St Patrick’s Week 2022: Not everyone has a book in them, but every Irish county does
While Ireland’s literary riches are not evenly distributed across the island, each country has at least one book in itTo celebrate St Patrick’s Day, The Irish Times has assembled a list of books, fiction or creative nonfiction, one set in each Irish county. It would be fair to say that, no more than its population density, Ireland’s literary riches are not evenly distributed and a handful of counties had us racking our brains for a representative.
But without further ado, let us head North to start our literary tour of Ireland, in the fictional village of Ballylack, Co Antrim, the setting for the latest novel from the Ballymena-born author Jan Carson, and proceed in alphabetical order to Co Wicklow.This is a novel about faith – and its limitations. It’s also a story of love. Hannah – and indeed all the children – are loved with fierce tenderness; their parents’ agony is conveyed with visceral effect.
If McNamee's subject matter is dark and ugly – violent death, cover-ups, conspiracies and corruption – his writing style is in stark contrast lyrical and heightened, full of finely-wrought passages and memorable turns of phrase – for example, McGladdery and his friend finding a hiding place to smoke becomes"an apprenticeship in the clandestine" – punctuated too by staccato sentences, a masterpiece of small-town gothic and the"dark grammar" of murder.
Solace tracks the sharp divides between two radically different Irish social realities: an ageing and conservative rural community in Co Longford with its gossip-driven and pointedly secular modes of surveillance and control acts as a counterfoil to the urban milieu of the young adults in the novel who are at ease with the hedonism, laxity, sexual promiscuity and tolerant diversity of contemporary Dublin.
Her story centres around two brothers, Cormac and Hart Black, and their efforts to assist in the suicide of their father, the Chief, who is dying from terminal cancer, but also, one suspects, from the shock of losing his farm and legacy to a property investment gone south. The subject of assisted suicide is an inspired metaphor for boom-to-bust Ireland.
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