Hedda Friberg, An Old Order and a New: The Split World of Liam O’Flaherty’s Novels [dissertation] (Uppsala UP 1996), characterises Dr. Hynes in Famine as battling ‘between two sets of allegiances, the New-Order urban civilisation in which he received his education and the Old-Order values of his native village to which he has returned.’ (p.217);

Patrick Sheeran, The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism (Dublin: Wolfhound; NJ: Atlantic 1976): ‘This, then, was the world of O’Flaherty’s youth, a world of explosive contraditions. The folk culture was beginning to disintegrate and the shaping forces within society were incapable of establishing an alternative. Provincial rootedness was everywhere giving way before a rising, ruthless middle [54] class. The broken world and its broken traditions scared the boy and young man who was sufficiently at home with the locals to absorb their unspoken assumptions and expectations. Yet he would remember the islands as a lost Eden to which, repeatedly, he would try to return. Things a great dela less tangible than the social and cultural forces we have outlined would draw him back. There was the extraordinary beauty and ferocity of nature and natural life which surrounded his youth. It so imposed itself on his mind and imaginatin that in London, New York or Paris he could write delicate, evocative sketches, minute in their detail, of a wave or seagull or the terror of a hunted rabbit. Nature, red in tooth and claw, one species preying on another, the hunter and the hunted, supplied him with an image of the human condition which survived all the complexities that Marxism, Nihilism and all the other -isms he was to espouse, introduced into his thinking.’ (p.55 [cont. infra.)

John Broderick, ‘Roots’, review of Famine, Irish Times (19 Jan. 1980); [a book] ‘without which we can have but an imperfect understanding of the country in which [it] is set.’ Broderick praises the character of Mary Kilmartin, who has been ‘singled out by two generations of critics as one of the great creations of modern literature’. He adds, ‘O’Flaherty himself is clearly in love with her’. He summarises, ‘Mary survives with her baby, to join her husband on a ship for America. [...] The old people die; the district is laid waste; and the gombeen men survive to form the backbone of Catholic Ireland down to the present day.’

James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse, NY:Syracuse UP 1983): ‘O’Flaherty’s Famine deals centrally with the Kilmartin family, Martin and Mary and their baby [all] of whom survive to sail to America. O’Flaherty’s knowledge of Famine-lore reinforced by his reading of Rev. John O’Rourke’s The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 with notices of Earlier Irish Famines (1875), which was most concerned of all early histories of the event with the plight of the ordinary people. (Sheeran, 1976, p.205). In Famine, Daniel O’Connell’s constitutional politics are lampooned in the figure of O’Connellite politician McCarthy Lalor, whom the parish priest inwardly repudiates (‘the demagogue O’Connell had professed himself a pacifist and a loyal subject [...] now [...] starved bodies [...] would pay for the craven sin of pacifism’, Famine, p.328). The novel is interspersed with sardonic socialist polemics, and contains an extreme representation of the landlord’s agent, Chadwick, who seduces and ruins Ellie Kilmartin, and exclaims against the peasants, “I’m going to root them out like a nest of rats” (Famine, p.172). When Brian Kilmartin dies, his dog dies with him, “nestled against the old man’s shoulder”.’ (Famine, p.448; Cahalan, op. cit., p.142.).

ENG507C2 - University of Ulster - 2003