Irish Books

Killian Quigley, an expert in oceanic humanities, is Chris's guest to discuss McCann's deep-sea adventure. Writer Anthony Fennell joins a vessel that repairs the information cables that run deep under the ocean, hoping for material for an article. Yet Fennell finds himself especially drawn to his fellow-Irishman, the expedition leader John Conway, both in thrall to and resentful of his corporate employers. Through Conway, Fennell understands the complexities of the undersea network: the cables are imperilled by climate change, yet also strike the alienated Fennell as symbolic of human connections, from family bonds to larger questions of social cohesion prompted by racial tensions. As Chris and Killian discuss, McCann is drawn to both literal and representative meanings of the data cables and the task of mending them. While the novel draws on such literary influences as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Jules Verne, the enigmatic Conway is a Gatsby figure who mystifies our narrator.
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Maebh Long - Kevin Barry fan and Eamon Cleary Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Otago - joins Chris to discuss The Heart in Winter. Barry's tale of lovers on the run is set in the American midwest in 1891 but looks back to Irish folkloric figures like Deirdre of the Sorrows. As Chris and Maebh discuss, Barry gives us a more agentive figure than the folkloric models in Polly Gillespie, the more streetwise character. If this makes Polly more modern, and even feminist, than the old Irish stories, the novel also looks to our own time in its language: Barry puts twenty-first century speech in his characters' mouths rather than the language of 1891. The Heart in Winter is a deceptive novel: it has a straightforward plot but a rich texture, and an exploration of melancholic desire that is also playful in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien.
Read the accompanying blog post at https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com/2026/06/dark-balladry-in-wild-west-kevin-barrys.html
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This remarkable novel presents us with a speaker who is reluctant to tell her story. Our young narrator's crisis begins when a republican paramilitary known as the Milkman begins to pay her unwanted attention. Milkman's courtship resembles guerrilla warfare, and his unexplained attraction to Middle Sister befits the directionlessness of the IRA campaign in the late 1970s. Chris and guest Professor James Chandler (University of Chicago) navigate a book made complex by the narrator's reluctance to share: Middle Sister has been traumatised, and she reveals information in oblique ways. We piece together the story from the words of an evasive and digressive speaker who is mindful not only of direct recrimination from paramilitaries for any wrong decisions, but the danger of local gossip. If the scenario is terrifying, nonetheless Burns achieves a quirky humour in the unconventional storytelling mode and, in a subtle way, she poses probing questions about ideology. For various reasons, Milkman is a difficult book, on which many readers give up: Chris and Jim urge them to stick with it.

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Kevin Foster, an expert in war narratives at Monash University, helps Chris examine a quirky veteran: the hero of Old God's Time fought in the Malayan Emergency and is a retired Garda. He was also brought up in a Christian Brothers home: protagonist Tom Kettle has been through the wars, so to speak. Tom's past resurfaces when two policemen visit his home in Dalkey about a cold case, little realising how closely the mystery relates to Tom's personal tragedies. His attempts to start again seem never to have succeeded; his life has been a series of devastating losses with only glimpses of contentment. Old memories intrude upon Tom's present so forcibly that we wonder whether he has dementia. The book is also haunted, in an inter-textual way, by ghosts from Sebastian Barry's other novels. Kevin and Chris find Old God's Time a moving and complex book which also achieves an unlikely humour in its vision of Tom Kettle's eccentric and perhaps disintegrating mind. The novel moves gracefully between different registers, invoking Greek myth with pathos at one moment and conventions of crime fiction at another. Contains spoilers.
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Chris's guest to discuss Intermezzo is Madeleine Callaghan (Maddy), Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Maddy explains that Rooney's title alludes to the opening strategies of chess, in which players aim to set up the conditions they want for free play. But Rooney's characters find they can't arrange their lives the same way: they can neither identify the beginning nor put the pieces where they want. We meet Peter - torn between his sexual ideal in the younger Naomi and his Platonic match in old flame Sylvia - and Peter's student brother Ivan, the socially awkward chess champion who falls for the much older Margaret. Chris points out that the brothers have recently been bereaved by the loss of their father, a grief that is present without being mediated. With that bereavement, and troubled love affairs, the novel presents a lonely world in which emotional closeness is elusive, sex doesn't fully answer a person's needs, and the unfortunate dog symbolises neglected responsibilities. While commentators have made much of Rooney as millennial spokesperson, Maddy notes Intermezzo's place in the cerebral traditions of various European fictions. Rooney is also specifically interested in where modern Ireland is going, without perhaps having the answers. It feels like a moral work, but does it communicate worthwhile morals? And would the novel benefit from the ability to find humour in adverse circumstances, as in some of the most well-known Irish literature?

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