Estudios Irlandeses , Number 8, 2013, pp. 177-194 ______AEDEI IRISH STUDIES ROUND THE WORLD - 2012

Patricia A. Lynch (ed.)

Copyright (c) 2013 by the authors. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the authors and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access.

Reflections on Irish Writing in 2013 by Patricia A. Lynch ...... 178 The Bell Magazine and the Representation of Irish Identity: Opening Windows (2012) by Kelly Mathews Malcolm Ballin ...... 183 Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (2011) by Eamonn Wall Mairéad Conneely ...... 185 Stewart Parker, A Life (2012) by Marilyn Richtarik Maureen Hawkins ...... 187 Jailtacht: The Irish Language, Symbolic Power, and Political Violence in Northern Ireland, 1972-2008 (2012) by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost John L. Murphy ...... 189 The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (2012) ed. by John Crowley, William J Smyth and Mike Murphy John O’Callaghan …...... 191 London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (2012) by Tony Murray Louise Sheridan ...... 193

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Estudios Irlandeses , Number 8, 2013, pp. 178-182 ______AEDEI

Reflections on Irish Writing in 2012 Patricia A. Lynch

In the Ireland emerging into 2013, some of the late Caroline Walsh, literary editor of the important facts of Irish life are still similar to the Irish Times , who was commemorated on many preceding years. The severe recession is still occasions, including in two of the books which I there, and in some ways has tightened its grip on am reviewing below. the population, but there are green shoots to be Some other positive upcoming events include seen in the form of slightly increased what is called The Gathering. Taking its employment, a deal on the national debt which inspiration from a similar Scottish event, will save the country some billions of euro, and a members of the Irish diaspora are invited to visit manifest improvement in the performance of the Ireland in 2013, and there are many events and United States; as an American friend said to me functions planned for this purpose. While some many years ago: “Whatever happens in America people, notably Irish actor Gabriel Byrne will appear in Ireland three-quarters of an hour (cultural ambassador for Ireland in the US 2010- later!” So there is some reason to hope. 2011), are rather cynical about the financial In this recession, literature and critical writing expectations of the organisers, others perceive it still flourish, book launches take place almost as to be mutually beneficial to both the Irish at often as before, associations continue to hold and to the Irish visitors to the home of their their annual conferences, and journals make their ancestors. Let us look forward to all who choose regular yearly appearances. An example of this to come back, let us make them truly welcome, was the Dublin Book Festival in November, the and join with them in commemorating the great fifth in succession, therefore coterminous with events which brought about our nation’s the recession, a fact that speaks for itself. I had independence. This year sees the centenary of the the great pleasure of attending the annual lockout of the workers by the employers in 1913, conference of IASIL (International Association leading to many recruitments to the British Army for the Study of Irish Literatures), taking place in the First World War, and the formation of the for the first time in Concordia University, Socialist movement that culminated in The Irish Montréal, another achievement for the Citizen Army, which was to play a significant burgeoning Irish Studies programme in this part in the Easter Rising of 1916. All of these University. Edna O’Brien finally brought out her events led to rich literature output which we will memoir, aptly Country Girl, with Faber and also commemorate. Faber. Of the newer faces on the scene, Kevin The first recent work which I read in 2012 was Barry brought out his second short-story Maurice O’Callaghan’s novel In Their Dreams of collection Dark Lies the Island. Fire . This fiction is set in West Cork, home of Of course there have been losses too. Many the author, who is a lawyer, novelist, and both academics took the option of early retirement just writer and director of a movie. The chronology a year ago, leaving departments of Irish Studies of the book is the Irish War of Independence and often with depleted staff and resources. The the subsequent civil war, covering the period death took place of the greatly loved author and 1919 to 1923, the same period which featured in doyenne of Irish popular literature, Maeve his earlier movie. The novel opens with a Binchy, but nonetheless her latest and last book detailed description of an Anglo-Irish gentleman came out this year. Another great loss was that walking in a beautiful landscape which is far older than his family’s possession of the estate.

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Sights and sounds of the countryside are lovingly and this is clearly indicated by the two lists set depicted: out at the end, those characters who are fictional The trees were very old. Their branches spread and the vastly greater number which are outwards and up as if they would embrace and historical. The author’s research is thorough; he shelter all living things. In the wood there was uses as background not only formal histories but birdsong, the pop of ladyfingers in the heat, dogs’ also autobiographical works such as Ernie distant barking across the river, a fringe of ghosts O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound (1936). in Jasper’s old walled estate and manor house. The immediacy that characterises O’Malley’s There was the shimmer of leaves and a fluttering account is also found in O’Callaghan’s work, but downwards of white and pink-petalled flowers. the latter is neither history nor autobiography; it Twigs crackled under the feet of squirrels and is fiction. After the initial ponderousness of the rabbits (O’Callaghan 2011: 3). work, I was held by the story and my interest was The style is slow, luxuriantly descriptive, and riveted until the end. reminiscent of late nineteenth-century fiction, The second and third novels which I read with particularly that of Thomas Hardy. There is the great pleasure have quite a number of themes in appearance of action with the meeting of Jasper common, as will become apparent in the with a gentleman friend, then later with two following paragraphs. First of these is John workers picturesque as any of Wordsworth’s Banville’s novel Ancient Light . It has many . However the mood and style change echoes of an earlier Banville fiction, the Booker- rapidly with the appearance of the next actors on winning The Sea (2005): a boy becomes friendly the scene, British soldiers known familiarly as with a family who are of a higher social status; in ‘Black and Tans’ , drunk on whiskey and spoiling both, the boy falls in love with his friends’ for a fight. Their journey in an army vehicle mother; in both, some or all of the family die from the town of Bandon into the countryside is prematurely. The actual parents of the two described with a wealth of local detail which narrators are rather obscure figures in the gradually gives way to a sense of menace. A background, and the narrators as adults recalling young woman named Elizabeth coming with their youth have troubled, insomniac daughters in food to the two workers becomes a target for the their twenties. The sea in both is associated with soldiers, and in the ensuing struggle the older tragedy. The Grace family in the earlier novel worker is killed for coming to her defense. are seen as “divinities” (Banville 2005: 107). With this incident, the action of the novel takes The father in particular seems to have the cruel off. An idyll has been shattered. The younger sardonic regard of gods as he watches the worker, brother to Elizabeth, is set in train to interplay of relationships in his family (12 1). become the hero of the novel, as soldier of the This was to be fully developed in Infinities Irish resistance and as lover. This beautiful (2009) where Greek gods play havoc with the countryside, seen at first as the rolling acres of lives of people, but in Ancient Light , while the the aristocracy, is now to become the setting for author still uses many classical references, he is guerrilla warfare, ambushes, marathon treks more concerned with human psychology and across rugged ground, and fear in all homes, loves. great and small, as old divisions of planter and A very different take on the past from planted, old and new religions, are re-opened. O’Callaghan’s novel is found in this latest The more lyric descriptive style still appears from Banville fiction. There is no intention to use time to time, but fields and roads are now mainly history here, apart from a re-creation of the described from a military tactical point of view. scenario and feelings of 1950s Ireland. Ambushes in particular are narrated with an Descriptions of small towns, household furniture, almost topographical detail, to the extent that the clothes, beach holiday places and transport are all reader feels as if he/she is there and can envisage lovingly sketched. However, this is not 1950s it all; it would be possible to draw or sketch the Ireland as many people know it. It begins with scenes at a pinch. It is a historical novel, then, the stark sentence, a real attention-grabber: “Billy

