

Amador Moreno, Carolina P. 2006.  An Analysis of Hiberno-English in the Early Novels of Patrick MacGill: Bilingualism and Language Shift from Irish to English in County Donegal. Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press.

_______.  2010.  An Introduction to Irish English. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd. 

Donne, John. 1985. “The Good Morrow” in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Mack et al. (eds). Norton: New York. p. 1991.

Finniss, Damien G., Ted J. Kaptchuk, Franklin Miller, Fabrizio Benedetti.  2010. “Biological, clinical, and ethical advances of placebo effects”.  The Lancet. 20 February. 686-695. 

Donoghue, Emma. 2010. Room. London: Picador.

Heaney, Seamus.  2010.  Human Chain. London: Faber and Faber. 

Keegan, Claire. 2010. Foster. London: Faber and Faber. 

McCourt, Frank. 1996. Angela’s Ashes. London: Harper Collins.

Moore, Ronnie and Stuart McClean (eds). 2010. Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and Ireland: Stethoscopes, Wands and Crystals. New York: Berghahn Books. 

O’Brien, Kate.1982 (1941). The Land of Spices. Dublin: Arlen House. 

O’Callaghan, John. 2010. Revolutionary Limerick: The Republican Campaign for Independence in Limerick, 1913-1921. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 

O’ Riordan, Adam. 2010. “Human Chain by Seamus Heaney: review”. The Telegraph.  29 August.  Accessed Jan. 26, 2011.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7963969/Human-Chain-by-Seamus- Heaney-review.html.

Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Penguin Books. 

Patricia A. Lynch is a retired faculty member of the University of Limerick’s School of Languages, Literature, Culture and Communication, where she lectured in English Studies/Irish Studies.  Her research interests include Hiberno-English as used in Irish literature, Irish folk-medicine, Post-Colonial Studies, Stylistics/Literary Linguistics, Utopian Studies and other aspects of Irish literature.  She is co-editor of Back to the Present: Forward to the Past, 2 vols, 2006, Amsterdam: Rodopi, and author of a number of articles such as “Hiberno-English in the Plays of Marina Carr”, Études Irlandaises, 2006, Autumn, 31.2. 109-124.   

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Netherland by Joseph O’Neill,

London: Fourth Estate, 2008

ISBN 978-0007269068

247 pp. £14.99 (Hardback)

Reviewer: Brian G Caraher

I first caught sight of this intriguing book while observing a family of four in the international departures lounge of “Washington National” on a hot summer day in June 2008. A woman in her late thirties was engrossed in Netherland, while her two teen-aged boys larked about with bags of expensive tennis gear and her husband stared blankly at his toyish I-Phone. I awaited a connection through Newark to Belfast, after a consultancy in “research methods” at the Folger Institute, but was thinking about my two young boys and their disaffected mother back home in Ireland. I had been raised within a large, “extended,” immigrant Irish family in the States, yet had encountered for the first time in my life the inner machinations and hidden torments of small, “nuclear”, bourgeois family life in the green tracts of upwardly mobile South Belfast.  Netherland is composed not only by an Irish author who has lived and worked in Ireland and the United States but comprises a brilliant study of the stories and lives of small families and hidden, often deleterious, deep narratives beyond the boundaries and in the nether regions, the dark labyrinthine caves, of psychic motivations. As Joseph O’Neill’s main character and retrospective narrator Hans van den Broek asserts early on: “It is truly a terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable” (p. 21).

Netherland involves a first-person narrative that could well be called “The Adversity of Hans van den Broek,” as O’Neill’s self-deprecating narrator ventures to call his own story once he declares he has hit “rock bottom” (p. 212).  It is an agonisingly personal story that takes in retrospectively the narrator’s young life in The Netherlands, his early career and marriage in England, and the drift and desolation of his life and marriage in post-9/11 New York City.  This fascinating narrative does not involve anything overtly Irish or anything directly rooted in Ireland.  However, this third novel by an Irish barrister at work in the US rightfully shouldered its way onto bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic in 2008 and 2009.  It brilliantly narrates the murky underworld that opens up when middle-class lives turn brutally bankrupt.

