The birth of a nation at the Rep, “Juno and the Peacock”

Ciaran O’Reilly, J. Smith-Cameron and John Keating in Juno and the Paycock.

If you’ve never seen Juno and the Paycock, Sean O’Casey’s wonderfully well-written tragicomedy about the individual human cost of the Irish Civil War, the new production at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York is about as perfect an introduction to the Irish classic as you could ever ask for.

The second work in O’Casey’s famous Dublin trilogy (which includes The Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars) Juno provides a richly detailed portrait of the Irish nation emerging, if you could truthfully call it that, from the centuries-long nightmare of British colonialism.

In Juno and the Paycock O’Casey introduces us to the Boyle family, a typical Dublin working class family of the period, as they scrabble to make a living in a nation that’s turning in on itself though a brutal civil war.

Poverty, O’Casey reminds us, is a form of violence in itself, and he never loses sight of the fact despite all the conflicting forces that clamor for a hearing in the play.

In Charlotte Moore’s brilliantly paced production at the Irish Rep every type of poverty -- financial, emotional and spiritual -- is contemplated and lucidly staged.

First produced at the Abbey in Dublin in 1924, Juno is set two years earlier, when conflict over the Anglo-Irish Treaty divided the Irish Republican Army between those who supported the compromise, and those who rejected it as falling too far short of the goal of national unity.

As Juno Boyle, the hard working housewife O’Casey names after the Roman goddess of marriage, actress J. Smith-Cameron convincingly shows us the thankless job her character has to keep a roof over her family’s head as the nation wages war.

As the walls close in Smith-Cameron crisscrosses the stage in fury and indignation, at times almost threatening to take flight, in a dazzling performance that deepens most affectingly as it progresses.

Juno knows her husband Captain Jack Boyle (Ciaran O’Reilly) is a ne’er-do-well and a dreamer, but she wants to believe he’ll reform himself and be the bread winner she needs him to be, in despite of all.

That human capacity for self-deception is everywhere on display in Juno. Captain Jack has convinced himself he was once a well travelled sailor, Juno has convinced herself she can stave off the growing chaos that surrounds her family, her daughter Mary Boyle has convinced herself that her posh suitor Mr. Bentham is the man of her dreams, and son Johnny Boyle has convinced himself he won’t be held to account by the IRA for the death of the comrade he betrayed.

As Captain Jack, Irish Rep co-founder O’Reilly mines O’Casey’s tragicomic script for its pathos and humor in a bravura performance that he often delivers at his own expense. O’Reilly’s Captain Jack is an intentional buffoon, a man who knows exactly how much he can get away with and rarely strays beyond.

But O’Reilly’s Captain Jack also shows us that he expects his shortcomings to be forgiven because he’s charming, although he’s deeply unforgiving of the shortcomings of others.

Ireland’s generational poverty and the violence colonialism has done to her people are conveyed by the play’s grim tenement setting and by the maimed body of Johnny Boyle (Ed Malone), the young man who has lost his arm in a bomb blast.

O’Casey has created the social background to the play with a flair for authenticity that gives the play its epic scope (the evocative set design by James Noone is so good it deserves to be considered another character in the play, and the sound design by M. Florian Staab is first rate).

But the men in Juno are the least interesting and effective part of the world of the play, curiously enough. They do not struggle like the women do to hold their families together; they refuse to expose themselves to the deep hurts of this world if they don’t have to.

That leaves it to the women in the play (and this production) to try to chart a course through the ruination that colonialism and its consequences have made of their city and their homes.  Juno may be the god of marriage, but the Paycock she calls her husband threatens to undo everything she has built.

O’Casey’s clear-sighted assessment of the social and religious forces that will blight the lives of the emerging Republic is startlingly prescient and he puts them all on stage -- a conservative clericalism that offers more judgment than compassion; intolerant patriarchs that will quickly condemn even their own children; men and women who will sell out their neighbors and friends for a few pieces of silver. All the recognizable horrors of the first decades of the Irish Free State are already assembled as the play begins.

Moore has created a brilliant ensemble for her production. As Mrs. Tancred, the dependably brilliant Fiana Toibin gives a pitch perfect rendition of the play’s most memorable speech. John Keating has completely re-imagined the role of Joxer Daly, giving him a level of intuitive street cunning that finally underlines the plays central themes.