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Gray was my best friend, and I fell in love with young movie star who is his love interest in the his mother”. This becomes even more riveting movie they are making together. Dawn when it is made apparent that the were Davenport becomes for Alex a representation of fifteen years old, and the mother is thirty-five. his daughter, especially as she often evokes her The close moral scrutiny of lives and mores in own dead father, and he attempts to save and heal general by mid-twentieth Irish society is not this girl and himself too, by bringing her to the evident here; even though the boy thinks that his area where Cass drowned herself. Later his wife secret affair is known about and condemned, this takes the girl under her wing, and they attempt to proves not to be the case, as evident late in the do for her what they could not do for their own novel. What would nowadays be regarded as daughter − with success, it seems. paedophilia, the seduction of a 15 year old boy There is a lurking sense of immortality and by a woman in her 30s, mother of his best friend transcendence underlying all of the transience, of same age, has little or no moral relevance in however. Some haunting experiences are lightly this book. touched on, of Cass while she was still living, in While the boy lover adores Mrs Grace from a the troubled months before her suicide, “a sort of distance in The Sea , and later transfers his ghost-in-waiting” (143), the shade of Alex’s dead attention to her young daughter, there is a father glimpsed in the attic (153), Dawn’s distinctly Freudian character to the full-blown perception of a nameless something when she is sexual relationship in Ancient Light . The boy in technically dead after her suicide attempt(158). love-making sometimes calls his lover “Mother”; Alex and his wife are atheists but these the woman at times adopts the indulgent amused experiences and the belief of others in tone of a mother soothing her baby, especially immortality open new possibilities to him. He when the boy sulks because she will not accede ponders the nature of coincidence, which might to his demands. This is complicated by the fact suggest a transcendent process at work “above, or that he admits to being a little in love with Billy, behind, or within commonplace reality. And yet and at times notes the disconcerting resemblance I ask myself, why not?”(151). On meeting again between mother and son. When his love affair with Kitty, Mrs Gray’s daughter, who has spent comes to an end, the boy seeks physical comfort her life as a nun, he ruminates: “If so, in her from his own mother, holding on to her finger as version of things, Cass is eternally alive, Cass he lies beside her bed, as he formerly did when and Mrs Gray, and Mr Gray, and Billy, and my he had childhood nightmares. mother and my father, ..”. But that is not the only Where O’Callaghan calls on the facts of history or possible heaven which he encounters: there is in the early part of the twentieth century, also the theory of the many worlds as Banville’s past is a very fluid concept, as the propounded to him by a mysterious South narrator repeatedly reminds us: “Images from the American man in the bar of an Italian hotel, past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot which leads him to think that “somewhere in this tell whether they are memories or inventions. infinitely layered, infinitely ramifying reality Not that there is much difference between the Cass did not die, her baby was born, ... two, if indeed there is any difference at all” somewhere too Mrs Gray survived” (241). There (Banville 2012: 3). He repeatedly confuses the are a number of transforming experiences of seasons, relying more on pathetic fallacy and his light, as the title indicates, especially that own feelings about the episodes by which to described at the very end of the novel, when the situate them in time; he reminds us that bereft and terrified boy experiences a type of biographies are fiction (54), and in the end stars transcendence in the approaching dawn, and “it in a film entitled The Invention of the Past. was as if some radiant being were advancing There is a repeated preoccupation with deaths: towards the house ... great trembling wings those of the narrator’s father, Mrs Gray’s last spread wide” (255) which soothes him and gives baby, her eventual death, his daughter Cass’s him back his sleep. death by suicide, the attempt at suicide by the So too, there is a great deal of irony in this

