Introduction

Northern Irish novelist Maurice Leitch was born into a working-class Protestant family in County Antrim and began his career as a primary-school teacher before turning to writing.[1] He later joined the BBC in Belfast as a radio producer and writer, publishing his debut novel, The Liberty Lad, in 1965. The novel follows Frank Glass, a young schoolteacher attempting to escape the emotional, social and cultural confines of his Protestant mill-town upbringing in Northern Ireland. A similar oppressive sectarian setting appears in his second novel, Poor Lazarus (1969), a compelling tale of a Protestant outsider navigating a predominantly Catholic community. The novel earned him the Guardian Fiction Prize but was banned in the Republic of Ireland for its depiction of homosexuality.[2] In 1970, Leitch moved from Belfast to London, where he continued his work with BBC Radio while simultaneously building a literary career, publishing novels, short stories and scripts for radio and television. Among his acclaimed works is Silver’s City (1981), which won the Whitbread Prize and is set in a war-torn Belfast during the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Leitch went on to publish eight further novels, featuring diverse plots and narrative voices, yet consistently populated by characters who dwell in the shadows of Northern Ireland’s past, reflecting on the enduring impact of political trauma and the difficulty of breaking free from history. Following his death in 2023 at the age of 90, obituaries in both the British and Irish press recognised Leitch as an “acclaimed Northern Irish” voice (Doyle 2023; The Telegraph 2023; Farrell 2023).

Despite this sustained engagement with Northern Irish settings and concerns, Leitch’s final novel, Gone to Earth (2019), marks a geographical departure by setting its narrative in mid-1950s Spain. The reader is transported to a small fishing village on the southern coast, where the central mystery revolves around Diego, a former left-wing Republican fighter in the Spanish Civil War. Presumed dead by Franco’s regime, Diego lives in hiding, “in constant fear of discovery” (2019: 26), alongside his wife Adriana, who works as head housekeeper in one of the first hotels in Torremolinos. This atmosphere of secrecy and repression serves as a backdrop for the internal struggles of other characters, each haunted by personal loss, hidden pasts and the lingering fear of a totalitarian regime. While the Spanish setting might initially appear distant from Leitch’s earlier depictions of Northern Ireland, critics have noted striking continuities. David Clark observes that Diego’s self-imposed imprisonment “draws inevitable comparisons with the political situation in Northern Ireland” (2022: 277), while publisher James Doyle remarked that the fictional Spain of Gone to Earth shares much “in common with the Antrim mill villages of Leitch’s early novels” (2019). These observations raise an intriguing question: to what extent does Leitch use the Spanish setting to reimagine the themes and concerns of his earlier Irish fiction? This article aims to expand on these remarks by examining how, in Gone to Earth, Leitch constructs a narrative of transnational reflection, in which the conflicts and historical traumas of Ireland are refracted through the remnants of Francoist Spain.

To examine the links between Leitch’s earlier Northern Irish fiction and his final novel, Gone to Earth, this article draws on insights from trauma and memory studies. These disciplines offer valuable perspectives for understanding how literature engages with the psychological and societal repercussions of conflict, repression and historical violence. Cathy Caruth, in the introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), illuminates how texts reveal lives marked by post-traumatic stress as well as the physical and mental consequences of traumatic experiences. She defines post-traumatic stress as “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event” (1995: 4). Traumatised characters, therefore, are often represented as being possessed by images or events from the past (1995: 5), as is evident in Leitch’s novels. Furthermore, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan’s Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel (2018) provides a further framework, arguing that while twentieth-century Irish fiction often depicted trauma through silence and suffering, more recent narratives explore the potential for “healing and recovery” (2018: 3), shaped by the authors’ historical and cultural moment. This evolution in literary responses to trauma is a useful lens through which to reconsider Leitch’s work. Although Silver’s City (1981) serves as a primary point of comparison, this article also draws on earlier novels such as The Liberty Lad (1965) and Poor Lazarus (1969) to contextualise Leitch’s sustained engagement with themes of violence, loss and memory. The analysis is structured in three sections, focusing on setting, character and theme to explore how Gone to Earth revisits the traumas of Leitch’s earlier Northern Irish fiction while gesturing more explicitly towards the possibility of recovery.

