Read Ireland Book Reviews, September 1998

John Banville
Maeve Binchy
Peter Costello
Richard Doherty
Mary Finn
George Fleming
Bartholomew Gill
Victoria Glendinning
Micheal Mac Greil
John Wyse Jackson
Liam Kelly
Linda Kelly
Declan Kiberd

Seamus King
Brian Lacey
Bill Lazenblatt
Alan O’Day
Sean O’Reilly
Julie Parsons
William Trevor

Irish Houses and Gardens by the Archives of Country Life by Sean O’Reilly
For over 100 years, Country Life has been publishing regular articles on country houses of Ireland and Great Britain. From the start, its definitive texts were illustrated with specially commissioned photography by some of the century’s pre-eminent architectural photographers, a practice which endowed the magazine with a unique photographic archive. The magazine was first drawn to Ireland shortly after 1910, and soon the then-new and growing interest in Georgian architecture led its writers to explore the unique contribution made by Irish architects and craftsmen to the development of the 18th century house. The result was a series of magisterial articles on such major monuments as Castletown, Castlecoole, Caledon and Russborough. The beauty and comprehensiveness of these illustrations, taken predominantly on glass-plate negatives, is without equal. Yet the magazine had wider interests that then Georgian tradition alone: its influential enthusiasm for the work of Lutyens led to photographs of the architect’s work in Ireland, including Lambay and Howth, being published soon after the buildings and gardens were completed, and the magazine remained sensitive to the inspiration Lutyens derived from medieval and classical Irish traditions. In the 1960s, broadening tastes led Country Life’s writers to explore the country’s major Victorian houses, such as Adare Manor and Humewood Castle. As the pace of loss and destruction of so many houses quickened in the middle of the century, the magazine’s photographs became an increasingly important, and often unique, record of what had gone. Perhaps most poignant of all are those which capture Powerscourt’s magnificent interiors before they were destroyed by fire in 1074. Even where houses have survived, dispersal of their contents means that Country Life’s photographs are the finest, if not the only, records of their furnishings. Here, Sean O’Reilly, one of Ireland’s leading architectural historians, h as selected over 200 of the archive’s most outstanding photographs, featuring twenty major houses which range in date from medieval castles to the 20th century decorative delights of Birr. His text provides the essential historical background to an appreciation of some of Ireland’s greatest buildings, making this book not only an important survey, but also a portfolio of classic photographs of unrivalled beauty and significance.

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Death in Summer by William Trevor
William Trevor’s most recent novel, Death in Summer (1998), is a riveting and wonderfully sympathetic portrait of the distress and damage that lie at the heart of some lives - both those that are obviously afflicted and those that appear to be blessed. There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia’s, sudden and quite unexpected, leaving her husband Thaddeus haunted by the details of her last afternoon, a drizzling Thursday in June. They had spent it arguing in their comfortable house in the Essex countryside, until Thaddeus reluctantly promised to visit a woman from his past who has down on her luck - a promise he had no intention of keeping. The next death came later, after Thaddeus’s mother-in-law had helped him to interview the young women who had answered their advertisement for a nanny to look after Letitia’s baby. None was suitable - least of all the last one, with her small, sharp features, her shabby clothes exuding a distinct whiff of cigarettes, her badly typed reference - so Letitia’s mother moved in herself. But then, just as the household was beginning to settle down, the last of the nannies surprisingly returned, her unwelcome arrival heralding the third of the summer’s tragedies. This book is a truly remarkable work.