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novel, another factor implying a causality outside President of the United States, and accompanied of human control. Mrs Gray’s husband is an throughout by the music of Bruce Springsteen. optician, but in life is manifestly myopic in Even though the family belongs to the middle relation to his wife’s affair. Cass, in getting her class in Southside Dublin, there are frequent father to walk with her at a dangerously narrow reminders of Ireland’s recession, and also farther ledge over a sheer cliff is acting out the afield; cousin Bruno has lost his job in Lehman’s circumstances of her future suicide. The identity Bank before coming to Ireland. The father, of the mystery lover of the narrator’s daughter’s Professor Murphy, is a doctor, and has made may possibly be the character called Axel Vander many enemies for himself in the hospital, but the whose life Alex Cleave acts in the movie; there is daughters, while acknowledging his difficult an acute similarity in these names, especially in character, also see how he tried to love and take the first names. Dawn in the movie acts as Cora, care of them when their mother dies young. the wronged young lover of Axel Vander, whose More than anything, however, this novel is death by drowning he causes. As Alex looks at about death. It carries a strong sense of fatality. Dawn in the hospital after her failed suicide Firstly, the death of the mother has left the attempt, he wonders: “What turbulent depths had daughters damaged even into adulthood; Addie she leaned out over, what windy abyss had called has also suffered from the effects of an ectopic to her?” (134) Overall, acting is seen as a pregnancy, her probable last chance to have a parallel for real life. baby. The coming of their cousin Bruno is a In this incredibly rich novel, there are many catalyst for her, leading to the first true love of lovingly recreated sensuous descriptions of her life; she meets him near the beach where she certain nature scenes, which are scattered loves to swim with her dog: “And that was how it throughout. The theme of light and vision is started” (MacMahon 2012: 53). He makes her often associated with mirror images, for example want to live a more full life, opens her eyes to when the boy first beholds Mrs Gray’s body in a factors hitherto neglected by her, such as the reflection of a reflection, but these topics are so beauty of various parts of Ireland and the wide that if I were to detail them in full, this neglected relatives who live in more modest review would never end. circumstances than them. However, there are The third novel which I have read from last various intimations that Addie will suffer from year’s new fiction is Kathleen MacMahon’s This cancer as her mother did. While the news of her Is How It Ends . Like the Banville fiction, this is impending death brings consternation to all the preoccupied with death, too, which is also closely family, in some ways she almost seems to associated with the sea. Both writers welcome it; “It seemed to her in that moment that commemorate the late Caroline Walsh, literary she had always known” (333). For the first time editor of the Irish Times; Banville’s novel is in her life she is the leader and has to be strong. dedicated to her and she is also warmly She feels calm, even elation, and for remembered in her niece Kathleen MacMahon’s the good things that have come to her; she regrets “Acknowledgements”. Both also use the only the things which she could have done with terminology of painting to describe colours. her life. Her approaching death has a redemptive Like many Irish works of fiction, This is How power over her father, as well as Bruno, and she it Ends is also a novel about a family. They dies while her family experience the joy of seeing comprise a father in his sixties, two adult the Northern Lights from the balcony just off her daughters and the husband and of the room, while she is conscious of the fact: “This is elder one, and even the love interest for the how it ends” (p. 400). unmarried daughter is a distant cousin who There are some distinct resemblances here to comes from America. It is in many ways a novel the short story “Happiness,” written by Mary about contemporary life, too, based in 2008 Lavin, grandmother to Kathleen MacMahon . around the first election of Barack Obama as The mother in this story is preoccupied with the

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idea of happiness being a value that one works daughter reassures her that she does not have to for, that sorrow is not a substitute for happiness. face her troubles any more, and she relaxes into This was the motto of her own father on his death as she has never been able to do in life, just deathbed and she clings to it, in spite of the pain like Addie in the novel above. So the mix of of losing her young husband at a tragically early death and transcendent experience is hardly new age. At the moment of her own death, her in 2012.

Works Cited: Banville, John. 2005. The Sea , London: Picador. ______. 2009. The Infinities , London: Picador ______. 2012. Ancient Light , London: Viking. Lavin, Mary. 1999. “Happiness”. The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction . Colm Tóibín (ed.), London: Viking, 650-660. MacMahon, Kathleen. 2012. This Is How It Ends . London: Sphere. O’Callaghan, Maurice. 2011. In Their Dreams of Fire . Dublin: Destiny. O’Malley, Ernie. 1961 (first published 1936). On Another Man’s Wound . London: Four Square Books.

Dr 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, 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, most recently “New Uses of Traditional Healing in Contemporary Irish Literature”, Estudios Irlandeses , No. 7, 2012, pp. 61-68.

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Estudios Irlandeses , Number 8, 2013, pp. 183-184 ______AEDEI

The Bell Magazine and the Representation of Irish Identity: Opening Windows by Kelly Mathews Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012 ISBN -10- 1846823234 218 pp. £65.00

Reviewer : Malcolm W. Ballin

In Anthony Cronin’s Foreword to Kelly on Dublin’s role but also re sisting the eternal Matthews’s excellent account of The Bell (1940- verities of rural Ireland invoked in de Valera’s 54) − edited by Sean O’Faoláin and later by iconic St. Patrick’s Day broadcast. The Bell’s Peadar O’Donnell − he says global perspective, registered through It was part of The Bell’s implicit assumptions that “International Numbers” and O’Faoláin’s “One the Ireland its readers lived in had not been World” editorials, established “a post-colonial described and that too much of Irish life had been context “(23). Post-colonial theorists such as seen through the haze of nostalgia for an invented Fanon and Bhabha are cited as relevant to The past or idealism about a projected future (2012: Bell’s twin missions while work by Luke ix). Gibbons on culture as a transformative force A little later, in her own Introduction, supports her contention that “ The Bell Matthews suggests that consciously tried to create a more complex and inclusive version of Irish identity” (25). The Bell proposed for Ireland a multi-faceted Matthews ends the introduction by reviewing identity, a multiplicity of voices that had been earlier critical work on The Bell (28-34). She interwoven throughout history and carried into the suggests that some commentators, over- present day. As such, the magazine represents a influenced by “O’Faoláin’s powerful personality” break with the narrow forms of nationalist discourse which predominated in the 1930s … have underrated the contributions of others, such (2012: 26). as Frank O’Connor and Geoffrey Taylor, and that they have given “comparatively little attention” Matthews identifies a creative tension between to the eight years of O’Donnell’s editorship. She “representation’” The Bell ’s original documen- accepts, however, that O’Donnell was not highly tary objective − to describe and analyse the effective, and in practice, something of an conditions of Irish life during the post- absentee editor. revolutionary era under de Valera’s government The next chapter, about the perceived tensions − and “transformation”, the creative act of between “representation” and “transformation”, influencing the future of Irish society and culture gives close attention to O’Connor’s series, “The along more liberal lines. Belfry”, describing his reluctant acquiescence in The Introduction outlines The Bell’s distinctive O’Faolain’s project of encouraging new poets to character, including its focus on literary realism, submit work. His “bluntly critical commentary” efforts to establish an active dialogue with its on submissions by Hewitt and Greacen readers, its relations with contemporary journals discouraged neo-romanticism and underlined his (such as Studies and Christus Rex ) and with preference for “the reality of everyday life” (48). predecessors (including The Irish Statesman and This approach, together with O’Faolain‘s “New Ireland To-Day ). Matthews defines The Bell’s Writers” series (focused on short fiction) and “inclusive” approach, avoiding an over-emphasis Michael Farrell’s articles on “The Country