Setting: Repression, Exile, and Haunted Landscapes

In literature, setting is crucial not only for establishing time and place, but also for creating atmosphere, shaping character and layering meaning. In both Gone to Earth and Leitch’s earlier Northern Irish fiction, setting functions less as backdrop than as a political and psychological force. Spain in the 1950s, under Franco’s dictatorship, was a period of harsh political repression and economic hardship, marked by autarky, censorship and police surveillance. Repressive measures included political purges, arbitrary trials, arrests and executions, particularly of former Republican sympathisers.[3] Northern Ireland during the Troubles was not governed by a totalitarian regime, but it was nonetheless scarred by sectarian violence, surveillance, and silenced dissent.[4] Both contexts foster landscapes where everyday life is suffused with fear. The Spanish village in Gone to Earth, seemingly remote and idyllic, is in fact tightly controlled: Diego, a former Republican mayor, must live in concealment and constant fear of betrayal. This recalls the atmosphere of Silver’s City, set at the height of the Troubles, where figures such as Ned Galloway, a violent freelance gunman, and “Silver” Steele, a former Loyalist folk-hero, navigate a Belfast in which violence is ever-present. Both settings operate as traumatised geographies, shaped by invisible yet palpable systems of control. From a trauma studies perspective, they materialise the lingering effects of political violence and the internalisation of fear. As the Irish publisher of Gone to Earth remarked on reading the manuscript, he was struck by “how familiar this Spain seemed, how evocative of my memories of growing up in 1980s Fermanagh” (Doyle 2019).

A recurring feature of Leitch’s fiction is the depiction of enclosed, parochial communities – the mill town in The Liberty Lad or the tight-knit coastal village in Gone to Earth – where privacy is illusory and communal scrutiny relentless. These microcosms enforce conformity, sustaining a moral rigidity that leaves little space for individuality or dissent. The Spanish setting of Gone to Earth is Torremolinos, then a poor fishing village on the southern coast of Spain, prior to the tourism boom of the late 1950s. Adriana’s work at the luxury Hotel Miramar places her in a visible yet precarious position: surrounded by affluent tourists, she remains constantly fearful of dismissal for minor infractions, such as answering the telephone during the Minister’s visit (2019: 53-55) – a detail emblematic of the regime’s punitive control. Similarly, in the impoverished neighbourhood where she lives – the Barrio, where Diego is hidden – people “view the world through the eye of a needle” (2019: 2). Such spaces offer no true refuge. The same claustrophobic dynamic appears in The Liberty Lad, where Frank Glass’s suffocation derives not only from sectarian politics but also from the cultural conservatism of a decaying Protestant industrial town. The contrast between the Hotel Miramar and the Barrio in Gone to Earth echoes the literal and symbolic divide in Leitch’s Irish setting, represented by the railway that “skirts the energetic centre of population and also separates Protestants from Catholics” (1965: 112). Though set in the early 1960s, the novel already anticipates the social and political tensions that would erupt during the Troubles. Across these works, Leitch’s settings emerge as socially claustrophobic spaces, showing how trauma is not only inflicted by the state but also perpetuated by community complicity and silence.

