Christ in the fields: A Fermanagh trilogy

This was the first publication of all three stories in one soft cover book. First edition first printing with plenty of wear and creasing. Internally the pages are toned, but there are no pen marks or inscriptions. Please examine all seller photos. In the early seventies, McCabe wrote a trilogy of short stories, Cancer, Heritage and Siege, which he subsequently adapted for broadcast by RTÉ in 1973 under the title Victims. The first story, Cancer, won the Writers Award in Prague and took second prize in the Prix Italia. Collectively, the trilogy were gathered and published in one volume in 1993 under the title Christ in the Fields. In these stories McCabe examines the divided loyalties and heightened emotions of individuals who live in the Irish Border counties. In sparse, bleak prose, replete with local dialects, the Protestant-Catholic impasse is starkly portrayed by characters whose independent agency is tragically compromised by virtue of their historical inheritance. In Cancer, the republican point of view is explored. Jody McMahon is wasting away from the physical disease while all around him, the cancer of violence and sectarianism is destroying the community in which he and his brother live. Following this is Heritage, where the conflict in Northern Ireland is seen through Protestant eyes. Here, a young, well-meaning Protestant farmer is goaded into joining the Ulster Defence Regiment by his bigoted mother and her brother. He receives a death threat from the IRA, and knowing that eventually he will be killed he commits suicide by driving into an army checkpoint. The final story, Siege, concerns a small IRA extremist group who take an old aristocratic family hostage. Over the course of the siege the inability of these two groups to understand the other’s perspective is tragically laid bare.…