Philip Casey

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Works

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Criticism
Interview, Books Ireland (Oct. 1994) [self-admitted surrealist]; review of The Fabulists in Times Literary Supplement (18, Nov. 1994) [down-and-out-ers in Dublin, ‘spoofing’].

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Commentary
Paul Magrs, reviewing of The Fisher Child (Picador), recounts the plot: Dan’s wife Kate becomes pregnant on a visit to Florence, and bears a black child, Meg, which Dan rejects and sinks into a depression; his own father, living a new-age life in Co. Wexford, reveals that an ancestor Hugh as involved in the 1798 rebellion and fled to Montserrat where he became a small landowner and had three children with a black slave Ama, one a white boy and two others black girls, a family doomed to tragedy since she favours the boy; Dan achieve compassionate reconciliation and learns through a ‘rush of hurt; to appreciate the troubles of others. Magrs calls it a ‘wise, tender novel’ about the ‘muddled connections and continuities of [the characters’] lives.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 16 Nov., p.24.)

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References
Katie Donovan, A. N. Jeffares & Brendan Kennelly, eds., Ireland’s Women (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994), selects prose.

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Quotations
1916 & All That: ‘It [visiting Kilmainham] was very moving, but I have long come to regard 1916 as an act of monumental foolishness, however undeniably heroic and noble. I believe their putative military descendants to be even more foolish. Ostensibly struggling to unite the island, they have before their eyes the evidence of what lies before them should they succeed. [/.../] I am proud to be Irish but that pride derives from a cultural source. I believe that Pearse and Connolly gave their lives for a political freedom which is of little benefit to the mass of the Irish people, its workings confined to meaningless arguments about non-issues and the clash of a few dominant personalities. Economic freedom has been tenuous and largely mythical. [... / ...] despite the pious rhetoric, the Easter Rebellion remains a pathetic waste of life.’ (Letters from the New Island, 16 on 16: Irish Writers on the Easter Rising, Raven Arts Press 1988, 47pp., Contribution [author name/no title], pp.28-29; p.29.)

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‘Comforts of Youth’, in “Finishing Lines”, The Irish Times Magazine (14 Sept. 2002): ‘[...] The curlew in the bog and the gasmask in the [London] bombsite have followed me through life as emotional contradictions. It is like declaring something to be true, then immediately seeing that its opposite is also true. This is probably why I have trouble believing that three plus two is five, but can quite easily grasp that an electron can be in two places at once. That space and time are relative concepts sits quite easily with me. Yet the gasmask and the curlew have a peculiarly unvarying character. They are things as themselves, in a particular, fixed time. Even though a bird is hardly stationary, the curlew’s cry always seemed to come from the same part of the bog. Though I must have heard it many times, it is as if I only heard it once, perhaps because its two lonely notes etch themselves into the brain, like a nervous metronome. The gasmask, on the other hand, despite the fact that it had a history, that its owner had perhaps died horribly, seems now to have been more lifeless than any mask or any corpse. / Not so the third image which has followed me around since my youth like an umpire of the game between the curlew and the mask: Croghan mountain, the same mountain over which the rain inexorably crossed like a blind animal that knew where it was going. The word Croghan comes from the Irish cruachán, meaning stack, or small mountain, and there are many so named in Ireland. Like most mountains, it looks different depending on where you view it from, but from where I stood, near Hollyfort, it had the classic shape of a peak. In winter it was reminiscent of the mask: cold - indifferent it seemed, even to the curlew; as if by contrast on a fine summer’s day when it was exquisite to watch, it somehow cared for you, which is to say you could love it then. / On a fine day in summer it was fascinating, as it shimmered, apparently blue, and seemed to breathe. In a lovely poem, James Liddy called it the Blue Mountain. I think I must have projected my inchoate sense of the spiritual onto it, and it has been refining and offering it back to me ever since. / No doubt there lurks in some psychoanalysis or poetics handbook a name for these enchantments that one carries to the grave. Im convinced that everyone has at least one to which they return in times of reflection, or crisis, and it is always there, in the background, waiting to release its power if only its carrier will allow it. It is where empathy begins. If a term for such solaces exists, 1 dodt want to know it. In a way, 1 shouldn’t even be mentioning them here. They should be sacred and therefore secret. But ifs too late. They permeate everything I have ever written, and perhaps they always will.’ (p.66; end.)

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Notes
The Fabulists (1994), set in Dublin, concerns Tess and Mungo, lonely people who begin sporadic affair after chance encounter on Ha’Penny Bridge having both been through ‘marriage, children, death of love’; exchange fantasies; rediscover capacity to feel; Mungo has previously lived in Barcelona; Tess receives postcards from Berlin; opens with Tess joining the Parade of Innocence to highlight the case of the Birmingham Six as it crosses O’Connell St. Bridge, where she first sees Mungo; ends with the couple waving to President Robinson as she leaves Dublin Castle following her inauguration; skill in handling of elements of fact and fantasy. (See review by Liam Harte, in Irish Studies Review, Winter 1994/5, p.49.)

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