Irish Home Rule 1867-1921 by Alan O’Day
This book is the first account of Irish Home Rule to explain all of the self-government plans, placing them in context and examining the motives behind the schemes. The book makes a clear distinction between material and moral Home Rulers. The former appealed especially to outsiders, some Protestants and the intelligentsia, who saw in self-government a means to reconcile Ireland’s antagonistic traditions. In contrast, material Home Rulers viewed a Dublin parliament as a forum for Catholic interests. This account reappraises the Home Rule movement from a fresh angle. By getting away from the usual division drawn between physical force and constitutional nationalists, the author maintains that an ideological continuity runs from Young Ireland, the Fenians, the early Home Rulers including Isaac Butt an d Charles Stewart Parnell, to the Gaelic Revivalists and the men of 1916. These nationalists are distinguishable from material Home Rulers not on t he basis of methods or strategy but through a fundamental ideological cleavage.

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1916 Rebellion Handbook with an introduction by Declan Kiberd
This book is a complete and connected narrative of the Rising, compiled contemporaneously with the event. It contains detailed accounts of the fighting, the story of the Great Fires with lists of premises involved. Military and Rebel Proclamations and Despatches. Punishment of Rebels full Record of Sentences. Casualities Official Lists of Military, Royal Irish Constabulary, Dublin Metropolitan Police, Volunteer Training Corps, and Rebels. Names of Persons Interred in Cemeteries. Official Lists of Prisoners Deported and Released. A special map illustrates the area of fighting. Despatches of Sir John Maxwell and Viscount French. Honours, Promotions and Awards to Military, Police and Civilians. Courts-Martial at Richmond Barracks - Reports of Public Trials. Sir Roger Casement’s Landing, Capture, Trial and Execution. Hardinge Commission of Inquiry and Simon Commission of Inquiry Evidence and Reports. Work of the Hospitals St John Ambulance City and County of Dublin Red Cross Societies. Facsimile Reproductions of Rebel Proclamations. Names of Prisoners Released under General Amnesty. Photographs, Personal Notes and New Index. Essential for anyone interest in the Easter Rising. 

Death of an Irish Tinker by Bartholomew Gill
A Peter McGarr Mystery. A body is found shackled to the upper branches of the tallest tree in Ireland. The victim is a ‘Tinker,’ one of the mysterious class of itinerant travellers who have roamed Ireland for generations. The murder bears all the signs of being the work of Desmond Bacon, ‘the Toddler,’ brutal king of Ireland’s heroin trade. But who was the deceased and why was he killed? The answer lies with a Tinker woman named Biddy Nevins, who may be the only person able to put Bacon away that is, if Peter McGarr and his crew can get to her before the Toddler does.

Mary, Mary by Julie Parsons
This book is a gripping psychological thriller set in contemporary Dublin. A phone call late on a hot Dublin evening. An anxious mother, enquiring about her daughter. It she’d said she wasn’t coming home If she’d rung Then, a week later, the full dreadful story beginning to unfold. The policeman, McLoughlin, watching as the green cover is pulled back from the mortuary slab. The young woman’s battered and mutilated body exposed. And for Margaret, the dull, aching realisation that his is not can never be allowed to be the end. Margaret is a psychiatrist, recently returned to Dublin after many years abroad. To a city where she once loved and shone. She came back to nurse her dying mother and now her daughter Mary is dead

John Stanislaus Joyce by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello
The influence of the father was profound and apparent: James Joyce retold many of his father’s anecdotes in his writings. To an extent never before conceded, the lifework of James was an imaginative recreation not of his own life but of his father’s. This is the story of the prodigal father!

Dublin’s Literary Pubs by Peter Costello
For generations Dublin’s pubs have been one of the city’s treasures. The y are at the heart of its social life, as central to the city as cafes are to Paris a home from home for Dublin’s famous writers. On this wonderful tour through the streets of Dublin you’ll learn about the life and custom s of pub life, meet the wits and the characters, and revel in the uniquely Irish atmosphere. With a little literature, some history, and an abundance of craic, this very entertaining volume allows the reader to follow the occasionally stumbling footsteps of Irish literary legends such as Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh as well as fictional creations such as Leopold Bloom and the Ginger Man.

