Life
Prof. of English, University College Cork; author of works on Brendan
Behan, to whom he is related through the Kearney line; author of a novel, The Consequence (1993), which concerns Fintan Kearney, a lecturer
in English at UUC who learns that an autobiography he cannot remember
having written is being published in London; includes reminiscences of
schooldays, a portrait of Behan, and memories of popular music in the
1950s.
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Commentary
by Cecilia Keegan, review of The Consequence (Belfast: Blackstaff;
Chester Springs: Dufour 1993, 1994), [324pp.], in Irish Literary Supplement
(Fall 1994): the novel is the conseqence of another called Gone With
Time, and the narrator Fintan Kearney’s attempt to tell the truth;
mentors of Fintan are his hard-drinking uncle Pearse; Eugene Watters,
and Brendan Behan, each represented as ‘characters’; narrator
wins attention of first girlfriend by forging Behan’s signature;
the real story, as remembered by the women in his life, is ribald.
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Notes
The Consequence is used as a central text in C. L. Dallat’s
discussion of the ‘rise of the novel as a critque of de Valera’s
Ireland’ (‘After the Censor had gone’, Times Literary
Supplement, 27 Sept. 1996, pp.21).
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