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Theatre”, “aimed to transform the arts in and perseverance”, aiming at what Luke Gibbons Ireland”’ (51). Placement of articles in the describes (173) as “transformation from within.” magazine was carefully structured “to provoke Its successors, magazines like Envoy, Threshold the reader to reflect on the multifariousness of or Rann were short-lived. Longer term inheritors life in contemporary Ireland” (58). Special issues, of The Bell’s tradition are Atlantis and the Field such as the “Ulster” and “International” numbers Day movement − both seeking to unite a divided developed The Bell’s emphasis on “the more society and see Ireland in an international direct forms of commentary on Irish literature, context. politics and culture” (64). Kelly Mathews has produced what is likely to These themes are developed in detail in be the fullest and most authoritative text on The Chapter 3 (“The Evolution of The Bell” ) and, Bell for some time to come. I have very few most significantly, in Chapter 4: cavils. It seems a pity that she does not “Representations of Irish Identity in The Bell” − acknowledge contemporaries such as David which lies at the core of the book. Attention is Marcus’s Irish Writing (1946-57) − which also paid to circulation levels within Ireland, Britain published seminal work by James Plunkett and and America (69), and to the review section’s Sean O’Faoláin. The Bell inherited a tradition of project of “national education” in literary matters Irish miscellanies, such as Standish O’Grady’s (85). A discussion of O’Donnell’s “under- All Ireland Review, which invoke a carnivalesque debated” editorship confirms some falling-off of opposition to established opinion. Even today, quality and a shift towards more literary material Chris Agee invokes The Bell as a model for his (93). Matthews emphasises The Bell’s material Belfast-based Irish Pages . The structured on slum-dwelling and town planning, the opposition Matthews proposes between constructive debate about the Gaelic question and “representation” and “transformation” is the sympathetic discussion of the problems of somewhat complicated by The Bell’s practice of Northern Ireland. advocating change (or “transformation”) Matthews turns in Chapter 5 to discussion of precisely through its realist representation of the “The Bell and transformations of Irish identity”. nature of existing Irish society. In my view, The She initially gives priority to wartime neutrality Bell helped to prepare the way for eventual and the accompanying censorship, drawing on public acceptance of the radical reforms the work of Clair Wills . O’Faoláin’s view that associated with T.K. Whitaker and Sean Lemass, “Irish moral judgement and intellectual leading up to Ireland’s entry into the European engagement had been ‘starved’ by the Community. censorship” was reinforced in his ten outward- looking editorials on the “One World” theme Dr Malcolm Ballin is an Independent (144-45). Matthews goes on to praise the Researcher, based at Cardiff University. After modernising debate in the magazine about radio, taking his first degree in English at Selwyn press and cinema (158). Considerable space (166- College Cambridge in 1957, he began a career in 70) is given to James Plunkett’s realist fiction the steel industry. Following retirement in 1996 concentrating on Irish urban experience, and as Director of Human Resources for British Steel associated “isolation and frustration”. The book plc, he returned to academic life in Cardiff, is rounded off by a brief Conclusion (171-78) – proceeding to a PhD in 2002. His book, Irish “The legacy of The Bell” − looking Periodical Culture: 1937-1972, was published by “unflinchingly on the realities of contemporary Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. His new book Irish life”, offering “a forum for both the Welsh Periodicals in English is due for representation of new realities as well as publication by University of Wales Press in July considerations of how they would impact Irish 2013 as part of its ‘Writers of Wales’ series. identity.” It is “a story of editorial doggedness

185 Estudios Irlandeses , Number 8, 2013, pp. 185-186 ______AEDEI

Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions by Eamonn Wall Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2011, ISBN 978-0-268-04423-7 210 pp. $27.00 paper

Reviewer: Mairéad Conneely

This book is both a fitting and wonderful and Moya Cannon and the writing of John amalgam of criticism and close reading of the McGahern sit comfortably in the territory of the literature of the Irish West, often through the lens West but appear as refreshing new ideas within of the less encumbered literature of the American the ecological framework set out by Wall. It is West. Eamonn Wall’s love for and understanding not the author’s intention, however, to destabilise of the American West inspires his desire to the Revivalist dream of an uncontaminated idea untangle the much-romanticised Irish West, and of Western purity, but rather to secure these both countries and their attendant bibliographies contemporary contributions within the support his journey, while also enriching, and at historically and eco-critically sound timeline times problematising his perspectives. It is within which they appeared. Though his subjects striking, nonetheless, that Wall’s emigrant eyes are concerned with the past, and are actively fix on a point of his maternal homeland with engaged in “intense dialogues with Revival which he has only become familiar having gained writers” (Wall 2011: xvi), Wall also considers a sense of place in the American West. This them as contemporary documents. This is a very study could have fallen victim to its author’s welcome departure, one which points favourably romantic re-embracing of Ireland’s most to a new way of looking at and critically romanticised landscape; thankfully, and perhaps assessing a literature, a geography and an as a result of distance and time, it stands outside ideologically-consumed area of Ireland. Irish of the rose-tinted arena and reaches a new and language texts could benefit from the same type exciting note within critical discourse on the Irish of treatment. West. Many have sought to classify the influence Much has been written about Martin of the imagined and the actual West on artistic McDonagh’s western credentials, and those of ideologies, but Wall’s imperative is to step Tim Robinson have been inscribed from an early outside the somewhat jaded forum of definition stage into the rocks he so loves. The inclusion of into the more fruitful terrain of depiction and Mary O’Malley’s, Moya Cannon’s and Seán description. Wall is primarily concerned with the Lysaght’s voices in the ecological and literary territory of the West, and how this is set out by chronology of the West is timely. Their seven Irish wri ters and cartographers. The thematically-diverse treatments of verse speak to ecology and tradition of place is at the heart the private or local and the communal and/or of this work and Wall demonstrates that it is universal in the natural world around them. Wall, a local activity which has international perhaps unwittingly, throws off the shackles of resonances. the criteria previously applied to Western authors and develops a new taxonomy. He casts his net The global and the personal or local attributes more pointedly at writers engaged in portraying of the cartographical work of Tim Robinson, the their own sense of the West. What Wall drama of Martin McDonagh, the poetry of articulates most succintly is what that West Richard Murphy, Mary O’Malley, Seán Lysaght

