After publishing a prize-winning volume of short stories and an accomplished early novel, Dermot Healy won the plaudits of the literary world with A Goat's Song, one of the most powerful pieces of fiction to emerge from Ireland in the past few decades. It was published in 1994, just as the Celtic Tiger was starting to roar, but belonged in spirit to an earlier, less well-heeled and self-assured society. Most of the book is set on the wild western coast of County Mayo, a place with some symbolic resonance in Irish letters. It is the setting for Synge's great drama The Playboy of the Western World, and has come to be associated with all that the Celtic Tiger was busy putting behind it: priestcraft, mythology, the Celtic Revival, folk wisdom, romantic nationalism, dancing at the crossroads, an English language replete with the rhythms of Irish.

LRB 19 May 2011 | PDF Download