Hans van den Broek’s “adversity” is never explained or, more importantly, explained away, psychologised or ethnicised in some definitive fashion.  Layers of familial crises, silences and betrayals emerge from the depths of what appears to be the ideal secondment of a Dutch equities analyst to the “boomtown” of turn-of-the-millenium Manhattan.  However, Hans’ superficially ideal life conceals faultlines fully contemporaneous with the post-9/11 world of George W Bush, William Cheney, Tony Blair and the assault on Iraq in March 2003: “we were at a crossroads,” Hans’ wife Rachel contends “that a great power had ‘drifted into wrongdoing’” (p. 92).  As a high-flying oil stocks and futures analyst, Hans finds himself “a political-ethical idiot” in the midst of ethical, political and marital adversities which he seems little able to comprehend, much less command.  He turns inward, harbouring for two years (October 2001 to November 2003) on the ninth floor of the Chelsea Hotel on West 23^rd Street, just north of the Twin World Trade Towers netherworld.  The Chelsea, by the way, is the rather bohemian hotel in which Joseph O’Neill, his wife Sally Singer and their three boys have resided since 1998 because neither parent had a reliable enough credit history to secure a mortgage in the USA when they first arrived.[1]  O’Neill’s van den Broek, wife Rachel and infant son are refugees in the Chelsea, trapped in their elegant loft apartment by the wreckage and chaos of lower Manhattan in the weeks and months following 11 September 2001 (see pp. 17-29, in particular).  “The unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere” of “a city gone mad” (pp. 18, 20) eats into their dreams, their domestic lives and the future hopes of their marriage.  Rachel gives up and turns silently inward (p. 38), while Hans continues to work “for M_____, a merchant bank with an enormous brokerage operation” (p. 23), not unlike Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, or the infamous Lehmann Brothers, all merchant banks with heavily-leveraged brokerage operations that brought the world to the brink of a fathomless financial abyss in mid-September 2008.  Rachel and her son retreat to her parents’ home in London; and she indulges in a wasteful, pointless and futureless affair with a self-involved and manipulative restaurateur.  Hans works, plays cricket and strikes up an unusual relationship with an eloquent West Indian gambler, the Trinidadian faux-entrepreneur Chuck Ramkissoon.

Chuck’s slowly unfolding series of stranger and stranger stories leads Hans deep into the dark underworld of New York’s past and present nightmares.  On the surface Chuck wants to recover the neglected history and sporting possibilities of cricket in New York City; he lectures immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean on race, cricket and fair play (see especially, pp. 4-16) and tries to secure financing for “The New York Cricket Club,” “Floyd Bennett Field,” “Corrigan Field,” or “Bald Eagle Field” – a project as slippery as its insecure and shifting names demonstrate (pp. 76-9).  Hans registers Chuck’s “vision” as one of “waste and ice” (p. 79), yet cricket is a crucial point of reference for the two opportunistic friends. Chuck articulates the rhetoric and ethos of cricket as “fair play”, integrative, “a lesson in civility” and as deeply American as any subsequent sport that now appears as typically American (baseball, basketball, etc.), yet Chuck also makes much of the notion of “not cricket” (pp. 12-3).  And the latter notion is the key to the book’s darkest vision: lurking in the netherlands of our rhetorics and visions of the future we encounter the impulses, obstacles, compromises and betrayals that turn us from our best selves and talk of fair play toward that which is “not cricket”, including infidelities, lies, vileness and evil.

O’Neill tells a tale that stands as The Great Gatsby for our contemporary era of economic and ethical boom and bust.  Chuck Ramkissoon’s vision of the recovered greatness of American cricket is undercut by his own gambling, betrayals and ghastly murder. Hans van den Broeck, O’Neill’s Nick Carraway, tells the progressively unfolding stories of personal aspirations and familial horrors, yet he escapes his opportunistic friend’s sordid death in the end.  O’Neill partners Hans’ tale of adversity with final recovery.  In a world “far away from Tipperary” (p. 116), Hans finds an unexpected measure of justice beyond the unsettling losses of his life. The end of the book turns away from plumbing the depths of melodramatic horrors toward recognising the small gestures of ordinary lives (p. 247).  Perhaps this is the sort of insight and resolution that can only happen in novels, whether Irish or American, but it is moving nevertheless.  Hans now knows tragically his own duplicity as well as that of his murdered Trinidadian friend, but he relishes the recognition that “there is to be no drifting out of the moment” of fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, parents and children, who must in the end turn toward one another and embrace and smile again, beyond the netherworld of collapsing towers, fraudulent bankers and self-deluding visionaries.

Prof. Brian G. Caraher has been chair of English Literature at Queen's University Belfast since 1993, and is currently Research Director in Poetry, Irish Writing, Creative Writing and Modern Literary Studies in the School of English. He has lectured and held various positions in the USA, Denmark, England, Greece, Italy, the Republic of Ireland, and in Northern Ireland. He has published on a wide range of Anglophone authors and topics from the 18th century to contemporary writing, including an extensive set of studies on the cultural politics of reading Joyce.

Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts by Christine Cusick (ed.), with an introduction by John Elder.