While the physical exile experienced by some characters in Spain appears to contrast with the domestic settings of Leitch’s Irish fiction, a closer reading reveals a deeper continuity. In Gone to Earth, Diego is not merely hiding in the attic of his house in Torremolinos for fear of being discovered by Franco’s police; he is also in a state of internal exile, haunted by the trauma of the Spanish Civil War and unable to reconcile with the past. Time and again, he is visited by memories of the war, while “writing about the past to take his mind off the even more dangerous present” (2019: 94). Similarly, the lonely Irish expatriate Eugene Furlong, who lives in an apartment in Las Golondrinas, experiences his own internal exile after having fought in the Spanish war as a volunteer with the Fifteenth Bandera on Franco’s side.[5] He is described as “another foreigner escaping from a past which was his business and no-one else’s” (2019: 34). This mirrors the existential displacement of characters like Albert Yarr in Poor Lazarus, a haunting portrait of a man adrift in a sea of alienation, as the only Protestant in the small village of Ballyboe, County Donegal. His alienation stems from being at odds with the political and cultural narratives surrounding him. A character with a history of mental disorder, described with understated irony in the narrative as suffering from “melancholia. The Irish malady” (1969: 177), Yarr frequently plunges into his stream of consciousness, revealing his anger and resentment. Trauma, as theorised by Cathy Caruth and others, often results in a dislocation of identity – something Leitch represents not only through character psychology but also through setting. The Spanish landscape, unfamiliar and foreign, allows the reader to perceive this dislocation both literally and symbolically, while still echoing the emotional geography of exile seen throughout Leitch’s Irish work.

Leitch’s settings are also defined by the unspoken histories they embody. In Gone to Earth, the scars of the Spanish Civil War and the repression of Franco’s regime are inscribed into the very landscape – deserted streets at night, whispered conversations, and a hotel that serves as a microcosm of the dictatorship. A telling example is the fields Adriana crosses on her way to work at the hotel, where she encounters an old man tending a garden of tomatoes, melons and aubergines, irrigated with water stolen from the landowner. This shared secret of an illicit act underscores the small strategies of survival under oppression, paralleling Diego’s concealment. Silence is paramount here: “Yet they never speak, and she wonders does he know about her husband, and is the widow of a rojo as bad as breaching a landowner’s irrigation channel” (2019: 3). Many other suppressed stories surface in this politically repressive society – whether through Diego, the hidden Republican, or Johnnie Ray, the American singer at the Hotel Miramar who conceals his homosexuality. The atmosphere of melancholy, tension, and unspoken history that permeates the book flows directly from these collective acts of suppression. Similarly, in Silver’s City, Belfast is haunted by the ghostly presence of former paramilitaries and the ideological wreckage of a once-hopeful revolution. The protagonist, Silver Steele – once a fearsome Loyalist icon and community figure – has become a ghost of himself: sick, broken, and forgotten, watching silently as his paramilitary ideals disintegrate: “[…] all future dreams, dreams he had constructed for himself and the others in that place of wire and guard-towers until it had become the only reason for getting through each day: all of that was at an end for him” (1981: 180). In the final scene, Silver perceives Belfast as a devouring city that consumes the aspirations of its inhabitants: “Old and cynical begetter, it watched its sons come, it watched them go” (1981: 180-81). Viewed through trauma studies’ emphasis on what is repressed but never fully forgotten, these spaces operate as repositories of unresolved histories. They are not merely backdrops for personal drama but active agents in the narrative – compelling characters to confront what remains buried, both publicly and privately.

Despite the similarities between the repressive and bleak settings in Gone to Earth and Leitch’s earlier Irish fiction, by shifting the setting from Northern Ireland to Spain, Gone to Earth introduces a temporal and geographical distance that opens new interpretative possibilities. On the one hand, Belfast, Ballyboe or the decaying mill village of Kildargan in Antrim offer little promise of a hopeful future amid the sectarian conflict. As the Irish novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennet observed in 1998, fiction in Northern Ireland tended to represent the Troubles as “an irrational and bloody slaughter without solution” (1998: 200). In contrast to the immediacy and intensity of Silver’s City, where violence is ongoing and inescapable, the Spanish setting of Gone to Earth allows for a more contemplative engagement with trauma. This is evident at the end of the story, when Eugene, after informing his American friend Johnnie that Adriana and Diego will be arrested by the police, remarks: “Water under the bridge” (2019: 191), acknowledging that the situation is unchangeable and suggesting a reduction of distress through the acceptance of what cannot be controlled. The subsequent scene, in which Eugene walks back to the hotel, looking at the sky and recognising a constellation with symbolic significance in Ireland – “The Plough, the North Star at its tip, which helped you get your bearings on one of those pitch black Leitrim nights at home” (2019: 191) – points to a newfound sense of orientation and purpose for this character. This shift aligns with Kathleen Costello-Sullivan’s observation that contemporary Irish fiction increasingly explores healing and recovery, rather than dwelling solely on trauma. Spain, as a setting, functions as both a mirror and a buffer – reflecting the dynamics of repression and fear familiar from Leitch’s Irish fiction while permitting a tentative movement towards closure. In this sense, Gone to Earth reimagines the trauma-saturated landscapes of Leitch’s earlier novels, suggesting that distance may be necessary for recovery to begin.

