In the Season of the Daisies - Softcover

Phelan, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568581084 ISBN 13: 9781568581088

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Chronicles the 1921 brutal IRA murder of a young boy, Willie Doolin, and its devastating effect on the victim's twin brother, an eyewitness to the crime, and on a small Irish town

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Personal tragedy wrought by misguided political action keeps an Irish town on edge for nearly 30 years, in this forceful if flawed American debut from Irish ‚migr‚ and former priest Phelan. No love is lost in portraying the Catholic Church and its representative, Father Quinn, a rabid nationalist whose support of Hitler from the pulpit during WW II and decades-long hounding of his parishioners for money to add an unneeded wing to the church have left them wary and quietly resentful. But the central figure here is Seannie Doolin, a 40-year-old boy whose intelligence and musical genius were snuffed out in childhood when he was forced to watch his twin brother murdered by an IRA team (the boys had inadvertently witnessed an assassination). The participants in that night's work have lived uneasily with the memory ever since, with Seannie's ravaged face (a blind eye, the result of a rock thrown at him when his brother was killed) and wraithlike presence a constant reminder. McKenna, the town doctor, has been drunk for 27 years, while another of the team has become a virtual monk, but the response of the vicious Mahon, who would have pulled the trigger but for an impatient comrade, has been to cover his tracks by killing the killer--who called him a coward--and by terrorizing Seannie at every chance. The night before the new church is to be dedicated, the past returns in deadly earnest, as Mahon's near- fatal beating of Seannie awakens the man in the boy, and he finally takes his revenge for what happened to his brother. Quinn, the IRA leader who ordered the mission, then washed his hands of it, is also called to account. Told from each man's perspective, Phelan's debut is initially a complex, even riveting narrative, catching especially well the fractured workings of Seannie's mind, but too many voices and a clich‚d howler of a climax prove the story's undoing. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

If civil war is the most cruel kind of human conflict, this powerful novel, the Irish-born author's first to be published here, serves as a searing illustration of its horrors. A harrowing dissection of the legacy of internecine conflict, its central character is Seanie Doolin, nearly mute, crazed and living like an animal on the periphery of a rural Irish community for more than 27 years. For some, his condition is a mystery. For others in the village, he is the living manifestation of a collective wound so deep and vicious that they are still reeling from its consequences three decades after it occurred. The central event, an IRA military maneuver that went horribly wrong, unfolds in flashback through the voices of various players, exposing not only a tragic, needless death but also the evil and hypocrisy of those who perpetrated and then conspired to hide it. The story that emerges, involving Seanie's twin brother (in neat but not blatant symbolism) is a patchwork of cruelty and betrayal engendered by misguided political fanaticism and the homicidal tendencies unleashed in its name. An emotionally overloaded narrative of deliberate repetition and meticulous detail, written in uncompromisingly tough language, the novel can be difficult to penetrate at times. But as the origin of Seanie's pathetic condition is revealed, we are drawn not only into the nightmare of his existence but also into the story's universal relevance.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1568581084
• ISBN 13: 9781568581088
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238