Ed Malone undercuts O’Casey’s melodramatic moments by investing them with an uncommon subtlety of feeling, and Terry Donnelly shines as the native Dubliner with her eye on the bottom line.

Don’t miss this production. It runs until December 8 at the Irish Rep on West 22nd Street. For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishrep.org.

Simple Minds, the other great Celtic band, play New York this week (VIDEOS)

Jim Kerr and Simple Minds

Simple Minds, who play Roseland Ballroom in New York City on Thursday night, were the greatest new wave band of the 1980s.

And they achieved that greatness before most Americans (but not all) had even heard of them thanks to "Don’t You Forget About Me" and the "Breakfast Club" movie.

To this day Simple Minds are spoken of with a hushed reverence by Irish and British fans who listened to their album "New Gold Dream" in the 1980’s and felt as if they’d found the first spiritual home of their adolescent lives.

That album was a staggering masterpiece. It arrived amid some of the darkest years of recent Irish and British history. To its listeners, raised on a diet of privation and seemingly endless recession, it arrived like a new romantic neutron bomb that exploded with yearning and majesty and romance and glittering dreams.

It was so singular and so indescribably transcendent, and there hasn’t been a moment to match in pop music since its debut.

U2 wanted to write "New Gold Dream." They reportedly handed it to their producers on "The Unforgettable Fire," Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, and said this is what we want. Even the cover looked like a tribute by the Irish to the Scottish band. But Simple Minds didn’t need to strive for grandeur, they simply had it, right from the start.

Now, after ten years without a U.S. tour date, they’ve finally come back to set America on fire with the same lightening that they managed to bottle from their earliest days.

“It’s too long; it’s an embarrassment,” Jim Kerr tells me, referring to the long absence, “but we’re here now and in that absence I am very confident the band has got better. People might even see benefit of the absence.”

The shorter tour schedule is a testing of the water Kerr admits. “But already we’re only a week in and there’s talk of coming back next year for a much more extensive tour which we hoped for but we weren’t taking anything for granted.”

What can we expect to hear when they take the stage?

“We have been trying to get together a good mix, for instance Europe in the last two years we played only the rare stuff, those albums before we broke. It was amazing to go back and play that stuff and we thought that would be a one off, but we found songs in there that we thought, 'Wait a minute. These things can fit into what we’re doing now.' Some of them were 30 years old, but they felt like they’d come from the future not from the past.”

This is true. For example this year for the first time I listened to "Room," a song from their early catalog on "Empires And Dance," and was amazed by how contemporary it sounds.

But with majestic albums like "Sons and Fascination," "Sister Feeling Call" and "New Gold Dream" Simple Minds found  a way to express the inner life of the Celt better than any other band of that era, including U2.

“I’m delighted to hear you say that and the first thing I would say is that I agree with you,” says Kerr. “There’s something going on that way and above the melody and the beat and all that stuff. There’s a certain spirit to it and a certain joy to it and an openness to it that I think, that’s our roots. There’s a certain imagination. People say where did all that come from, I’m not sure but I just think it’s part of the DNA.”

This music made the Irish and the British love them long before they cracked the American market.

“We had five albums out elsewhere before we even got a domestic well-promoted release here,” explains Kerr. “Just then when it was time for us to go out and make it we got this earthquake of an event, this "Breakfast Club" song ("Don’t You Forget About Me") that wasn’t meant to do what it did.” (Thinking back he laughs uproariously.)

The stadium era days that quickly followed were a double-edged sword for a band that previously had walked an effortless tightrope between sweeping emotion and the pensive inner life.

“On the one hand don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Whereas our success had been hard-earned the "Breakfast Club" seemed separate from us and because of that there was a distortion.”

Kerr admits the band didn’t make it any easier on themselves because after breaking through they followed "Once Upon A Time" with songs like "Belfast Child" and "Mandela Day."

“The radio programmers said who the f—k is this? Whereas that stuff did well everywhere else it was a damp squib here in the States. We don’t have the same career in America that we have elsewhere but I’m very anxious not to blame anyone, it’s just the way it was.”

When people ask Kerr about Simple Minds he often asks which Simple Minds? “Is it the early new wave thing, is it the electro avant garde, is it the stadium rock years, is the MTV years, is it the Celtic "Belfast Child" thing? The expanse within the music has been huge. That’s thank to the guys who could make it their own and always make it Simple Minds.”

