SEEING THINGS

Sebastian Barry's Irish marvels.

- GILES HARVEY

The Irish historian Roy Foster was recently asked to explain one of the great riddles of world literature. How was it, the interviewer wanted to know, that a sparsely peopled island on the margins of Europe had managed to produce such a hoard of canonical writers? At a bare minimum, the list would have to include Swift, Sterne, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, Beckett. Though how could you fail to mention Flann O’Brien? Or Frank O’Connor? For that matter, what about Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, and Seamus Heaney? And this is to say nothing of the extraordinary crop of living talent—from Edna O’Brien to Sally Rooney—whose accustomed toil continues to enrich the tradition.

Instead of reaching for grand theories to account for this remarkable literary surplus, Foster did that very Irish thing: he told a story. One summer, he said, he’d been on holiday in County Kerry when the trunk of his aged Volvo became jammed. At a nearby garage, Foster asked the mechanic if he ought to take the car back to the dealership. The mechanic didn’t think so. He gave the trunk a good whack with his wrench, and just like that it sprang open. “In matters like this,” the man said sagely, “Volvo dealers wield no special magic.”