Characters: Ghosts of War, Memory, and Transnational Trauma

The most significant character embodying trauma, self-imposed exile and resistance in Gone to Earth is Diego, though his presence is largely confined to the shadows. Like many of Leitch’s male protagonists – particularly Yarr in Poor Lazarus and Silver in Silver’s City – Diego is a figure consumed by the past, defined by defeat and rendered voiceless by historical repression. A former Socialist mayor during the Spanish Republic, he survives Franco’s purges by hiding in his own home, in a “tiny cupboard of a room” (2019: 3), living “like some silent ghost […] in constant fear of discovery (2019: 26). His existence is both literal and metaphorical burial, and the ghostly metaphor applied to Diego connects him to characters such as Silver, whose former heroism has been transformed into disillusionment. Once a revered Loyalist, Silver has become a ghost of himself – sick, broken and forgotten. Similarly, Yarr represents another form of the living dead: an outsider, estranged from society and utterly defeated by political tensions in a predominantly Catholic border town. The description of his emotions in a pub scene after listening to a song about Terence MacSwiney – the IRA leader imprisoned in England who died on hunger strike in 1920 – highlights the difficult and lonely existence Yarr endures:

He stood, feeling lonely, out from the edge of the crowd, one hand in his pocket, the other plucking at his lapel, waiting. It became suddenly plain to him how apart he was from this mob. He didn’t belong. […] He also realised, and not for the first time in his life either, how cruelly fast they might align themselves against him if a whim nipped them. (1968: 53)

Diego’s ghostly confinement resonates not only with Silver’s broken heroism and Yarr’s estrangement, but also with experiences beyond fiction. A striking parallel can be found in Northern Ireland during the Troubles: in a review of Gone to Earth, the publisher recalls the case of Belfast boxer Eamonn Magee’s father, who hid in his attic for around 18 months after being labelled an informer by the IRA (Doyle 2019).[6] This real-life ordeal adds a transhistorical dimension to the novel, inviting reflection on the traumatic costs of political resistance and state violence.

Eugene represents a contrasting ideological trajectory – one of misguided idealism that culminates in long-term alienation. At the age of 22, he volunteered for the Irish Brigade and fought on Franco’s side, believing it to be a Christian crusade. He had been “inflamed by the cinema newsreels back home of churches being torched, altars destroyed, nuns raped, priests murdered” (2019: 77). On returning to Ireland, however, General O’Duffy and his volunteers were deeply unpopular. After his father’s death, Eugene moved first to England and later to Spain, carrying with him a sense of displacement. Throughout the novel, he emerges as a solitary figure haunted by the “terrible things he’s witnessed and been party to” during the Spanish Civil War (2019: 127). He embodies a form of trauma that, as Cathy Caruth suggests (1995: 4), often surfaces in intrusive thoughts and dreams. The narrative underscores this through repeated references to images that “had stayed scorched on his brain” (2019: 135), and towards the end of the novel Eugene even admits to Adriana that many of his memories of the war give him “bad dreams” (2019: 169). His participation in the Spanish Civil War on Franco’s side, motivated by religious fervour and nationalist propaganda, mirrors the trajectories of young Protestant or Catholic men in Leitch’s Northern Irish fiction who join paramilitary forces under the illusion of a moral crusade, only to encounter betrayal or disillusionment. Eugene’s limp – sustained not in war but later in England (2019: 77) – becomes a metaphor for how trauma is often displaced, manifesting not at the moment of violence but in its aftermath. In this way, his marginalisation – no longer welcome in Ireland and isolated in Spain – resonates with the wider pattern of Leitch’s protagonists: outsiders unable to reintegrate into society, figures marked by exile and dislocation.