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Prejudice in Ireland Revisited by Micheal Mac Greil
This book is an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of Irish society and understanding of racism in Ireland in all its various manifestations. It is much more that a study of prejudice and tolerance towards social group s and minorities; it also provides a comprehensive survey of Irish attitude s and values. It is not only authoritative and informative but readable an d interesting. The findings present a challenge to us all, and demand thought and attention from politicians, lawyers, opinion formers and indeed every one of us. The book is a goldmine of accessible information, particularly valuable because it does not just set out Irish attitudes on a wide range of issues but shows how they have changed since the early 70s. This makes i t fascinating reading for anyone interested in social change in Ireland.

Magennis VC: The Story of Ireland’s only winner of the Victoria Cross by George Fleming
James Magennis was born in West Belfast and served in the Royal Navy in World War II. He was the only person from Northern Ireland to win the Victoria Cross, the only naval rating with a VC to survive the war and the only person in naval history to exit a submarine in a diving suit, perform a military operation and return to the same submarine. Yet while honoured in his adopted town of Bradford England, he was made to feel unwelcome and virtually forgotten in his home town of Belfast. The author rescues Magennis from obscurity in a book that begins with Magennis’s life in Wes t Belfast in the 1920s and 1930s. Magennis escaped Belfast’s poverty by joining the Royal Navy in 1935. The middle part of the book is packed with adventure and history of war at sea, and finishes with Magennis winning the Victoria Cross in 1945. The closing chapters bring the reader back to the reality of his return to Belfast where the political and religious problems had not changed. He was an embarrassment to the Unionist establishment and unwanted by his fellow Catholics. Forced to leave the city, Magennis went to England where he was simply accepted as a war hero. Always a quiet man who never sought glory, he died in obscurity in 1986.

The Clash of the Ash in Foreign Fields: Hurling Abroad by Seamus King
From the beginning the Gaelic Athletic Association attempted to spread the gospel of hurling outside Ireland. Star teams of hurlers were sent abroad to advertise the fame and hurling was organised among the Irish diaspora. This book tells the history of these efforts and how the game was played in the United Kingdom and North America, in Argentina and South Africa, in Australia and New Zealand, in fact in any place the Irish settled in substantial numbers. The book is a follow-up to The History of Hurling b y the same author, is over 175 large format pages long and contains over 50 black-and-white photographs.

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Richard Brinsley Sheridan: A life by Linda Kelly
The first night of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, on 8 May 1777, was one of the great dates in theatrical history. From then on , Sheridan was launched by his fame as a playwright into the ‘little great world’ of 18th century society. Sheridan’s comedies and his comic op era, The Duenna were all written by the time he was 28. For the next 30 y ears he was wholly involved in his twin careers an manager of Drury Lane theatre and Member of Parliament. At a time when politics were dominated by a few aristocratic families, he rose above the inbuilt disadvantages of his poverty and Irish background to become one of the greatest parliamentary figures of the age, greater even, in the opinion of the Prime Minister William Pitt, than his leader Charles James Fox. Linda Kelly’s biography , drawing on a wide variety of published and unpublished sources, gives a comprehensive picture of Sheridan’s tempestuous and brilliant career.

A Flame Now Quenched: Rebels and Frenchmen in Leitrim, 1793-1798 by Liam Kelly
The Irish rebellion of 1798 comprised a scattered series of local uprisings and desperate incursions that, tragically for the rebels, failed to cohere. This fascinating portrait of County Leitrim in the 1790s provides important insights into the rebellion in Connaught. In Leitrim, the spirit of rebellion peaked in 1795 three years before General Humbert’s French troops and their Irish allies marked almost the full length of the country, with the government’s superior force in pursuit, towards their eventual defeat just over the Longford border at Ballinamuck. Leitrim was shaken by violent Defender disturbances in 1793 and 1795, culminating in the battle of Drumcollop, which brought the county to a state of insurrection. Following the battle of the Diamond in County Armagh and the formation of the Orange Order in September 1795, large numbers of refugees from Ulster descended into Leitrim, bringing with them revolutionary ideas and a sense of outrage that helped to keep the flame of rebellion alive. But Leitrim had risen too early, and the government’s suppression of the Defenders and, later, the United Irishmen, was brutally effective. The author of this book has mad e extensive use of local and archival sources to produce and authoritative and accessible account complete with maps, illustrations and original documents of the two strands of history: the rise and fall of the Defender and United Irish movements in Leitrim in the mid-1790s, and the French invasion of Connaught, which began promisingly but soon became a march towards certain defeat, with dire consequences for the Irish rebels who flew to the French standard.

