Volume 46, Number 7 · April 22, 1999
Waking from the Nightmare
By Thomas Flanagan
Breakfast on Pluto
by Patrick McCabe
HarperFlamingo, 199 pp., $22.00
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
by Sebastian Barry
Viking, 308 pp., $23.95
The Star Factory
by Ciaran Carson
Arcade, 295 pp., $23.95
In the early morning of the day that fills Ulysses, as they stand outside the Martello tower at Sandycove, Haines, the sentimental English celtophile with eyes sea-cold and imperial, tells Stephen Dedalus: 'We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.' Stephen replies only with a wary silence, but history is much upon his own mind that day, like God and Shakespeare and his father. History in the large, universal sense, but more particularly the messy, contingent history of his own island. Later that morning, talking with an Ulster Protestant schoolmaster for whom that history has a very different meaning and color, he says, in words that would become memorable: 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'
Review, 4969 words
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