Another spectral presence in Gone to Earth is Adriana, a sensible and humble woman who endures the stigma of being the widow of a former Republican mayor and soldier. She lives in constant fear of reprisals, risking her life if the police discover that she is helping her husband Diego to hide in the attic. Her daily routines centre on caring for her husband, evading Franco’s police and navigating the hotel’s political tensions. From the opening scene, she is introduced leaving home for work “silent as a ghost” (2019: 1), her spectral quality signalling both her marginalisation and her resilience. Adriana embodies the role of the post-war survivor who carries the social and emotional burden of another’s trauma – in this case, her husband’s. It is she who, when Diego returned from the war, persuaded him to hide at home rather than surrender, reasoning that “even if he wasn’t shot, he’d end up in the concentration camp at Torremolinos instead” (2019: 93). This moment reveals her pragmatic agency, but also her entrapment within a system that forces her into secrecy and silence. Adriana thus represents the suppressed voices of women who bore the brunt of the civil war’s devastation and the cruelty of the regime that followed. Rather than embodying the active, militarised roles of figures such as Diego and Eugene, Adriana aligns with the notion of the “third Spain” – those who sought distance from the fervent militancy of either side but nonetheless endured the war’s consequences.^[7] Her ghostlike presence also recalls female figures in Leitch’s Northern Irish fiction who survive through silence. One such example is Nan Harding in Silver’s City, a massage-parlour worker living on the margins of society, yet one of the few characters to display humanity, autonomy and emotional depth. Nan is not politically active or ideologically driven; instead, her scars, coping decisions and quiet endurance mirror the broader trauma of a society under siege, representing the often-overlooked civilian and female experience of the Troubles. Her life is shaped by fear, male control, emotional damage and silent endurance. To protect herself and preserve her identity, she fabricates fantasies of companionship, claiming not to live alone but to share a flat with two other women: “she almost got to know those non-existent flatmates, re-inventing them and their little ways each time. […] They were part of her private life, two ghosts inhabiting the same two rooms, kitchen and bath, she paid so handsomely for” (1981: 97). The passage is telling: her imagined companions function as psychological defences, but they also reinforce her spectral status, multiplying the ghostly presences that haunt Leitch’s fiction. Viewed through the lens of trauma studies, characters like Adriana and Nan exemplify secondary trauma and inherited political stigma, suggesting that women’s agency in conflict is often articulated not through direct confrontation but through strategies of survival and endurance.

Where earlier characters in Leitch’s fiction – such as Frank, Yarr or Silver – are locked into cycles of despair, guilt and isolation, Gone to Earth tentatively gestures towards the possibility of recovery. Silver’s ending, for instance, offers a bleak and nihilistic outlook: he surrenders to the police, not as an act of heroism but as resignation, the final gesture of a man who recognises he no longer belongs anywhere. His fate is imprisonment once more, where he “would have plenty of time to go over the things that crammed his head. That would be his sentence, for the city always made you pay for your dreams” (1981: 181). The conclusion is one of collapse rather than resolution – no justice, redemption, or peace, only existential reckoning. By contrast, Gone to Earth opens a different horizon. While Diego remains in hiding, the novel allows space for reflection, memory work and even emotional connection, primarily through Adriana’s protective love and through his act of writing. His obsession with the past leads him to record his life and war experiences in the school exercise-books Adriana buys for him (2019: 24). This compulsive writing functions therapeutically, since it takes “his mind off the even more dangerous present” (2019: 94). In trauma theory, narrative is often framed as a means of “working through” suffering, and Diego’s writing resonates with this idea. Although the novel ends with Adriana and Diego about to be arrested – an echo of Silver’s City – the tone and prospect are markedly different. Diego dresses in his best clothes and, calm and dignified, prepares to surrender, leaving secrecy and lies behind. Adriana, recalling her first love for him, describes him as a “caballero autentico [sic]” (2019: 199). This Spanish phrase, significantly, carries cultural weight: to be a caballero auténtico is to embody honour, dignity and moral strength, qualities absent from Silver’s broken surrender. The tonal shift signals not only a development in Leitch’s treatment of trauma but also an evolution in his political outlook. Whereas earlier works end in paralysis, Gone to Earth gestures towards the possibility of dignity and even reconciliation. In this sense, the novel exemplifies what Costello-Sullivan identifies as a tendency in twenty-first-century Irish fiction to explore recovery rather than merely mapping pain. The intertextual echo with Silver’s City is thus crucial: both novels end in arrest, yet their emotional registers diverge sharply. By reframing familiar themes of defeat and dislocation through the Spanish setting, Leitch extends the concerns of Irish trauma beyond national borders, suggesting that recovery may require distance, re-narration and new geographies.