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The Williamite War in Ireland 688-1691 by Richard Doherty
This book is an account of the war that convulsed Ireland from 1688 to 16 91, the echoes of which can be heard to this day. This is a military historian’s view of that war which describes the major battles and sieges , including the Boyne, Aughrim, Derry and Limerick, as well as actions that are not so well known such as the sieges of Carrickfergus, Charlemont and Athlone. In these pages the reader also meets some of the principal commanders, including the two kings who fought at the Boyne and men such as Tyrconnell, Ginkel, Kirke and Solms. Above them all tower the names of Marlborough and Sarsfield, while the talent of the duke of Berwick begins to flower during the war. The author challenges some of the accepted myths of the Williamite war, including those surrounding the siege of Derry, and h e also analyses why the final victory went to the Williamites rather than t o the Jacobites, concluding that the reasons were entirely military and political rather that as a result of any moral superiority of the victors.

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Manus O’Connell’s Life of Colum Cille edited by Brian Lacey
From c.1510 Maghnus O Domhnaill was a leading political figure in the north-west of Ireland. Between 1537 and 1555 he was chieftain of Tir Conaill. In 1532 he completed the greatest cultural achievement of his life, the composition of the Beatha Colaim Chille or ‘Life’ of the sixth-century monastic gounder who Manus claimed as his ‘high saint and kinsman in blood’. The ‘Life’ is an extraordinary work, running to nearly 100,000 words of verse and prose, written, for the most part, in clear, elegant Irish. It is a compendium of all that we known or more correctly believed about Colum Cille in Manus’ day. Like the life of Manus himself , the Beatha Colaim Chille is being recognized increasingly as an example o f the extension to Gaelic Ireland of Renaissance ideas and standards. Although the Beatha is not our best source for reconstructing the life of Colum Cille, it does provide an insight into the beliefs, pratices and cultural institutions of Gaelic Ireland in the early part of the 16th century, prior to the onset of the Reformation and the Tudor conquest.

A Wexford Childhood: 1915-1930 by Mary Finn
This book is a moving and highly evocative account of an idyllic childhood spent in rural Ireland during the years between the two World Wars. With rare power and beauty, the author succeeds in capturing what it was like to be young when farming and seafaring were still largely self-sufficient, mutually supportive community endeavours based on sound ecological principles. Viewed through the eyes of a bright and unusually perceptive child, Mary Finn’s often poignant yet humorous book resonates with memorable descriptions of the rich assortment of characters who once populated her world, as well as the colourful rituals and seasonal rhythms of Irish country life.

