The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1985: Mary Leland, The Killeen

relentless repetition with which casualties are created, agency is denied and change remains an apparent impossibility. The dissolution and disillusion of a generation, diagnosed and embodied by Alan Mulvanney, create an image of a society indifferently squandering its promise and its hope and its capacity for moral growth. Family is unavailing, friendship is fleeting, ideals are debased, affiliation and belonging are denied, all at the cost of common purpose and common understanding. There is no character for whom crisis is not the norm. During his time in London, Eugene McDermott is told by an anonymous youngster from Belfast, ‘It’s just yourself, isn’t it. All you’ve got is yourself’ (93). The main events of A Curious Street – suicide, accidental death, madness – emphasise that self’s frailty and the emotional waste and cultural failures which make its vulnerability commonplace , unchanging and unchangeable. Supplementary Reading Theo d’Haen, ‘Des Hogan and Ireland’s Post-Modern Past’, in Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout (eds), History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), pp. 79–83 Desmond Hogan, ‘Return to Ballinasloe: A Record for November 1990’, in Hogan, The Edge of the City: A Scrapbook 1976–1991 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 142–8 Paul Deane, ‘The Great Chain of Irish Being Reconsidered: Desmond Hogan’s A Curious Street’, Notes on Modern Irish Literature, no. 6 (1994), pp. 39–48 Tony Murray, ‘Curious Streets: Diaspora, Displacement and Transgression in Desmond Hogan’s London Irish Narratives’, Irish Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 2 (May 2006), pp. 239–53 Also Published in 1984 Linda Anderson, To Stay Alive; Caroline Blackwood, Corrigan; Jennifer Johnston, The Railway Station Man; Val Mulkerns, The Summerhouse 1985 Mary Leland, The Killeen A noted journalist, Leland (b. 1941) has published a number of nonfiction works devoted to her native Cork. She is also the author of a collection of short stories. A second novel, Approaching Priests (1991), deals with the Irish generation that came of age in the 1970s. A note at the beginning of this novel explains the title. It is a transliteration of a word in Irish for ‘a church yard set apart for infants’, and 1985: MARY LELAND, THE KILLEEN 89 an additional note mentions a burial place reserved for unbaptised children. In The Killeen, the site in question is in the townland of Adrigole, in west Cork, and the resting place is that of two-year-old Thomas Costello, illegitimate son of a local girl, Margaret Coakley, and a left-republican diehard named Earnán Costello. On the run before securing his escape to America – the novel is set in the early 1930s, in the period immediately following Fianna Fáil’s first general election victory – Earnán is given refuge in a convent in Cork city, where Margaret has come to work in the kitchen. Their time together is very limited, and the seduction is readily accomplished, leaving the remainder of the brief, charged narrative to detail the larger context into which mother and child are received. Margaret has taken the position in the convent on the death of her father, partly because one of her teachers thinks it a good opportunity for her but largely to escape her vindictive and abusive mother. The teacher’s good opinion of Margaret is confirmed by the regard for her of Sister Thomas Aquinas, a thoughtful nun who finds her not only a promising young woman but, in her origins and forms of socialisation, the bearer of elements of Gaelic tradition, as described in the book she and Margaret read together, Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland. To ensure Margaret’s continuing well-being, Sister Thomas prevails on Father Costello, the convent chaplain and brother of Earnán, to find a place for her in the household of the widowed Julia Mulcahy, a relative of the priest’s. Julia’s husband, Maurice, was a comrade of Earnán’s, and has recently died on hunger strike as a political prisoner, ‘A Republican victim of other Republicans’ (40). Margaret gives birth in Julia’s house, and as soon as she does so, Father Costello baptises Thomas, whereupon the child is taken away and placed in a school. This institution is nothing like those orphanages whose history and administration have subsequently become such an unsightly blot on Ireland’s moral landscape. On the contrary, the place in question is a haven for the children of political undesirables who have either been jailed or forced to flee the country...