Themes: Conflict, Fear, Memory, and the Possibility of Healing

Both Northern Ireland and Francoist Spain were shaped by bitter ideological conflicts that split communities and legitimised brutal repression. In Gone to Earth, the long shadow of the Spanish Civil War and the silence it imposed echoes the sectarian violence of Leitch’s earlier novels, particularly Silver’s City, where urban guerrilla warfare renders Belfast a fractured, paranoid space. Through continuous flashbacks, violence constantly resurfaces in Gone to Earth, suggesting that the war has not really ended but lives on in the memories of Diego, Eugene, Adriana and others. The novel depicts violence as senseless and indiscriminate, perpetrated by both sides: the anarchists who threatened to kill right-wing villagers, burn the church and murder Father Gregorio (2019: 24-26), and Franco’s North African troops, who rape women (2019: 139) or “tak[e] the ears of the enemy for trophies” (2019: 83). This critical brutality recalls Silver’s City, which opens with a scene of sectarian violence: Ned Galloway, a Loyalist paramilitary, is ordered to execute a local doctor, and carries it out in cold blood before the victim’s ten-year-old daughter (1981: 3-5). Here, violence frequently slips from political conflict into criminal opportunism, with young men committing atrocities for power rather than ideology. Galloway epitomises this new generation – thriving on chaos, intoxicated by brutality and detached from conviction. His sadism is captured in a chilling fantasy: “‘Look at them,’ he announced. ‘All those tight-arsed hypocrites in their Sunday suits. I’d love to spray a few rounds in among that crew […] Just to hear them squeal’” (1981: 89). This sadistic relish in this scene resonates with the figure of Captain Delgado in Gone to Earth, a bullying police officer who embodies Francoist brutality and “enjoy[ed] reminding others what it was like to be on the losing side” (2019: 109). Such parallels reveal Leitch’s sustained interest in exposing the corrupting effects of violence: whether in Belfast or Andalusia, its ideological justification collapses into cruelty, intimidation and self-interest. In both contexts, political myths – whether Nationalist or Republican, Loyalist or Republican – are stripped of their moral certainty, leaving only trauma and unresolved grief. This intertextual continuity positions Gone to Earth not as a departure from Leitch’s earlier work, but as its transnational extension, where Spain becomes a mirror through which to reread Ireland’s own cycle of violence.

Fear and silence pervade both Gone to Earth and Leitch’s Northern Irish fiction. Characters live under regimes – Franco’s Spain and the militarised Northern Ireland of the Troubles – where authority is not only externally imposed (through police, soldiers, informants) but also internalised as psychological repression. Leitch’s portrayal of Franco’s Spain in the 1950s is bleak: civil guards patrol the streets, harassing vulnerable women like Adriana on her way to work (2019: 2), while Diego survives in perpetual hiding. His existence parallels the hyper-vigilance and emotional repression of Leitch’s Belfast characters, who learn to live under constant threat. The Hotel Miramar, where Adriana works, becomes a metaphor for Spain’s façade of normality under dictatorship – a fragile performance masking fear and control. Similarly, Leitch’s depictions of Northern Irish towns often present a superficial order beneath which violence simmers. In Silver’s City, the constant drone of army helicopters patrolling Belfast from above (1981: 28, 66, 149) captures the sense of omnipresent monitoring. Combined with “security checks” (1981: 101) and the informal authority of paramilitaries, these images render Belfast a militarised zone: civilian life unfolds under occupation, where governance gives way to surveillance and coercion. As James Doyle observes in his review of Gone to Earth, the novel portrays “a police state, whose people (like the Northern Irish) follow the philosophy of ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’” (2019). In both contexts, silence becomes both a survival strategy and a symptom of repression. Leitch’s work thus shows how trauma is not only an individual burden but a social condition – producing communities of watchers, whisperers and the perpetually silenced.