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means to them and what their Wests look and would have liked to hear his over-arching feel like. conclusion on the works outlined and evaluated. The beauty of this book is that it brings His open ending may be the most apt, however. together authors who have not been considered Like the themes he presents, it is suggestive of collectively as West of Ireland authors, until the possibility and promise of what is to come. now. Yet it has much to offer to both student and teacher, novice and expert. It is a resounding restatement of the value of comparative approaches to literature but Wall carefully avoids Dr. Mairéad Conneely lectures in Irish at St. comparison for comparison’s sake and instead Angela’s College, Sligo. Her areas of research suggests a shared ecology and a sharing of include Irish language literature and influences amongst Western writers. His contemporary Irish language drama, the works of readings on eco-feminism in Irish and American Tom Murphy and Brian Friel, Irish studies, poetry, for instance, highlight why the West is Island studies and Comparative Literature. Her still such a pulsating presence in literature and book, Between Two Shores / Idir Dhá Chladach: why there is much still to be captured, poeticised Writing the Aran Islands, 1890-1980 and dramatised within the ecological framework (Reimagining Ireland, Peter Lang) was published of our most imaginative and real cartographical in 2011, and she is currently researching Irish asset. Walls’ passion is almost tangible and I island poetry in both Irish and English.

187 Estudios Irlandeses , Number 8, 2013, pp. 187-188 ______AEDEI

Stewart Parker, A Life by Marilynn Richtarik Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-969503-4 419 pages. £30.00.

Reviewer: Maureen Hawkins

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, friendship), he wrote for radio, television, and the Richtarik’s biography of the stellar Northern Irish stage as well as a column on pop music for the playwright, Stewart Parker, does an excellent job Irish Times against the backdrop of “the of cementing the reputation of a writer who died Troubles” in the North. Later he moved to too young (Richtarik 2012: 47), at the height of Edinburgh and, finally, London. his powers, just as the full quality of his work Like most writers, he received his share of was being properly recognized. She draws on his rejections, but his being a playwright made it diaries, an autobiographical novel he never worse; much of his story is one of repeated published but kept returning to, and other private disappointment as production after production– writings as well as extensive contacts with his even of commissioned work–is cancelled, usually friends and associates and a thorough knowledge due to lack of money, change of producers, or of everything he ever staged, broadcast, and/or unavailability of actors, directors, or venues. The published. The author paints a picture of a only major plays that actually debuted as Protestant working-class Belfast youth who scheduled with the groups that commissioned overcame obstacles, including the amputation of them were Northern Star (Belfast’s Lyric his leg for cancer at age 19, and disappointments Players) and Pentecost (Field Day). Despite all that would have felled most people, in order to this and family problems to boot, he kept up a create a body of work that has led many to staggering writing schedule, revising constantly, compare him favourably to Brian Friel. and keeping a cheerful demeanour, though bad Born in 1941, he was fortunate enough to begin reviews wounded him deeply. His focus and his his secondary education after the British ideal audience, even after he moved to Britain, government’s educational reforms had was Belfast, though until Northern Star and established a route to university for promising Pentecost , he had to rely on Dublin and London working-class students. Bright and gregarious, for premieres. Influenced by Sam Thompson’s he took to university like a duck to water and Over the Bridge , he worked to give voice to his soon became the centre of numerous creative people and the agony caused by sectarianism groups at Queen’s University, where fellow while, at the same time, attempting to ameliorate students included Seamus Heaney and Michael it, in works ranging from early BBC Schools Longley. Partway through a Master’s thesis on Department broadcasts like The Bus Stories poetic drama (which he later finished and (1972-3) to late plays like Northern Star and submitted), he took the opportunity to broaden Pentecost . Richtarik points out that even plays his horizons further by teaching at a university in like The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner , the United States. After , he decided it “a send-up of British films of the immediate post- took too much time from his creative work and war period,” have their Northern Irish dimension; returned to Belfast. There, often in penury but she says: “its real targets were fanatical always surrounded by friends (he had a gift for nationalism, hero worship, and the cult of blood