Cork: Cork University Press, 2010.

ISBN 9781859184547

269 pp. €39.00 (Hardback)

Reviewer: John Eastlake

Irish Studies has seen a proliferation of theoretical perspectives made explicit in the past decade, even while questions linger about the disciplinarity of Irish Studies itself. Whether viewed as a concentration of interests, lines of inquiry based on a foundation of literary and cultural theories, or an emergent discipline, Irish Studies has proved a warm and welcoming environment for the application of multiple theories to familiar subjects. Unlike the growing momentum behind “Transnationalism” in Irish Studies which has resulted in multiple publications in various areas of the discipline, and innumerable panels at the major Irish Studies conferences, Ecocriticism has yet to be established as a major feature of our academic landscape. (For instance, at IASIL 2010, there was no dedicated panel for Ecocriticism.) The volume in hand collects eleven essays, bracketed by John Elder’s “Introduction” and the editor’s interview with Tim Robinson. Ecocriticism has the demonstrable potential to develop into an important area within Irish Studies, as the recent “Ireland and Ecocriticism” conference, organised by Dr Maureen O’Connor, attests. This volume may therefore prove useful in the further development of Ecocriticism in various Irish Studies venues, and will hopefully encourage the development of coursework on Ecocriticism and Irish literature.

The contributions by chapter, with two exceptions, focus on single authors and selected texts thereof: Eamonn Wall on Richard Murphy; Joy Kennedy-O’Neill on J. M. Synge; Joanna Tapp Pierce on Elizabeth Bowen; Greg Winston on George Moore; Kathryn Kirkpatrick on Paula Meehan; Donna Potts on Michael Longley; Maureen O’Connor on Edna O’Brien; Miriam O’Kane Mara on Roddy Doyle; and Karen O’Brien on Martin McDonagh.  Jefferson Holdridge discusses both Lady Morgan and William Carleton, and Eóin Flannery addresses Irish tourism, colonialism and landscape. The volume is cleanly edited, well presented, and includes both a collated bibliography and a useful index. Though the contributions are of consistently high quality and benefit from being brought into proximity with each other, there is no direct engagement between contributors. Some chapters focus tightly on Ecocriticism, demonstrating its capabilities as a perspective and tool, while others stray further afield in pursuing their readings. As Elder notes, the authors and texts discussed stem mostly from the late-nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, which provides a coherent focus for this collection of essays. In general, Elder’s introduction is laudatory, and pithy. He writes, “There’s a purposeful and dialectical character to this volume’s critical project” referring to his assertion that ecocritical readings have the potential to simultaneously reveal both “the sceptical and debunking energies” of Irish authors, while not “denying their underlying intention to find a more sustaining and positive vision”. He adds that ecocriticism should  be “muddy boots crumping into the academy”, riffing off Tim Robinson’s comments in the closing interview, suggesting ecocriticism may be a galvanizing force in the study of literature in the academy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Initially, the lack of an editorial introduction, laying out, at length, the emergence of Ecocriticism and its applications in Irish literature, may be off-putting to the reader, who is seeking justifications for the project. However, the editor has done her work well, as the chapters are arranged to draw the reader along. Wall’s essay opens the collection and does a good deal of heavy lifting in explaining in fruitful summaries the development of environmental studies in the USA, and the manner in which ecocriticism has subsequently become available to critics of Irish literature, especially poetry. And, in Kennedy-O’Neill’s essay, (reprinted from ISLE), she argues for the utility of ecocritical reading: “by examining Synge’s use of nature with an ecocritical approach, one can see that it does not conform to many of the traditions of British writers” and reveals “a blend of uniquely Irish ambiguities towards place”. Winston further advances the overarching discussion by examining agrarian spaces in Moore’s The Untilled Field, acting on a need to push ecocriticism beyond wilderness/civility dichotomies of environment. As well as collapsing and transcending analytical dichotomies, O’Brien (in a essay first published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism) identifies ecocriticism as a way to address contradictions in representation  and mimesis, such as those found in McDonagh’s attack on Man of Aran, which she argues parallels the “fracture that displaces the interrelationships between the human and nonhuman world”. Further on, the links between Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism are introduced and interrogated in both Kirkpatrick and O’Connor’s essays. O’Connor writes: “The historical background of another emerging field, in which this current volume makes an important intervention, that of Irish ecocriticism (and ecofeminism), has suffered similar neglect, possibly for a related reason; that is, the humiliating history of British colonial discourse that has both feminised and zoontologised the Irish”. While there is no single chapter that recaps the history of ecocriticism, the contributions, in volume form, are admirably efficacious in developing the reader’s appreciation and understanding of the origins of Ecocriticism in environmental studies and literature and its current polyvalent potentials.

