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2005: Sebastian Barry, A Long, Long Way
- Cork University Press
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Supplementary Reading Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (New York: Morrow, 1992) Éibhear Walshe, ‘The Vanishing Homoerotic: Colm Tóibín’s Gay Fictions’, New Hibernia Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (2006), pp. 122–36 Stephen Matterson, ‘Dreaming about the Dead: The Master’, in Paul Delaney (ed.), Reading Colm Tóibín (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2008), pp. 131–48 Susan Griffin (ed.) and ‘Introduction’, All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) Also Published in 2004 Ronan Bennett, Havoc in its Third Year; Emma Donoghue, Life Mask; Roddy Doyle, Oh, Play That Thing; Neil Jordan, Shade; Sean O’Reilly, The Swing of Things; Glenn Patterson, That Which Was 2005 Sebastian Barry, A Long, Long Way One of the leading playwrights of his generation, Barry (b. 1955) is equally well known for his novels. Early works of fiction include Macker’s Garden (1982) and The Engine of Owl-Light (1987). The publication of The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) inaugurated a loosely connected sequence of novels concerning the Dublin-based Dunne and the Sligo-based McNulty families. The fortunes of individual members of these families are recounted in Annie Dunne (2002) and The Secret Scripture (2008), and typically feature protagonists who prove to be exceptions to the course of events of their time. Set in the early years of the twentieth century, these alternative histories convey arresting revelations in an ornate and sometimes whimsical style. On Canaan’s Side (2011) continues the Dunne family saga in America. Although he seems a long, long way from fully appreciating the fact, Willie Dunne has been marked by history from birth – ‘He was called William after the long-dead Orange King, because his father took an interest in such distant matters’ (3). And it is not only far-off history that has left an imprint on him. The state of Irish society, and of Irish relations with England, are also unavoidable aspects of his formation and of his pre-First World War world. The Dunnes live in Dublin Castle, their apartment a perk of Willie’s father’s position as a superintendent of police. Dunne senior describes himself as ‘a man that has strove [sic] to keep order in this great city and protect it from miscreants and the evil of traitors and rebels’ (247). His rigid adherence to 162 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 the status quo is such that he finds it difficult to forgive his son for not being tall enough to enlist in the police. The exception that confirms the superintendent’s strict rule is his befriending of a trade unionist, Lawlor, injured in a baton attack during the 1913 Lockout, a good deed that leads to Willie falling for Lawlor’s daughter, Gretta. Employed as a builder’s labourer, and planning eventually to marry Gretta, Willie nevertheless decides to join up when war breaks out, believing that in this decision ‘he had followed his own mind’ (13). In this belief he has led himself astray, and pretty much everything else that happens thereafter ensures that he is a long, long way from becoming what he might be. He loses Gretta Lawlor’s love through the malicious moralising of a comrade-in-arms. His return home on leave coincides with the outbreak of the Easter Rising, producing among other things an unnerving similarity between the city’s main thoroughfare , Sackville Street, and the Flanders trench of the same name in which Willie serves. And Willie finds himself bearing arms against his countrymen, one of whom, the same age as himself, he sees shot: ‘he carried the young man’s blood to Belgium’ (97). Remarking in a letter to his father that ‘I wish they had not seen fit to shoot the . . . leaders’ (139) of the Rising alienates Willie from that pillar of the establishment . The Rising also costs Willie a friend, Jesse Kirwan, who is court-martialled and shot for going on hunger strike to protest the rebels’ execution. What Ireland signifies is clearly changing in ways that Willie hardly dares imagine. At the front, his faith that ‘his father’s fervent worship of the King would guide him, as the lynchpin that held down the dangerous tent of the world’ (22) soon comes under fire. As an unworldly eighteen-yearold , the inner conflict arising from trying to cope with the demands of war is as baffling to him as the tactics and attitudes of his commanding officers. And...