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Writing Ulster Issue 5: American & Ulster: A Cultural Correspondence edited by Bill Lazenblatt
This issue of Writing Ulster explores the cultural connections between Ulster and America. It contains articles by Americans about Ulster, or about Ireland in general, as well as articles by Ulster folk about America. From Oxford, Mississippi, James Mullan provides a novelist’s perspective on Irish immigrant experience, whole Matt McKee of Larne, County Antrim, looks somewhat sceptically at claims that Davy Crockett was of Ulster extraction. Frank Ormsby conjures images of those ‘Yanks’ who were billeted here during the war, on one of their nostalgic return visits, while Douglas Carson muses on the possibility that John Wayne might have ended up as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland! Sophie King evokes memories of American film and its significance to her girlhood in Belfast, and Jenny Cornell analyses representations of the Troubles and television drama, while her short story set in Belfast points to a more positive future. Music as a medium of cultural interaction does not go unnoticed, with essays on fiddle-playing by Hilary Bracefield and on Jazz influences on his own work by celebrated Ulster poet Michael Longley. Maureen Murphy details the lives of Irish servant girls in America as recorded in the literature of the 19th century, while Paul Muldoon reflects on his life in Hopewell, with a New Englandly haiku. The Americanisation of Ulster is observed in Lee Wright’s discuss ion of design features in the province, while Jerushia McCormack looks more sceptically at the same process as it affects Irish life in general. The book also contains new poetry from: Fred Johnstone, Richard Godden, Robert Graecen, Danny Barbare, and Bev Braune.

The Untouchable by John Banville
John Banville, born in Wexford in 1945, is one of Ireland’s finest writer s and this is perhaps his finest novel. It is engrossing and exquisitely written. One critic stated that Banville is the ‘most intelligent and stylish novelist currently working in English.’ It tells the story of Victor Maskell, a former spy who has been betrayed. After the announceme nt in the British House of Commons and the hasty revelations of his double life of wartime espionage, his disgrace is public, his knighthood revoked, and his position as curator of the Queen’s pictures terminated. This book explores Maskell’s life in an attempt to answer the questions: For whom has he been sacrificed? To what has he sacrificed his life?

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Tara Road by Maeve Binchy
This new blockbuster by Ireland’s most popular novelist is set in contemporary Dublin and on the north-east coast of the United States. It is the interlocking story of two women, Ria Lynch and Marilyn Vine, who hav e never met. Their lives have almost nothing in common. Ria lives in a bi g ramshackle house in Tara Road, Dublin, which is filled day and night with the family and friends on whom she depends. Marilyn lives in a college t own in Connecticut, New England, absorbed in her career, an independent and private woman who is very much her own person. Two more unlikely friends would be hard to find. Yet a chance phone call brings them together and they decide to exchange homes for the summer. Ria goes to America in the hope that the change will give her space and courage to sort out the huge crisis in her life that is threatening to destroy her. Marilyn goes to Ireland to recover in peace and quiet from the tragedy that she keeps secret from the world, little realising that Tara Road will prove to be the leas t quiet place on earth. They borrow each other’s houses, and during the course of that magical summer they find themselves borrowing something of each other’s lives and suffering grows into a story of discovery, unexpected friendships and new hope. By the time Ria and Marilyn eventually meet, they find that they have altered the course of each other’s lives forever.

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Jonathan Swift: A biography by Victoria Glendinning
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is an inexhaustibly intriguing figure in the literary and political history of Ireland and England. Best known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, he was an ordained clergyman whose enemies thought did not believe in God. He became a legendary Dean of St Patrick ‘s Cathedral in Dublin, whose ambition for church preferment in England was perpetually frustrated. For four short, intoxicating years he was the intimate of Queen Anne’s chief ministers, and their publicists and propagandist a ‘spin doctor’ before the term was invented. His private life was intense and enigmatic. Two younger women, whom he called Stella and Vanessa, moved to Ireland to be close to him. He made both of the unhappy. Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer and wit, Jonathan Swift is the master of shock. His furious satirical responses to the corruption and hypocrisy he saw around him in private and public life have every relevance for our own times. His black imagination, and his preoccupation with the foulness that lies beneath the thin veneer of artifice and civilisation, gave a new adjective ‘Swiftian’ to the lexicon of criticism. Like his Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, Swift is a problem in perspective and scale. Victoria Glendenning, prize-winning biographer, has taken a literary zoom-lens to illuminate this proud and intractable man. She investigates at close range the main events and relationships of Swift’s life, promising a compelling and provocative portrait set in a rich tapes try of controversy and paradox.

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