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sacrifice, all of which sustained the Troubles.” work but also of other works referred to from the This is not to say that Parker is a dull, Deirdre legend to Behan’s The Hostage , as well humourless propagandist; one of the striking as detailed accounts of important events in features of his work is its humour, indeed its Northern Ireland during Parker’s life that are “light-heartedness”; even his darkest play, reflected in his work. This breadth of audience, Nightshade , a “meditation on how people however, leads to one disturbing quasi-omission. confront – or fail to confront – loss and the fact She completes her account of Bloody Sunday of mortality,” incorporates magic tricks and without mentioning the results of the Saville music. Inquiry, saying only that “The soldiers claimed Richtarik seamlessly interweaves the events of to have been fired on first, but those on the Parker’s personal and professional life, his march had a starkly different perspective .” reading, the public events that he lived through Although she corrects that omission in an in the North that affected his work, and the endnote, the general reader is unlikely to read intellectual currents of the time with critical them because most of the endnotes are source discussion of his works in ways that illuminate notes only, and one may come away with the not only the significance of their context but also impression that what happened is still in dispute draw attention to their artistic quality and major and that the marchers may have fired on the themes. The result is to make the reader want to troops. rush to read or reread every one of them (which, That minor quibble aside, this is a welcome thanks to the publication of his collected Plays in and exemplary critical biography of a playwright 2000 and the publications of his television plays who clearly deserves the love, skill, and effort and selected non-dramatic writings and music she has put into it. She dedicates it to “the reviews in 2008, is now possible for his major friends of Stewart Parker, old and new,” and I work). She also creates a portrait of a man whose predict that it will make many new friends as death was a human as well as artistic loss to the well as rewarding the old ones. world. When one reads of his personal happiness and professional success in the last few years of his life, it is with the pleasure that one would feel for a dear friend. Richtarik has accomplished the very difficult Maureen S. G. Hawkins is an Assistant task of writing a biography that will appeal Professor in the Department of English of the equally to the scholar and the general reader. Its University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. She great, well-documented detail will make it an has written extensively on eighteenth-, invaluable tool for the specialist, while its nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Irish drama, general readability and feeling for the subject on British, European, Canadian, and American will recommend it to a larger audience. For the drama, and on intertextuality. She has also co- benefit especially of the latter, she provides edited a book on Global Perspectives on generous plot summaries not only of Parker’s Teaching Literature.

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Jailtacht: The Irish Language, Symbolic Power, and Political Violence in Northern Ireland, 1972-2008 by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost Cardiff: U. of Wales Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0708324967 288 pp. £19.99 (Paperback)

Reviewer: John L. Murphy

“Jailic” developed among political prisoners in He locates the emergence of “Jailtacht” not in the North; on their release, a “Jailtacht” Long Kesh’s cages of the early 1970s but in the radicalised community groups in the 1980s, mid-1980s, after the 1976 reversal of political to shifted republicans towards political criminal status among republicans incarcerated accommodation in the 1990s, and commodified a — when “Jailic” itself was coined. After the stretch of today’s West Belfast for “struggle hunger strikes, prisoners circumvented an Irish tourism”. Dr. Mac Giolla Chríost grew up in ban. Blanket protesters on a wing shouted out Derry City. He acquired Irish during the 1980s at phrases at set times of day, with varying levels of QUB − followed by a “self-exile” into the Welsh- fluency. Gearóid Mac Siacais recalls: “Thosaigh speaking heartland that earned him a Readership an Ghaeilge ar bhonn slándála agus chríochnaigh in that language at the University of Wales. He sé mar theanga labharta na blocanna.” (“The Irish knows intimately that “symbolic terrain” where language started as a basis for security but ended Celtic cultural claims to political independence up as the spoken language of the Blocks.”) This reverberate as personal recovery of native transformation in the late 1970s, over eighteen tongues. months, enabled Irish to be spoken by three He combines engagement with distance. The hundred rather than the seven or eight inmates combination of the two standpoints leads him to who had carried the language into the H-Blocks analyse Irish as “the defining symbolic element from the Cages. of the political violence that has shaped the Some cellmates may have been less eager, but history of Northern Ireland and, to a great extent, spoken (or shouted) Irish dominated. Texts were the relationship between the UK and the Republic smuggled in (and out); nails scraped lessons into of Ireland”. By interviews with ex-prisoners, he concrete. Prisoners deployed Irish against explains Jailic’s acquisition, its use as formulaic “criminalization”. A post-strike lull in fluency “language strings”, and its sociological impacts. was countered by an intensive six-week course Graffiti and mural depictions, along with archival smuggled in by Máirtín Ó Muilleoir. By the late and online research, demonstrate his diligence. (I 1980s, constant Irish infiltrated his dreams, appear among those “ordinary cybercitizens” Séanna Walsh confides. documented who address Jailic in a “public Mac Giolla Chríost delineates usage. As argot, space”.) tokens as catch phrases peppered English speech. Historical contexts precede chapters respectively As a medium for deeper communication, Jailic’s on close readings for stylistics; the “performativity” divergence from Gaelic norms − given limited or of managing incarceration, creating social no opportunities for formal education − evolved identities, and building a “sense of place”; signs into “rough, natural accents” and rote idioms and murals as “visual grammar”; and ideology in acquired by repetition rather than effort. The the “grey literature” produced by republicans − and “comms” shared in the blanket protests and loyalists. hunger strikes, as well as texts by Bobby Sands,

