Life
b. Derry; The Price of Chips (London 1973); Age for Fortunes (London: Arrow Bks 1980).
[ top ]
Commentary
Richard Deutsch, ‘“Within Two Shadows”: The Trouble in Northern Ireland’, in Patrick Rafroidi and Maurice Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time, l’Université de Lille 1975-76, pp.132-54; quotes an interview on the Price of Chips: ‘It’s a specific viewpoint, and I hear so much rubbish being talked about the North that I felt that I book like this, specifically about Derry, was needed ... I wanted English people to get the feeling of Derry by reading this book.’ (Sunday Independent, 16 Sept. [1973]; Deutsch, p.141); further, gives details of plot concerning Colm O’Kanes, a sensitve young man who becomes an architect; his dg. has a brief affair with a British soldier and is beaten bup by troops arresting his son, Finbarr, a People’s Democracy supporter, then interned in Long Kesh; Bosco MacDermott is brash and rough; ignores Troubles but joins in when the Army arrests his son in law since they can’t find his son who is in the IRA; his sick wife dies of CS Gas in the Bogside; attempts to kill a soldier and is mortally wounded.
[ top ]