Past glories

Debut novel takes a leaf out of the book of modern Irish writing, hurtling classical antiquity into the present.

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Returning to the classics to make sense of the present is a master strategy of modern Irish writing. In Ulysses, James Joyce deploys the template of the Odyssey to cast an epic grandeur on his bumbling Dublin everyman. Patrick Kavanagh's poems about squabbling Monaghan farmers are underwritten by the words of Homer's ghost: "I made the Iliad from such a local row." More recently, the poets of the Northern Troubles have found in Troy a mirror of their own "local row". We think of Seamus Heaney's ominous Mycenae Lookout, or Michael Longley's hopeful Ceasefire, written in the wake of the paramilitary cessations of 1994, with its clipped and devastating final couplet spoken by King Priam: "I get down on my knees, and do what must be done/And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son."