A recurring theme in several chapters raises questions about the relationship between ecocriticism and the voluminous body of space/place theory, and as this discussion is left to the background, the argument for ecocriticism’s utility in this respect is, perhaps, left unmade. In Tapp Pierce’s contribution, Bowen’s use of landscape is allowed “to come fully alive” through an ecocritical reading, focusing on the relationship between “’literature and the physical environment’”, but Tapp Pierce also acknowledges the overlap or even interchangeability between it and a reading based on “sense of place” and “neo-primitivist animism”. Tapp Pierce goes on to explore the complexities of Bowen’s work admirably, teasing apart the differing threads of Bowen’s relationship with her family home of Bowen’s Court, but in doing so, raises a question about how prominent “physical environment” is when compared with the historical, social, cultural, personal, and familial aspects of place. The legacy of Seamus Heaney’s work on “sense of place” is keenly felt, as are Tim Robinson’s contributions. While Ecocriticism may be fully compatible with the work of space/place geographers and philosophers, a direct examination of this issue would be most welcome. The lack of a full editorial chapter (beyond the editor’s “Acknowledgements”) is a missed opportunity for a volume that is described as “an unprecedented integration of Irish Studies and Ecocriticism” on the jacket. Two major areas are left unaddressed as a result: the lack of a chapter on Ecocriticism and Irish-language literature (of any sort); and, a general lack of discussion about the potential “depth” of Ecocritical approaches in Irish literatures in Irish and English. Without any explanation given, that the poetry and prose of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (for example) are not discussed in a volume centred around modern Irish literature and the environment, is simply mystifying. It is alluded to in several of the chapters, and on the jacket copy, that eco-based readings of Irish literature are likely to be sustainable for all periods, not just the modern. The jacket asserts that the importance of place “is in fact rooted in ancient traditions of Celtic mythology and place-lore”. This is something of a leitmotif throughout the volume, which perhaps calls for a follow-up volume to argue this assertion that looks at a much broader range of texts including earlier periods and from both the Irish-language and English-language literary traditions.

This volume will serve the interested reader well, marks a stimulating entrance for Ecocriticism into our discipline, and could be the starting point for another sustained discussion in Irish Studies.

John Eastlake is a IRCHSS Postdoctoral Fellow, hosted by Roinn an Bhéaloidis, University College Cork. His research to date has focused on the ways in which native and indigenous peoples have collaborated with others in the production of life-stories and other printed texts. He has a particular interest in Irish and Native American instances of cross-cultural, collaborative productions of printed texts, especially autobiography/life-writing and traditional narrative.

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“Tinkers”: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller by Mary Burke.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

ISBN  978-0-19-956646-4.

329 pp.   $95/£50/€74.

Reviewer: John L. Murphy

Understanding this misunderstood subject demands clarification of its terms. Professor Burke ends her introduction with an explanation. “Tinker” earns quotation marks “as the construct of the community within dominant discourse” (16). Travellers are those descended from those who practiced a nomadic way of life in Ireland; this term is now used by themselves and the settled population. This term may be a translation of siúlóir/ siubhlóir for “walker/ stroller,” which in Hiberno-English became “shuiler” (43). A Traveler refers to the American descendants of nineteenth-century Irish Traveller emigrants; Gypsy, by comparison, has been misapplied to Ireland’s historically indigenous itinerants.

Definitions display the care with which Burke approaches her topic. She begins with “literary antecedents of the Irish Revival Tinker.” The “pseudo-historiographical tradition” places Travellers in a Milesian, if exotic, scenario: “The Irish past was another country, and that country was usually in the east.” This orientalization of the Traveller shaped a “proto-ethnic” origin myth. Burke examines pre-Celtic attributions for Travellers, and their continuity in Enlightenment categories of Gypsy, rogue, and “tynker” that define a Romantic-era fascination with the picaresque. Comparing and contrasting the Scott(ish) with the Irish versions of “tinkers,” Burke then shifts to Revival dramatizations.

Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding (1907) “upends the binary of pious settled person and impious tinker,” to demonstrate the artificiality of who’s a nomad and who’s settled (71). It places the censorious priest in the same suspicious light as that which tracked the tinkers. Burke examines earlier drafts, stage directions, and contemporary influences. She shows how the sacred and profane, the chapel and the camp, force the viewer to confront as a unified whole what insular prejudice has kept segregated.