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Gerry Adams and comrades, display Irish became a living language once again, while orthographic and articulated distinctions from, or the Gaeltachtaí struggled to sustain Gaeilge as a similarities to, Irish outside prison. By the mid- communal channel of exchange and a personally 1990s, the imprisonment of republicans schooled chosen signifier. Additionally, claims of Irish- in Irish, as well as access to external materials, language acquisition linked (arguably in signaled a “fossilization” of Jailic as markers of fetishised or tokenistic manner) rebellious its diction and pronunciation persisted among its republicans from the old IRA with those who freed inmates. This spread into poetry, plays, and swelled its Provisional ranks five decades later. films about the Gaeltacht na Fuiseoige, the Irish- This origin myth generated an “invented speaking community of the Lark, in honor of tradition” of an iconic, subversive Irish passed Bobby Sands’ pen-name. down decades behind bars. Performance of Irish forced a congenial space This book concludes: “language is too within prison. Filthy walls filled with scrawled powerful a tool not to be political”. Despite the vocabulary, while the Jailtacht encouraged cross-border and post-GFA efforts to ease Irish collegial teaching of the language, rather than out of its Northern and republican contexts, this student-pupil hierarchies. The Gaelicisation of study argues for the potency of Jailic. For, given names (as with Sands) proves an intriguing spawned under repression, it reclaims and case study in how diligently and imaginatively appropriates by “strength, power, and prisoners and activists adopted or adapted dominance”. Language endures against identities to further ideological commitments. oppression and occupation. Symbolically, Jailic These, in turn, gained proclamation, frequently stands for Irish resistance. in the Gaelic font, on murals, as street names, and in signs. These appeared within the Shaw’s Road Belfast emerging Gaeltacht, and as daubed slogans or graffiti elsewhere in that city or Derry. Monuments to the fallen, banners in demonstrations, and paintings asserting solidarity Prof. John L. Murphy coordinates the by the incorporation of Basque, Arabic, or Humanities sequence at DeVry University's Catalan content show the wider cultural Long Beach, California campus. His Ph.D. is components associated by Irish-language leftists from UCLA in medieval English literature. Irish with nationalist or radical insurgencies abroad. language reception by English-language culture, “Fianna Fáil Gaelic and Sinn Féin Irish” sums Irish republicanism, Beckett’s purgatorial up ideological squabbles and linguistic concepts, Jews in medieval Ireland, the reception shibboleths amidst political deviations from of Buddhism by Irish intellectuals, folk-rock in conventional Irish conceptions of language: in its Irish counterculture, and the presentation of teaching, its form, and in its public role as the otherworldly, liminal states in medieval and “first official language” of the Republic. Not modern literature illustrate his published only loyalists but nationalists debate its state- research. He reviews books and music over a sponsored funding or subversively anti- broad range of topics in print and online, and he establishment presence. Within the Jailtacht, contributes to PBio.

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The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine Edited by John Crowley, William J Smyth and Mike Murphy Cork: Cork University Press, 2012 ISBN 978-185918-479-0, Hardback, 299 x 237mm, 728pp., 200 maps and 400 illustrations. €59

Reviewer: John O’Callaghan

The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine does not Irish population expansion from the mid - claim to speak for the one million men, women, eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth-century, in the and children who starved or succumbed to related face of agricultural depression and the de- diseases in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. It industrialisation of the island outside of the begins with Eavan Boland’s poem, “That the north-east, was overwhelmingly reliant on the Silence of Cartography is Limited”. This seems cultivation of potatoes on increasingly marginal to represent an acknowledgement of the near- land. The destruction of successive crops by futility of attempting to represent the reality of blight meant that the food supply was abruptly the Famine, of hunger, pain, fear, and death and drastically reduced. Famines, however, can experienced in cabins and huts, in bogs and result from an inability to access available food ditches, in workhouses and fever hospitals, and as opposed to an outright scarcity of all types of by roadsides. Many of the victims remain food. The Great Famine was distinguished by its anonymous, hidden from history by mass graves. longevity and the associated scale of its mass Yet this sophisticated volume does as much as excess mortality, but also by the location of its any history can and deserves the highest praise. It occurrence. Appallingly, this was at a time when is a worthy treatment of its monumental subject, Britain boasted the leading empire in the world, and offers a tour de force synthesis of and the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland interdisciplinary scholarship from the fields of was the richest and most powerful state yet art, geography, literature, and indeed known. There is no fudging. Dogmatic cartography, as well as from diaspora, Irish, administrators and economically-motivated memory, and migration studies. No fewer than evicting landlords are not absolved of fifty essays from sixty contributors provide a vast responsibility, but as in all good history, body of local, provincial, national and misperceptions are challenged where they may international analysis on pre-famine society, exist. Death did not discriminate on the basis of contemporary relief efforts, and the legacy of the religion. Often, Irish Catholic professionals and haemorrhaging of the Irish people through tenant farmers benefitted at the expense of those emigration. This latter phenomenon has been less fortunate. The catastrophe was exacerbated central to Irish self-understanding and to how by the undaunted adherence to laissez-faire others have perceived the island. At least those economics of the British political elite. who survived, whether they went or stayed, could Doctrinaires even withheld food supplies from tell their tales, as long as guilt or trauma did not Ireland at critical junctures. The intellectual prevent them. The book is beautifully produced position of Charles Edward Trevelyan, the and visually striking. Computer-generated parish Treasury official leading the state’s response, was maps of population decline blend seamlessly with that humanity should be left to the mercy of the contemporary paintings and illustrations, as well free market. According to his thinking, as with more recent photographs. government intervention was not warranted or

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desirable. His cohort anticipated a highway to and Monavanshire, twenty families all told, who modernity through the famine roads. Their had been evicted by 1851. One of the landlords inhuman policies of wilful neglect failed the Irish was John O’Callaghan, with whom my father and people. The result was the worst humanitarian I share a name but, I feel compelled to add 160 catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe and years after the fact, to whom we are not related. perhaps the defining development in national By the 1860s one of the Bunakilla families had history. Its impact was not confined to Ireland made their way to Minnesota, where they and its shadow looms large, home and away. purchased Winnebago Indian Reservation land Within a decade, two million people had fled to from which the native people had themselves destinations around the globe in pursuit of been removed. something that was not available to them in In contrast to the Great Irish Famine, most Ireland, whether that was simply enough to eat, modern famines occur in marginal economies. or something more abstract, like happiness. The concluding section of the Atlas devotes The mapping of the Famine at parish level weighty consideration to the historical resonances allows for new interpretations of traditional between the Irish and contemporary famines. The perspectives and folk-memory. The identification most pressing question it raises is not a new one, of intricate and interlinked local and regional but it is one of only a few to which it can provide dynamics raises questions about the social a definitive answer: why are famines still conditions which prevailed around the country happening? This is the authoritative reference and the diverse responses in terms of relief work on the Famine. It will serve Irish people efforts. In tandem with the provincial case and all others well, wherever they may be. It will studies, they demonstrate clearly the variety of be a powerful teaching resource and will no causes and effects at play. Also traced are the doubt inspire future research. routes followed by those who had to undertake a journey of the heart and mind as part of their physical travel, to learn a new tongue and forge a new identity in an attempt to make a new home. It is the stories of the fates of individuals and their communities that are the most affecting, and Dr John O’Callaghan has published widely on which for many readers will be the most modern Irish history. Among his books are interesting. Revolutionary Limerick: The Republican Of particular appeal to me was John Campaign for Independence in Limerick, 1913- O’Connell’s short piece on Donoughmore, Co. 21 (Irish Academic Press, 2010), The Battle for Cork, the home place of my father. Reliant in Kilmallock (Mercier Press, 2011), and Narratives some parts on “spent bog in a state of tillage”, as of the Occluded Irish Diaspora: Subversive many as 1,400 people died in Donoughmore Voices (co-editor, Peter Lang, 2012). His next between November 1846 and September 1847. book, Plassey's Gaels: A History of the GAA at Valuation Office records suggest the suffering of the University of Limerick, 1972-2012 , is due out the entire population of the townlands of Bunkilla with Collins Press in May 2013.