Leitch’s fiction consistently insists that the past is never buried – it resurfaces, demanding reckoning. Gone to Earth literalises this through its spectral figure in the attic: Diego, writing memories that continually reopen old wounds. Eugene is too haunted by war; though he drinks to forget (2019: 31), the images remain vivid in his thoughts and dreams. Most characters attempt to suppress the past, but with little success. As the hotel manager Don Gustavo warns Adriana: “God knows, I’m someone who believes the past dead and buried, but there are others with long memories, not so forgiving” (2019: 60). A hotel waiter echoes this sense of collective memory when he tells the American singer: “In our country, Senor [sic] Johnnie, no one forgets, not even those who don’t remember” (110). The motif of memory’s persistence directly recalls Silver’s City and Poor Lazarus, where attempts to escape history are continually thwarted. Silver himself embodies the impossibility of leaving the past behind: once a “great household name” (1981: 24), his identity lingers on murals and in popular memory – “it was hard to avoid either the sight or sound of that name in the part of town” (1981: 25). Similarly in Poor Lazarus, Yarr is violently reminded of his own history when an old man in a pub calls him a “British cunt” and an “Informer”, an insult that pierces him with an “old half-forgotten memory” (1969: 55). Across both Spanish and Irish contexts, what remains unspoken – political betrayal, familial guilt, social complicity – festers, returning to haunt the present. Adriana, Diego, Eugene, Silver and Yarr all carry the marks of these unresolved histories, their lives shaped by the impossibility of forgetting. In dramatising this recurrence, Leitch’s fiction embodies what Cathy Caruth describes as trauma’s return as a “wound that cries out” (1996: 4) – an unassimilated past that insists on making itself heard.

While earlier works like Silver’s City end in despair or death, Gone to Earth allows glimpses of continuity, care and quiet resistance. Adriana’s protective love, Diego’s compulsive writing, and even the tentative bond between Adriana and Eugene suggest that healing – however fragile – is possible. Small acts of defiance sustain this hope: Adriana smuggles foreign newspapers from the hotel so that he can access uncensored news, even if he needs a dictionary to read them (2019: 50), while Diego clings to the Spanish-language broadcasts of exiled communities in Russia, Paris and London, “his salvation and sanity for these twenty odd years” (2019: 24). These gestures underscore not only resilience but also faith in an alternative future beyond repression. Such moments of care and survival mark a tonal shift in Leitch’s fiction, aligning with Costello-Sullivan’s claim that contemporary Irish writing increasingly moves beyond mapping trauma to exploring recovery and meaning-making. Though the ghosts of history remain, Gone to Earth ends with the suggestion that remembrance need not paralyse the characters: living with the past may be painful, but it can also be redemptive. In this sense, Leitch’s Spanish novel is not merely an echo of his earlier concerns but rather a tentative step into new emotional terrain, extending his exploration of trauma towards the possibility of renewal.

Conclusion

This analysis demonstrates that Maurice Leitch’s final novel, Gone to Earth, is less a departure than a transnational reframing of his core concerns. By transposing the psychological and social dynamics of Northern Ireland onto the landscape of Francoist Spain, Leitch uses the Spanish setting as a critical lens. The repressive atmosphere of the 1950s fishing village – marked by fear, surveillance and silenced histories – mirrors the claustrophobic Ulster communities of his earlier fiction. This geographical and temporal displacement defamiliarises entrenched sectarian tensions, allowing their underlying structures of trauma, fear and suppressed memory to be examined with fresh clarity. The novel thus constructs a comparative framework in which the legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the Troubles illuminate one another, revealing the recurring patterns of post-conflict societies. At the same time, the distance afforded by Spain enables a more symbolic engagement with authority and survival. Eugene’s final glimpse of “The Plough, the North Star at its tip” signals a tentative orientation towards the future. Setting, in this sense, is not backdrop but an active agent – a repository of memory and violence that also opens a space for reflection and the possibility of recovery.