Are they any bands now that excite him the way "New Gold Dream" and other albums of his excited an entire generation?

“That’s a good question. There’s bands I can like on a level of that’s great pop or that’s great song writing or something. But not in the way that you’re talking. I am struggling to come with any currently. I still listen to The Doors and don’t forget he was a Celt as well.”

“On Friday I listened to "Astral Weeks" by Van Morrison and that for me probably does all the things that you just mentioned there. It’s got this sense of wandering in it. It has stream of consciousness lyrics where I don’t know what he’s talking about but I do know what he’s talking about. And it touches me in a way that the other stuff doesn’t touch me.

I want to pin him down on the source of his band’s magic, but he thinks it a hallmark of being a Celt.

“There’s something inside us reaching for something, searching for something, connecting to something that’s intrinsic to where we come from.”

I have to admit it’s a thrill to hear the man who made the album that has haunted and obsessed me for 30 years contemplate his own achievement. "I didn’t do it," he maintains, "the whole band did."

“We hope we’re one of the bands of our generation and if we are that’s great. We don’t think anyone owes us anything really.”
  
Simple Minds play the Roseland Ballroom on Thursday, October 24. For tickets CLICK HERE.

After ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Broadchurch’ Arthur Darvill conquers Broadway

Arthur Darvill starring in "Once"

Arthur Darvill is currently making his New York stage debut in "Once, the Musical" on Broadway, but he needs no introduction to avid fans of British television here in the U.S.

In "Doctor Who" and more recently "Broadchurch," Darvill has become a household name to the growing U.S. fanbase of these two very different but acclaimed British shows.

But in a step away from the roles that have won him fame right now Darvill’s playing a lovelorn Irish musician in the Enda Walsh-penned musical "Once" based on the film of the same name.

‘I've been doing it for about six months now and I'm here till Christmas,’ Darvill tells IrishCentral. ‘It's one of the longest runs I've done. There's always that wariness about something that's really long commitment wise but actually it's been brilliant and the time's flying by.’

The ensemble production reflects the closeness of the troupe of actors onstage, Darvill says.

‘It's like a real family. I've never taken over from a role before, and I thought oh God they'll be so stuck in their grooves, but they were so welcoming and generous as performers and people.’

But playing a down-on-his-luck Irish singer seems like such a sideways step character wise - what made him interested in the role?

‘I'm a musician as well as an actor,’ Darvill explains. ‘Once is one of those stories that are bizarrely universal because it's not necessarily a love story, it's a story about personal growth and getting over yourself in order to be happy. I think it's very realistic . The meeting of these two people made me think of people you meet not even necessarily romantically - who change your life in a profound way and they don't even know it. People who have that influence over your life. I think it's a really beautiful non-patronizing story.’

It's a Broadway musical without being a razzledazzle Broadway musical, Darvill says. ‘The music really appeals to me and I love Enda Walsh's writing anyway. This is different to his work but the fact that he did the writing for this was interesting to me too.’

He did have some stipulations. Being British, he knew he’d have to go to Ireland to work on his Irish accent.

‘I said there's no way I can do this without going back to Dublin. Me and my girlfriend went the weekend before I came over here. My best mate is from Ireland and we just did a play together. His name is Cian Barry. He's proper Irish. He just told me everywhere I needed to go. He just gave me a list of pubs and we did that. We went to Howth and did the walk and it was really great to see it with my girlfriend. I hadn't been for three years and I'm planning to go back when I get to the UK because I just love it there.’

Meanwhile the success of "Broadchurch" (in which he plays Reverend Paul Coates) took Britain and the U.S, by surprise, but Darvill says he knew it would be a hit for an unusual reason.

‘It's an ensemble piece and I take no credit for it whatsoever. I'm so proud of it and I was really lucky to be involved with it. The writer Chris Chibnall is amazing and he's the reason I got on board with it in the first place.’

There was one aspect in particular about "Broadchurch’s" production that encouraged him to sign on, he says.

‘Early on I knew it was going to be good because Chris said to me there's going to be a no t--ts policy. Everyone has to be nice and good. That really filtered through the production.’

The success of "Broadchurch" should be send a message to the studios he says.

‘It's a real testament to the writer being allowed to write. Chris was very much left alone by producers. I think that shines through. I think when people trust the writer on television then good things get made.’

