Life
1937-?1996 [bapt. Martin]; b. July Belfast; ed. Grove Prim. Sch. and Mount Collyer Intermediate School; various jobs incl. apprentice electrician, 1951-52; Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm, 1955-62; electronics engineer; attended Keele University, 1967-71, B.A. in English and philosophy; English lecturer at Northern Ireland Polytechnic, Co. Antrim, 1971-75; Warwick Univ., 1975-76, M.A. in English Literature; returned as Senior Lecturer to Northern Ireland Polytechnic, 1976, for several years;
his novels incl. The Task (1978), dealing with revenge wreaked by Sean McCart for the death of his brother Colm at the hands of the British Army; The Ceremony of Innocence (1977), exploring McCart family history from World War II; The Road to Ballyshannon (1981), a story of Republican escapees from Belfast Lough [prison] with a RUC hostage, and their death at the hands of Irish police at Ballyshannon in the Civil War period, 1922; and Dream (1986), set between the period of the Land League period and the Second World War; radio plays for RTÉ and BBC; he was a self-professed alcoholic. DIW DIL DIL2 OCIL
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Criticism
Linda Leith, ‘Subverting the Sectarian Heritage: Recent Novels of Northern Ireland’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (December 1992), pp.88-106; see also Edna Longley, ‘Defending Ireland’s Soul: Protestant Writers and Irish nationalism after Independence’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994), pp.162-63.
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George O’Brien, ‘Introduction: Tradition and Transition in Contemporary Irish Fiction’, in Colby Quarterly, 31:1 (March 1995), p. 5-22: ‘[...] David Martin ’s saga ofthe McCart family, recounted in The Task (1975), The Ceremony of Innocence (1977) and Dream (1986), is in some respects a more orthodox artistic approach to the representation of Northern society [than that of Leitch, Morrow and Cochrane]. Even the taut, thriller-like format of The Task is ultimately more interested in the ideological preconditions and cultural formations ofthe psychic and communal forces articulated by Belfast’s civil strife than in the cheap-thrills potential of its plot. Of particular interest here is Martin’s representation of a spectrum of British soldiers’ attitudes. The opening sentence of The Ceremony of Innocence - “It was Easter when the bombers came” - contains so many Irish historical resonances that it comes as an instructive surprise to find that Martin is talking about the Luftwaffe bombing of Belfast. This novel sees post-1969 Northern Irish history through the lens of an earlier generation’s experience. Such a perspective provides a trans-sectarian panorama of Belfast between one war and another. In Dream Martin extends the historical perspective back to the turn of the century and events leading up to the defining moments of modern Loyalism, the Ulster Covenant and World War I. History, public event, ideological commitment, communal affiliation are all detailed with a view to providing a diagnosing and perhaps curing current afflictions. In a chronological sense, The Road to Ballyshannon (1981) is very much part of this ambitious sequence. Set in 1922, during not only the Irish Civil War but the inaugural years of the Northern Irish state, its prison escape plot is centered on characters from both sectarian camps who find themselves inevitably implicated in each others’ fate. As in his other novels, Martin’s portrayal of trans-sectarian interaction and interdependence functions as an allegory of possibility for the present time and lends a repressed but persistent gleam of idealism to his historical imagination.’ (Full text available as .pdf at Colby Library - online; accessed 21.09.2020.)
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