Volume 50, Number 12 · July 17, 2003
The Wonder of Irishness
By Andrew O'Hagan
Shroud
by John Banville
Knopf, 257 pp., $25.00
It is funny the way countries excessively proud of their national character often have literatures mired in questions of falsehood. Fabulation, in this way, may be considered both the curse and the glory of Irish writing. 'They have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood,' wrote Jonathan Swift of those super-rational creatures the Houyhnhnms, but we might laugh out loud at that, seeing how fakery, phoniness, the counterfeit, and the sham have long established themselves as watchwords of self-consciousness in the land of Swift's birth. 'Old father, old artificer, stand me now and forever in good stead,' wrote Joyce. And let's not even get started on Oscar Wilde.
Review, 3964 words
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