Her third chapter, “Playboys of the Eastern World,” explores Orientalist pursuits of Synge and his colleagues into the Aran Islands. Burke places folkloric inventions within Synge’s prose narrative next to a previously overlooked impact. Synge linked his faith’s loss to Darwin’s rise; Burke situates this within Anglo-Irish, late-Victorian Ireland. She suggests that “Yeats, like Synge, constructs the Protestant-led Revival as a compensatory response to evolutionary theory” (115). Prevalent hostility to Darwin and The Playboy of the Western World reveals the era’s cultural fear of “amorality and nihilism” (122).

Chapter Four explains how Tinkers threatened stability via post-Revival entertainment. She examines Seán Ó Coisdealbha’s comedy An Tincéara Buí (1957), the challenging if uneven Frank Carney play The Righteous Are Bold (1946), and Maurice Walsh’s novel The Road to Nowhere (1934). These tended to reaffirm the dominant social pieties even as they allowed room for Traveller confrontations with them.

Travellers themselves gain the stage, write the stories, and enter the films made after their communal politicization. Their débuts are preceded by Bryan MacMahon’s The Honey Spike, both the 1961 play and 1967 novel of the same title, which were enriched by his knowledge of Cant (Shelta), the Irish Traveller language. MacMahon reports the language as everyday communication rather than “exotic archaism,” and Burke finds in its power a portent of the Troubles. Tom Murphy and John Arden’s dramas deal with mobilization among the wider community as Civil Rights issues begin to stir the Irish, as emigrants and natives. Radicalization of those distinguished by “peripatetism” infuses these late twentieth-century plays.

Juanita Casey and Rosaleen McDonagh remind Burke of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea as feminist and class-conscious responses from those finding their voice. She compares their authority to the madwoman in the attic talking back to Jane Eyre, or Travellers encamped outside the Irish Big House. Casey’s first novel The Horse of Selene (1971) and McDonagh’s experimental performance The Baby Doll Project (2003) draw on their own lives. These activists speak for their community. From a generation gaining literacy and respect, they assert themselves within and against a patriarchy, at least from stereotyped Traveller and settled perspectives. Their radicalism, however, seems to have not shaped their community’s recent portrayals in British, Irish, and American films. These tend to lag behind Traveller-originated literature and drama, to date, or their entry into Irish and British political arenas.

For almost a century, Travellers have been represented on screen. Into the West, This Is My Father, and Trojan Eddie emerged from 1990s Ireland, but Burke finds them wanting in the conviction that energizes literary and dramatic efforts beginning to emerge from Travellers themselves.  Snatch gains a wry eye; Burke notes parallels with The Tinker’s Wedding in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film. It suggests prejudice is being projected onto Brad Pitt’s character of Mickey, a “pikey,” by even “more unsavoury associates” (247).

Irish-American Travelers, often lumped with such associates, earn study. Traveller (1997) and The Riches a decade later as an F/X cable television series capitalize upon criminals seeking redemption, or those forced to seek it after being forced to do so by “community consensus.” The conflation with “white trash” within American culture offers abundant opportunities for cliché. All the same, as in Snatch and Synge, mainstream characters are shown to be as consumed by amorality as those whom they denigrate.

What contrasts exist between Irish Travellers and Irish-American Travelers? Burke glides past this crux, but she notes that mainstream American whites regard as “natural” the possession of an “Irish and Christian heritage.” For the Irish, the Other turns more towards the Romany as the Traveller is seen to be indigenous, one of their own. Deviance from the norm, it seems, for both nations appears brief for those designated as (or claiming the identification as) Travellers. Future attention to this context by scholars and community activists who study “Tinkers” may clarify what her dense, tenaciously argued, and theoretically aware survey has established by its close reading of primary and secondary texts.

Burke seeks an end to the equivalence of Traveller with marginal. As recent literature and activist campaigns show, the marginalized can get along with the majority. “Otherness” may exhaust those relegated to the edge. Differences can be honored, as in a film by Travellers, Pavee Lackeen (2005), without fetishizing this minority. Perhaps their “exotic sameness” will become a new norm, at last.

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The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume I: 1929-1940 by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (eds.); George Craig and Dan Gunn, associate eds.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

ISBN 978-0-521-86793-1.

782 pp.    $50/£30/€36 

 Reviewer: John L. Murphy

The editors began this project around 1985. Changes in ownership of Beckett’s works, negotiations over publication of his correspondence, and the winnowing down of 15,000 letters to 2,500 to be reprinted in four volumes, along with another 5,000 from which excerpts would be used for annotations, demonstrate the care with which this endeavor has been compiled. Beckett may be the last major writer to have his correspondence extant in an entirely non-electronic form. The range of his letters, two-thirds written in English, 30% in French, and 5% in German, attests to the cosmopolitan range and erudite ambition of his determination to imagine himself, early on, into a literary life.