Darvill has heard the rumors of a U.S. production again starring David Tennant and himself but his own casting has not quite been confirmed yet.

‘I think that's amazing. I don't know how that's going to work but it obviously is because he (Tennant) is doing it. I think the fact that Chris is involved is good.’

Fans of "Doctor Who" have often written that they’d have liked to see the Doctor (played by Matt Smith) take Rory William’s (Darvill’s character on the show) on board the Tardis as a companion in his own right. Playing the pair as a bickering gay couple has been a feature of entire forest acres of fan fiction, does Darvill realize that?

‘Maybe,’ he laughs. ‘We're not far off that anyway. We (Smith and Darvill) really lucked out with each other. We'd done a play a few years before together and we really got on. It was always our plan to play brothers. We'd always get together and get drunk and say we should really play brothers. Then "Doctor Who" came up and it couldn't have been a better thing. I respect him so much as an actor and a friend. With my first day on "Doctor Who" with Matt it was clear he knew exactly what he was was doing.’

One of Rory’s finest hours was as the Roman Centurion who waits 2000 years to be reunited with his true love Amy Pond. It’s one of the most romantic tales ever told on "Doctor Who," or indeed anywhere. Darvill says he still hears all about it.

‘So many people have said to me you know that that character has ruined the expectations girls have of their boyfriends now for everyone. I said yes I know. It's also difficult for me to live up to anything close to that. Thanks (showrunner) Steven Moffat.’

And a final world on "Once, The Musical?"

‘It's a proper play with music and it has real heart. Be prepared to turn up and bawl your eyes out in a good way. It's unlike anything anyone has seen on Broadway.’

The truth of Michael Fassbender's "12 Years A Slave" is brutal (VIDEO)

Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.

In 12 Years a Slave, which opens on Friday, gifted actor Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northup, a New York State citizen who is kidnapped and forced to work as a slave on a plantation in New Orleans in the 1830s.

At the start of the film Northup, who is a talented musician, is deprived of his liberty and separated from his adoring wife and family. For 12 harrowing years he is forced to live like a barn animal, under the watchful eye of cruel slave owners like Edwin Epps (magnificently played by Michael Fassbender) who would have no hesitation to hang or shoot him without a second thought.

What makes the film so hard hitting is that it is based on a true story. Northup was a real man and the film is closely based on his famous account of his life as a captured slave in Louisiana. That the events in this film actually happened gives it an extra dimension of authenticity.

12 Years a Slave is a real life horror film, in other words. The white columned plantation that Northup works on quickly begins to resemble a Nazi-era concentration camp with guard towers and terrified inmates.

Here the axe can fall at any moment for something as simple as looking at a slave owner the wrong way. No one is ever safe.
Because of these facts a sense of an all enveloping dread haunts almost every scene of the film, first because we realize that Northup is being hoodwinked by smooth talking white gentlemen who are in fact leading him to his doom, and then because of the actual horror of finding himself in leg irons being transported to a slave plantation.

Because he has always lived as a free man, Northup’s terror at what is happening to him is shared by the modern audience’s terror that these things actually happened.

On the slave boat to the plantation Northup is coached by the other slaves about how to behave. Don’t look white men in the eye too directly, don’t offer a smart word, don’t question any order and you might just live, he’s told.

When he reaches the plantation we watch as Northup desperately tries to stay alive in a system that has been crafted to work him into the ground. He is sustained only by the thought of escape and being reunited with his beloved family, but any hope of help from others who discover he has been kidnapped are quickly dashed because it turns out that even principled white people are as intimidated by the system of slavery as the black people who live under it.

Northup is literate and intellectual and he can write, three facts that he is told would get him killed if they were discovered. He cannot seem too smart and he cannot be too subservient either. Trying to outpace the suspicions of the white people who exploit him is the only way he will survive.

Fassbender’s character in particular is fascinated by the thought of breaking Northup, who he realizes poses a threat to his established order by being too competent and too smart.

Northup is slave owner Epps’ property, he reminds us, to be owned, used and abused as Epps sees fit. “That’s scripture,” spits Epps, quoting the Bible, which actually says a slave should do as his master bids. “There is no sin,” in mistreating a slave Epps thunders, since a slave is property and a man may do what he likes with his property.

