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even as it invokes them, this novel (to use the most convenient if not necessarily the most accurate classification) is yet one more remarkable demonstration of Beckett’s intellectual range and aesthetic control. But it may not seem to have very much to do with Irish writing. This view, however, seems shortsighted. To speak generally, there is obviously no reason to think of Ireland being beyond the pale of such a work’s interests . More specifically, however, some of the themes and structures of How It Is are also among those to which contemporary Irish novelists, in their own very different ways, have directed their attention. Among these are the availability of a usable past, the possibility of living outside of history, the aesthetics of voice, the utility of ‘old words’ (134), the resources of memory and journeys through certain buried spiritual and psychological terrain. Not to reduce the imaginative domain of How It Is to that of a quaking sod, but its discursive interests are not quite so alien as they appear, surprising as that may seem. Supplementary Reading Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, 2nd ed.), pp. 187–99 John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970, 2nd ed.), pp. 209–18 Gary Adelman, ‘Torturer and Servant: Samuel Beckett’s How It Is’, Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 25, no. 1 (Fall 2001), pp. 81–92 Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, Samuel Beckett: Comment C’est/How It Is: A CriticalGenetic Edition (New York: Routledge, 2001) Also Published in 1964 Anthony Cronin, The Life of Riley; Janet McNeill, The Maiden Dinosaur; Edna O’Brien, Girls in their Married Bliss; Flann O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive; Richard Power, The Land of Youth; William Trevor, The Old Boys 1965 Brian Moore, The Emperor of Ice-Cream This is the third of a trio of novels – the other two are Judith Hearne (1955) and The Feast of Lupercal (1957) – dealing with Moore’s boyhood and youth in his native Belfast. Prior to its publication, novels such as The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960) and An Answer from Limbo (1962) had already begun to draw on his post-Belfast life, most of which was spent in North America. But Moore (1921–99) continued to 1965: BRIAN MOORE, THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM 17 keep his origins in mind, as his prolific output indicates by, among other elements, its interest in religious matters. Works as superficially different from one another as Cold Heaven (1983), Black Robe (1985), The Colour of Blood (1987) and No Other Life (1993) return to the subject. The air-raid described in The Emperor of Ice-Cream took place on 15 April 1941. Over 900 people died in the seven-hour attack. Seventeen-year-old Gavin Burke is a failure. This is not only how he sees himself. So does his family. He has failed his exams and will not be following in the footsteps of his father and his brother Owen in reading law at Queen’s University, and he is only notionally studying for an alternative exam which may secure him university entrance. This exam he also fails. His relationship with the pert but very sensible Sally Shannon, a student nurse, is on-again, off-again. And he has enlisted in the ARP (Air Raid Precautions), an official British organisation established to assist the civilian population in the event of air raids. Gavin’s father, whose unreconstructed brand of Irish nationalism has been fortified by Hitler’s initial military success, regards his son’s enlistment as a particularly deviant departure. Nobody whom Gavin knows thinks that in joining the ARP he is making a declaration of independence or even that a life of one’s own is conceivable beyond the narrow confines of conventional bourgeois activities, attainments and institutions. And Gavin himself has only a hazy sense that he is taking a step towards a life of his own. In his view, adulthood consists of the male entitlements to drink and wench to one’s heart’s content, supposed freedoms in which his peers indulge as a means of transgressing the cultural limitations of their class and the puritanical ethos of their Catholicism. The world of the ARP post appears to be less an antidote to Belfast’s typical rigidities than a microcosm of them, with sectarianism, sexism and bureaucratic overkill its prevailing social features. Yet, these features are most in evidence at the administrative level, and there...

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