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London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity By Tony Murray Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (2012) ISBN 9781846318313 224 pp. £65.00 (Hardback)

Reviewer: Louise Sheridan

In today’s global economic crisis, and with the discourses from negative portrayals of the Irish collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy, that appeared in British media since the war. emigration has once more become a major part Murray has undertaken a depth of research to of Irish daily life. This is reflected in public, complete this work, and his analysis of the social, and cultural discourses that abound about twenty-eight texts explored is nuanced and Ireland’s exiles. Works that explore Irish insightful. The reader may experience a slight diasporic experiences have become a familiar disappointment in that the sheer number of texts feature of contemporary Irish literature, with covered does not allow for a deeper exploration recent publications from authors such as Edna of them; however, that was not the author’s aim O’Brien, Sebastian Barry, Colum McCann and in creating the collection. Colm Tóibín. Interestingly, while public Murray uses Avtar Brah’s trope of “diaspora discourse focuses on today’s migration, much of space”: a space “inhabited” not only by those the literary work produced in the last decade has who have migrated and their descendants but taken twentieth-century migration as its subject; equally by those who are constructed and arguably because post-war migration remains represented as indigenous (Murray 2012: 181), to largely under-explored in literature, and under- explore the ways in which the chosen authors researched in academic circles. While excellent compare migrant experiences formed by work on Irish migration has been carried out interactions or “entanglement” of genealogies of both in the humanities and social sciences, most dispersion with those of “staying put” (Brah notably by Mary J. Hickman, Bronwen Walter, 1996: 181242?). He refigures Brah’s concept to Breda Gray, Liam Harte, and Shaun Richards, explore how migrant identities are configured there remains a lacuna of knowledge about the within and across what he coins as the “narrative lives of Irish men and women who migrated to diaspora space” (Murray 2012: 189). In these Britain in the post-war years. Tony Murray narratives, we learn, the Irish diasporic addresses this absence of scholarly work on the experience is shaped by interactions between the Irish in Britain, specifically on the Irish in migrant and those who are considered London, in his nuanced and insightful work: indigenous to Britain, but also, crucially, by London Irish Fictions . interactions with those who stay behind in London Irish Fictions explores a range of Ireland. Irish interactions with diasporants of autobiographical and fictional works to consider other ethnicities is also a formative part of life in some of the ways in which the post-war London diaspora. Irish have represented their own subject- Part 1 of the book considers representations of positions and experiences as Irish people in Irish migration to London in the 1940s and London. An aim of the work is not only to 1950s; a key subject explored is that of the address a deficit of knowledge on such tension between migration as escape, and as experiences, but also to reveal alternative exile for the Irish migrant. Here Murray

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acknowledges the implications of gender, class the study of the final part of London Irish and subject positioning in both the old and new Fictions . As a second-generation Irishman country, that results in a heterogeneous, rather himself, Murray demonstrates a keen empathy than fixed, experience for Irish migrants. “Navvy with the experiences narrated here, whilst also Narratives” looks at two novels: John B. Keane’s recognising the many differences in experience. The Contractor (1994) and Timothy O’Grady He identifies the common ethnic background that and Steve Pyke’s I Could Read the Sky (1997) as is made apparent in these tales of growing up in examples of exile narratives and stories of social an Irish family in London, revealed in similar isolation and destitution. A discussion of the experiences of school, holidays, religious ritual influence of Celtic mythology on migrant and family traditions, and the ambivalence, or literature is a particularly enlightening focus of feeling of in-betweenness revealed by second this chapter. The work of well-known authors generation authors such as John Walsh and John Edna O’Brien and John McGahern are also Bird. covered in part 1. In an analysis of Girls in their London Irish Fictions is the first book that Married Bliss (1964) and Casualties of Peace looks at literature of the Irish in London, and (1966) Murray suggests that while much makes a valuable contribution to Irish diaspora scholarly work on O’Brien’s writing has been studies more generally. Murray’s analysis of the carried out, the diasporic dimension of her work role of narrative in shaping diasporic identities is has been neglected. While this may be true, it is masterly, and sheds new light on representations worth noting that in recent years some scholarly of exile, escape and belonging in the diasporic work on O’Brien as a diasporic writer has experience. A highly enjoyable and certainly begun. recommended read. Part 2 looks at narratives of the “Ryanair Generation”; those who left Ireland in the severe Works Cited recession of the 1970s and 1980s. The term Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: “Ryanair Generation” alludes to the fact that Irish Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. migrants to Britain could travel by air at discount Murray, Tony. 2012. London Irish Fictions: prices which brought about, for some, a new ease Narrative, Diaspora and Identity . Liverpool: of access between Ireland and England. Liverpool UP. However, as Murray goes on to show, while travel between Ireland and Britain may have been easier, literary texts by authors such as Joseph Dr. Louise Sheridan completed a PhD on Irish O’Connor and Sara Berkeley demonstrate that diasporic oral and literary narratives at the the psychological consequences of migration are University of Northampton in 2011. Currently no less complex for these migrants than for the working at the University of Limerick, her generation gone before. research interests lie in Irish diaspora studies, The experiences of the second generation, memory studies in literature, and contemporary those children born in England to Irish parents, is Irish literature.