The characters in Gone to Earth embody these transnational traumas, echoing Leitch’s Irish figures while marking a new phase in his work. Diego’s spectral existence recalls Silver’s psychological imprisonment; Eugene’s disillusionment parallels the fate of young Belfast men drawn to paramilitary myths; Adriana’s quiet strength reframes the overlooked burdens borne by women, recalling Nan Harding in Silver’s City. However, a crucial evolution is evident. Where Leitch’s earlier novels culminate in cycles of despair and nihilistic surrender, Gone to Earth gestures tentatively towards the possibility of recovery through Diego’s therapeutic writing and the final, dignified reclamation of his identity as a “caballero autentico [sic]”. This shift aligns with Costello-Sullivan’s observation of a movement in contemporary Irish fiction from representing trauma towards exploring pathways of healing.

Thematically, Gone to Earth both reiterates and reconfigures Leitch’s preoccupations with fear, violence and memory. Political and social repression, whether under Franco or amid the Troubles, generates cycles of fear, silence, and moral ambiguity, while intrusive memories keep past wounds alive. Diego’s war memories, Adriana’s protective vigilance and Eugene’s haunted introspections transform suffering into narrative, linking private scars to broader histories. However, small acts of defiance – reading foreign newspapers, listening to exile radio broadcasts, preserving personal histories – suggest that even under extreme repression, individuals can assert agency and retain dignity. In its tonal shift from the fatalism of Silver’s City to the cautious hope in Gone to Earth, Leitch affirms that remembering need not be paralysing; it can sustain dignity and endurance. This tonal evolution again reflects the broader trajectory of contemporary Irish fiction, from mapping trauma toward exploring recovery.

Ultimately, Gone to Earth stands as a capstone to Leitch’s career, refining and expanding his lifelong engagement with conflict’s aftermath. The Spanish lens does not simply replicate Irish themes but reconfigures them, providing a space for contemplation where the immediacy of violence is replaced by a focus on long-term reckoning and resilience. By drawing these transnational parallels, Leitch universalises the Northern Irish experience, positioning it within a wider European struggle to confront difficult histories. His final novel argues that while the ghosts of violence and repression remain, survival strategies – memory, narrative and human connection – offer a fragile but vital path to redemption. Published shortly before his death in 2023, Gone to Earth stands as both testament and transition: a work that distils his persistent themes while signalling the possibility of renewal.

Acknowledgements

The research leading to the publication of this essay was supported by funding from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Investigación under the 2022 programme of grants for research projects (Reference PID2022-140013NB-I00).

Notes

[1] For a brief overview of Leitch’s biographical details and writings, see the introductory note to the chapter on his novel Stamping Ground in George O’Brien’s The Irish Novel, 1960–2010 (2012: 52).

[2] His earlier novel, The Liberty Lad, was also banned south of the border on similar grounds (Carlson 1990: 97-108).

[3] Among the extensive literature on Franco’s regime, four studies of particular interest are those by Casanova (2015), Moradiellos (2000), Rodríguez (2010) and Tusell (1988).

[4] Considerable scholarship also exists on the Troubles; see, for instance, McKittrick and McVea (2000) and Radden Keefe (2018).

[5] In his psychological thriller Gilchrist (1994) Leitch introduces a lonely Irish old-age pensioner in exile on the Costa del Sol – an Ulster preacher on the run to Spain with church funds.

[6] This haunting episode is discussed in Paul G. Gibson’s biography of the boxer, The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee (2018). Other similar cases are recounted in Ed Moloney’s Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland (2010: 115, 279-80).

[7] For details about the concept of the “third Spain,” see Paul Preston’s series of short biographies Las tres Españas del 36 (1998) and Alfonso Botti’s Historias de las “terceras Españas” (2023).