But British director Steve McQueen never allows Fassbender to become a mad-eyed slave owner menacing his noble slaves. Instead the film pulls back from big sweeping emotions to show us how damaging the slavery system is to literally everyone who lives under it, including the slave owners themselves.

In 12 Years A Slave white people are shown rationalizing the exploitation they’re practicing; black people are shown rationalizing the exploitation they’re experiencing. It’s a complicated, poisonous dance.

So what McQueen has accomplished is finer than just a meticulously crafted reenactment of a true story about slavery. The film actually shows us the damage that slavery did to both slave and master. That is ultimately what makes it so hard hitting.

Ejiofor’s performance is Oscar worthy, as is Fassbender’s in his supporting role as Epps.  Ejiofor’s delivers not just the best male lead performance of the year, it’s one of the greatest ever committed to film. If you only see one film this year, make it this one.


Here's the trailer for "12 Years A Slave":

Irish arts events light up New York’s October

Irish actor, writer and director Tim Ruddy joins a heavily Irish
cast in Thomas Kilroy’s version of The Seagull this week.

Stoked Fest, an exciting new one-day film festival for kids brought to you by the people behind the long running Craic Irish Film Festival, is scheduled for October19 at the Long Beach Hotel on Long Island.

If you live on the island you don’t need to be told about the sucker punch that Hurricane Sandy delivered to the locals. Certainly Stoked Fest organizer Terence Mulligan doesn’t need to be told, since his own home like a thousand others was damaged in the unprecedented floods.

Mulligan says his new festival is planned as part of the ongoing revitalization of Long Beach in the aftermath of the hurricane. To that end Stoked Fest wisely puts the spotlight on the island’s youngest inhabitants.

But this is a real film festival, which means a bit of Hollywood style pizzazz will be included to create the right atmosphere. That means you may want to get your youngest family members gussied up, because there will be a red carpet to walk when the kids enter the hotel.

The night is scheduled to start at 5 p.m. with kids walking the red carpet in front of the paparazzi. Polaroid pictures will be taken of your nearest and dearest on the carpet. (They can pick up the pictures after the short screenings). You may have to contend with some limelight hugging divas trying to outdo each other, but you expected that.

“We wanted to make this inaugural festival fun and interactive for the kids and families,” Mulligan told the Irish Voice.

“Expect to see specially selected shorts and recent award-winners such as Granny O’Grimm and the Boy in the Bubble together with some recent Oscar nominated shorts such as Pentecost.”

Presented by Jet Blue, which will be raffling two round trip tickets on its airline, Stoked Fest will keep the spotlight on Irish short films. “Long Beach needed a kids festival, and there are a lot of Irish and Irish Americans in the Long Beach and Rockaway area,” added Mulligan. “It makes sense the first year to do a spotlight on Irish short films that are kid friendly.”

Free Zico water and munchies for the kids and families will be provided. Doors open at 5 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 kids. Kids under five attend free. For more information and detailed shorts films contact 917-373-6735 or visit www.stokedfest.com.

The Seagull was playwright Anton Chekov’s breakthrough drama, the first of his four great masterworks, and this week beginning on Thursday, October 10 at the Culture Project a 1981 translation by Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy will tread the boards.

Featuring a cast that includes some stellar Irish talent including Stella Feehily, Ryan David O’Byrne, Amanda Quaid, Tim Ruddy and Kenneth Ryan, Kilroy’s East Galway set version unfolds in a classic Anglo Irish setting instead of Russia, and it reappraises the classic play through an Irish lens and through the medium of Hiberno Irish.

Kilroy sets his version of Chekov’s masterpiece in 1886 Ireland, in the era of the Land League amid the inexorable decline of the Anglo-Irish estates. By doing so he unearths glaring parallels in the tectonic shifts in Russian and Irish society that comment on Chekhov’s original in unexpectedly telling ways.

Tackling a classic play and its universal themes while at the same time uncovering entirely new and unexpected social and political angles that illuminate the Irish struggle is why Kilroy’s version matters and why it is still frequently performed.

It will be interesting to see such a large company of distinguished Irish actors on the same stage as they tackle this challenging material and filter it through their own experience as Irish citizens. It also reminds us that many of the best Irish actors now call New York home rather than Dublin.