Fehsenfeld and Overbeck explain how they sought a middle way between the minimalist editorial approach of Richard Ellmann for James Joyce’s letters, and the maximalist approach taken by John Kelly for W.B. Yeats’s letters. Restricted to reproducing those letters that drew directly upon Beckett’s writings, the editors nevertheless seek a liberal interpretation of this control. They explain how their first examples display Beckett’s desire to connect to correspondents. He delivers less information, and more solidarity, or intimacy, as he tries to forge a literary career – and to keep his distance from one.

As Beckett’s confidence grows, and as Murphy finally gets published after nearly two years of rejections, his language takes flight. Their content and style soar like kites, above his cities. His words may relax, energize, or recoil. No wonder “rectal spasms,” as the editors note, characterize the physicality of later 1930s letters, with analogies between the act of writing and primal, raw functions within the body.

He begins with coiled frustration. “I am looking forward to pulling the balls off the critical & poetical Proustian cock” (36). His monograph on Proust he regards more as duty than pleasure. He struggles to separate himself from his fellow and elder Irishman in Paris. “Sedendo et Quiescendo” to Beckett “stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours” (81). He then promises an editor at Chatto & Windus a scatological comparison to the precise shape of his bowel movements.

Thomas McGreevy received many of the letters included here. They speak of Beckett’s indolence: “even if I succeeded in placing something and getting some money I don’t think I would bother my arse to move.” (158) He would rather lose the world for stout “than for Lib., Egal., and Frat., and quarts de Vittel.,” (159) he tells McGreevy in May 1933. Yet Beckett wonders why Man of Aran lacked any poteen, and soon he spends more time in London, looking toward Paris rather than Dublin for his future.

A year later, he tells Morris Sinclair of his fears, that “no relationship between suffering and feeling is to be found,” and any joy comparing his own fortune to those with less “begins to look deceptive” (204). He observes himself as if “through a keyhole,” and feels at a distance well away from his own self. “Strange, yes, and altogether unsuitable for letter writing” (205).

He finds the attitude that will infuse his mature work. In Autumn 1934, he informs McGreevy that the dehumanization and mechanical nature of the artist extends to the portraits he studies so intently: “as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbor a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself” (223).

Still, humor lurks. A spider has two “penes.” The “Kook of Bells” gets a nod. T.S. Eliot spelled backwards stands for toilet. Beckett contrasts the art, plays and concerts he views with English literature. It remains mired in “old morality typifications and simplifications. I suppose the cult of the horse has something to do with it”(250).  He tires of vices and virtues. This mood may, in Spring 1935, account for his difficulties with Murphy. After analysis with Bion, Beckett rages to McGreevy. “If the heart still bubbles it is because the puddle has not been drained, and the fact of its bubbling more fiercely than ever is perhaps open to receive consolation from the waste that splutters most, when the bath is nearly empty” (259).

Yet, he watches the old men as kite flyers at Kensington’s Round Pond that autumn, and he observes them in his letter with the same detail that will enrich his novel. He tells McGreevy of a friend’s comment: “‘You haven’t a good word to say except about the failures’. I thought that was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time” (275).

Tedium shrouds 1936. Working for his brother back in Dublin tempts him briefly. “I am thinking of asking Frank does he want stamps licked in Clare Street. Though I fear my present saliva would burn a hole in the envelope” (320). He informs McGreevy: “I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them”(362).  Frank asks him after Murphy is turned down again:

‘Why can’t you write the way the people want’, when I replied that I could only write the one way, i.e. as best I could (not the right answer, not at all the right answer), he said it was a good thing for him he did not feel obliged to implement such a spirit in 6 Clare St. Even mother begins to look askance at me. My departure is long overdue. But complicated by owing them £10 apiece (366).

Beckett cannot please possible publishers. “Do they not understand that if the book is slightly obscure, it is because it is a compression, and that to compress it further can only result in making it slightly obscure?” (380). He vows that his next work will be “on rice paper with a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots” (383).

He roams Germany, refining his fluency, in early 1937. His letter to Axel Kaun in German represents a breakthrough. “It is getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears like a veil which one has to tear apart for me to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it” (518). While this exchange is well-known, within the contexts of travel and growing unease as the Continent’s fate entangles with his own uncertain future, this letter gains resonance. In 1936 he had noted how at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “all the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar” (384). He shifts from London to Paris to Dublin, unsettled.

