Volume 30, Number 20 · December 22, 1983
The Luck of the Irish
By Mary Gordon
Fools of Fortune
by William Trevor
Viking, 239 pp., $13.95
The Stories of William Trevor
Penguin, 799 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Few colonizers have attached to the romance of the country they have conquered as the Anglo-Irish have. It may be that no other colonizers have been quite so literary; it may be that the racial closeness of conqueror and conquered has called forth a marriage like that of intense, doomed cousins: irresistible to the romantic imagination, damaging for generations. In creating a myth for themselves and for the Celtic Irish, the Anglo-Irish have seen themselves as victims frozen in a frame of grand heroic isolation. In their great houses, with their famous horses and heraldic dogs, they saw themselves suffering: misunderstanding, loneliness. They brooded over the half-beloved natives who could not, in any way that could be trusted, love them back. Blood, poetry, and magic—the coin of the Irish Irish drew them in and yet repelled them. Still they were, deep in their hearts, not English. They belonged nowhere except, passionately, where they were.
Review, 2599 words
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