Kilroy is himself one of Ireland’s most distinguished playwrights of the 20th century, with 13 stage plays to his credit which include The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche and The Shape of Metal (which was performed at 59 East 59 Street Theatre as part of the 1st Irish Theatre Festival).

The Seagull will perform at the Culture Project’s Lynn Redgrave Theater, 45 Bleecker Street at Lafayette in New York. Call 866-811-4111.

A look at books: from crime and supernatural, to US politics and Irish fiction

Books by Nethercott, Matthews, Ellis and Maher. 

The Séance Society
By Michael Nethercott

IT’S 1956 in Connecticut, and private investigator Lee Plunkett has enlisted the help of the man known universally as Mr. O’Nelligan to help him with an apparently unsolvable crime with a supernatural element.

Mr. O’Nelligan is old, ancient even, but the scholarly Irishman has maintained his keen eye and his talent for timely aphorisms. Now the unlikely duo is thrown together in an engaging and well-plotted romp filled with eccentric and witty characters that will keep you guessing to the final page.

Author Michael Nethercott’s maternal grandparents hailed from Co. Kerry, as does his Irish immigrant detective Mr. O’Nelligan, who finds echoes of the poetry of W.B. Yeats in even the most depraved criminal circumstances. This is a book for a cold night by a warm fire and a surefire antidote to the winter blahs.

Minotaur, $24.99.


Tip and the Gipper (When Politics Worked)
By Chris Matthews

YOU might not remember, but there once was a time when America’s political opponents worked together for the good of the country. In this era of stalemate and manufactured crisis, MSNBC anchor and author Chris Matthews has found himself reflexively looking back at earlier times when the job of shaping the nation’s future was more important than serving the party’s needs.

Unlike nowadays, when one party seems incapable of conceding to the other even after the people have spoken, when Ronald Reagan arrived with a historic mandate. House Speaker Tip O’Neill realized it spoke for itself.

But O’Neill also knew it was his job to defend government programs, Social Security and welfare, and to prevent unlimited tax giveaways to people who did not need them if the country could not afford them.

Each side, Reagan’s and O’Neill’s, won victories and suffered defeats, but through it all they kept working in an example apparently lost on many of their ideological heirs.

Matthews wants the country to remember the example of leaders who worked to advance the nation’s interests rather than attack their own people to consolidate their political power.

Simon & Schuster, $29.95.


The Boy at the Gate
By Danny Ellis

SHOULD we mourn the passing of Dublin in the rare auld times? It depends on who you ask.
It’s often said you can judge a nation by how it treats its most needy citizens, and by that exacting yardstick 20th century Ireland was often neck in neck with Romania under the USSR.

Ellis grew up in 1950s Dublin, where he was eventually abandoned by his own mother and sent to the already notorious Artane Industrial School for orphaned and abandoned boys. There were hundreds of children in each year -- the school actually looked like a town full of forgotten boys -- but Ireland’s secret shame was hidden far away from sight.

It was run by the order that has become a byword for abuse and psychological terrorism, the often laughably named Christian Brothers. Against this backdrop of dysfunction and bullying, the timid eight-year-old Ellis has to cobble together his own identity, a task made all the more poignant by his innocence, his hope and his fear of the abusive adults all around him.

Music saved him. At Artane Ellis discovered a talent as a trombonist that would lead him away from his wrong beginnings.

But even 50 years later the ghosts of that era still sometimes haunt the adult man. The Boy at the Gate is a testament to the fragile hopes of his boyhood self and the near fatal frontal assault that theocratic Ireland delivered them.

Arcade, $24.95.

The Fields
By Kevin Maher

Some  books are filled with the immanence of an Irish summer morning, and Kevin Maher’s debut novel The Fields is the latest example. In it we meet irrepressible 14-year-old narrator Jim Finnegan coming of age in the 1980s in Dublin.

Love, even unrequited love, has the power to save your life is the book’s always timely message, and very quickly we watch as Jim falls head over heels for Saidhbh, the young woman four years his senior.

The music of 1984 and the period detailing are seamless, as is the growing sense of the complications that stand in Jim’s path as he tries to grow up in a country where there seems to be no future ahead of him.

The dark underside of Irish life in this era is also instantly recognizable to anyone who lived though the period. In The Fields Maher has marked himself out as one of the most distinctive and inventive new Irish voices in fiction in recent years.

Little Brown, $26.