Recovering from the 1938 attack upon him by a Parisian assailant, Beckett contemplates an offer from Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press to translate Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome. He hesitates, not wanting to do the predictably censorable work anonymously, but reluctant “to be spiked as a writer” (604). He as always needs the money, but the project fades away. His later letters document the rejections given to Murphy, and Beckett’s reluctance to stay in Ireland. “All the old people & the old places, they make me feel like an amphibian detained forcibly on dry land, very very dry land” (637).

Even in 1933 he felt an “unhandy Andy” around his family. Frank suffers his own malaise, “with the feeling all the time in the not so remote background that he is strangling his life. But who does not” (369). In 1938, Beckett learns from his brother that their mother is ailing. “I feel sorry for her often to the point of tears. That part is not analysed away, I suppose,” he tells McGreevy. From Paris, he “returned to the land of my unsuccessful abortion,” but only to “keep my mother company” before he goes back for good “to the people where the little operation is safe, legal & popular. ‘Curetage’” (647).

For Beckett’s own intimacies, this compendium remains discreet. Lucia Joyce and Peggy Guggenheim garner proper mention. Beckett stays reticent regarding his relationship with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. He introduces her to McGreevy in 1939 as “a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, who is very good to me. The hand will not be overplayed. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last” (657).

By June 1940, Beckett wonders about their fate, “provided we are staying on in Paris.” He tells Marthe Arnaud how “Suzanne seems to want to get away. I don’t. Where would we go, and with what?” (683). He concludes, c/o the painter Bram Van Velde, with a characteristically resigned, yet defiant set of images and thoughts. As those around him await the Nazi occupation, Beckett cites Murphy, and mixes his own predicament with that looming over the recipients of his final letter.

under the blue glass Bram’s painting gives off a dark flame. Yesterday evening I could see in it Neary at the Chinese restaurant, ‘huddled in the tod of his troubles like an owl in ivy’. Today it will be something different. You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky. Unless you are a dealer (683-684).

Presciently, an advance notice about More Pricks Than Kicks in The Observer opined: “Mr. Beckett is allusive, and a future editor may have to provide notes” (210). Notes expand here. Each letter earns footnotes; profiles of recipients total fifty-seven. Works cited, an index, and George Craig’s French and Viola Westbrook’s German translation prefaces supplement the letters. Contributors credited by the editors fill thirteen pages.

This is the first of four projected volumes. The diligence of those who have assembled this compendium attests to its thoroughness. Spot-checking, I could find only one small slip, an indexed reference that lacked a referent. The immense labor of Beckett, building up his own talent, is matched by the scholars who present his early correspondence, or at least a third of what remains, to an attentive audience.

Prof. John L. Murphy coordinates the Humanities sequence at DeVry University's Long Beach, California campus. His Ph.D. is from UCLA in medieval English literature. Irish language reception by English-language culture, Irish republicanism, Beckett’s purgatorial concepts, Jews in medieval Ireland, the reception of Buddhism by Irish intellectuals, folk-rock in Irish counterculture, and the presentation of otherworldly, liminal states in medieval and modern literature illustrate his published research. He reviews books and music over a broad range of topics in print and online, and he contributes to PopMatters and the New York Journal of Books regularly.

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Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor

London: Harvill Secker, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-4362-0571-2

246 pp. £16.99 (Hardback) / £7.99 (Paperback)

Reviewer: Tony Murray

In recent years, we have witnessed something of a collective “backward glance” in Irish literature. A glut of novels, set in the early to mid-twentieth century, has been published by established Irish writers, only to provoke the ire of their younger peers. Julian Gough recently commented, with some justification, that “reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented” (Flood 2010).

 There has certainly been a gradual turn by some authors towards historical fiction. Playing a prominent part in this have been novels about Irish migration. Last year, there was Colm Tóibin’s Brooklyn, set in the early 1950s; three years earlier Edna O’Brien partly set In the Light of Evening in the same location in the 1920s. But, perhaps responsible for starting the whole thing off, there was Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play that Thing (2003), again set in the 1920s, this time in Chicago. Joseph O’Connor’s most recent novel, Ghost Light, ploughs a similar furrow. But, importantly, it focuses as much on the journey eastwards to Britain as westwards to America, with post-war London providing the key backdrop to the action.

The novel is essentially a love story exploring the unlikely yet intense relationship between the playwright J.M. Synge and the actress Molly Allgood. It is a part-biographical, part-imaginative excursion into a slice of Irish theatrical history, but also an intriguing and absorbing study of the experience of exile. This is most obviously the case with regard to Molly who ended up living in destitution in a Paddington lodging house. But, it is also true, in another sense, of Synge himself who (quite apart from his sojourns in Paris and Coblenz) saw himself as “a kind of outsider” (51) or as O’Connor pointed out in a recent interview, “as a migrant among the natives” (O’Connor 2010).  Like The Light of Evening, O’Connor’s novel moves back and forth across time and space, between Ireland, England, Europe and America, between those who left and those who stayed and those who returned only to leave again. In this regard, Ghost Light explores themes of diaspora and displacement in Irish life in a more nuanced way than, for instance, Brooklyn, which is a more traditional novel of migration told in a rather linear and flat manner. O’Connor, of course, is well-qualified to take on this subject. His early work was informed by his own experiences in London in the late 1980s (O’Connor 1991) and his two outings previous to this one explored similar territory on both sides of the Atlantic (O’Connor Star of the Sea, 2002; Redemption Falls, 2007).

Ghost Light, however, is possibly O’Connor’s most technically accomplished novel to date. There are moments of striking lyrical intensity which contribute to a moving meditation on love and loss and the role of memory in our lives. His use of simile is particularly inventive and effective. Take, for instance, the way he describes Synge’s censorious habit of using the word “disappointed”, “like a tartish cologne” (89). Perhaps, O’Connor’s most ambitious decision was to write large parts of the novel in the second person, a notoriously difficult register for writers to pull off, but one which seems to work quite well. Initially, one finds oneself asking who exactly the narrator is. Is it a friend of Molly’s, is it Molly’s more famous sister Sarah, or is it, indeed, Synge? Eventually, one can only conclude that it is Molly herself, in the form of her alter ego, reflecting on episodes from her rather erratic life and career. Such memories flood her thoughts as, like a latter-day Mrs Dalloway, she ambles through the streets of post-war London to participate in a radio broadcast of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. Indeed, the foundation of the novel is a “day in the life” of Molly (27 October 1952 to be precise) and a very portentous day it proves to be, as we later discover. From here, Molly’s thoughts diverge in extended Bloom-like detours to scenes from her life with Synge: a rehearsal of The Playboy at the Abbey; a walk in the Wicklow mountains; a performance in San Francisco. The ghost of Joyce is evident also in Molly’s namesake from Ulysses who haunts the shape and accent of her thoughts and most markedly in her frank and, at times, bawdy ruminations on her sexual relationship with her “Tramp”. Synge, on the other hand, comes across as very much a product of his times and background. Like Yeats, he was essentially a middle-class Victorian gentleman with a reserve bordering on the chilly. But he was also clearly devoted to Molly and, when free from the disapproving gaze of his family and professional associates (including a rather severely drawn Lady Gregory), Synge is portrayed as a man prepared to reveal a modern and liberated self.

If a rather sombre read, the novel is nevertheless very funny in places. This is particularly true in those passages of dialogue where O’Connor gives free rein to the working-class Dublin vernacular. It is apparent in the character of Molly herself but also in the many finely-sketched auxiliary characters who pop up to provide light relief from time to time. O’Connor has a stab at some minor Cockney characters too, although the deft touch he displays when giving voice to the inhabitants of his home town is not quite so persuasive here. At moments, it verges on “Mockney” and the rather quaint off-kilter tones one might expect of a character actor fresh out of Ealing Studios. The real success of the novel is its structure which is a complex mosaic of set pieces that, if chronologically somewhat confusing, is nevertheless entirely justified. We learn about Molly, Synge, their families and acquaintances in a fragmented way, rather as we might in real life. Episodes from their lives come together in jigsaw fashion providing fresh perspectives on their personalities until, by the close, an almost complete picture of their relationship has emerged. Almost complete, because we are still left wondering at the end about precisely what drew these two people together. But, perhaps, this is not necessarily a bad thing. It invites us to complete the story ourselves and, by doing so, play our part in an imaginative journey as important as Molly and Synge’s, namely that between the writer and his readers.

Works Cited

Flood, Alison. 2010. ‘Julian Gough slams fellow Irish novelists as ‘priestly caste’ cut off from the culture’ in The Guardian, 11 February.

O’Connor, Joseph. 1991. Cowboys and Indians. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.

_______.  2002. Star of the Sea: Farewell to Old Ireland. London: Secker & Warburg

_______. 2007. Redemption Falls. London: Harvill Secker.

_______. 2010. “The Playboy and his Muse” in Prospect 171, 25 May

Tony Murray is Deputy Director of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University. He is curator of the Archive of the Irish in Britain and runs the annual Irish Writers in London Summer School. He researches literary and cultural representations of the Irish diaspora and his monograph, London Irish Fictions: Diaspora and Identity in the Literature of the Post-War Irish in London will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2012. 

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