A fresh look at the first World War? Very novel

CultureShock: That the first World War remained almost virgin territory in Irish fiction for so long lends Sebastian Barry's superb A Long Long Waya sense of compelling urgency.

When Sebastian Barry's superb novel A Long Long Waywas published last year, it deservedly generated the kind of interest that made it a good choice for this year's One City, One Book event in Dublin. The idea that the whole city should pay attention to this book throughout the month of April is especially poignant because, for so long, attention was not paid.

In 1929, one of the most important Irish writers of the 20th century also published a novel on arguably the most important event of the 20th century - the first World War. Liam O'Flaherty's Return of the Bruteis a harshly potent description of the brutalising effects of the war, hinting, within its emotional contours, at the horrors still to come. The novel came from first-hand experience. O'Flaherty signed on with the Irish Guards in February 1916 and left for the front in January 1917.

He took part in the disastrous advance on Passchendaele. A shell exploded in a hole in which he was drinking whiskey with two other soldiers. He woke up to see one of the men with a bleeding stump where his arm should have been. He remembered, at the medical station, being asked if the mangled flesh hanging on his tunic was his own, and then being on a train with a blinded soldier weeping because he would never see his wife's hair again. The trauma left him shell-shocked and mentally vulnerable for the rest of his life, but it may also have made him a writer.

What's striking about Return of the Brute, though, is that it did nothing for O'Flaherty's reputation and was, until very recently, perhaps the least regarded of his writings. It did not belong in Irish literature, and critics were repelled by a violence of language and incident that they took to be crude.

The year before, WB Yeats had famously rejected the first serious confrontation with the war in Irish theatre, Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie. Ireland had changed while its sons were at the front, and the central modern experience, shared by 150,000 Irish soldiers, was not part of the official culture.

Some of the writers who were there - the wonderful dramatist George Fitzmaurice, for example - sublimated their experiences almost beyond recognition. Those who did write about what they saw were left out of the canon. Patrick MacGill wrote most of his extraordinary novel The Great Pushin the trenches, but you won't find it, or any of MacGill's war writings, in, for example, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.

The odd effect of all of this was that, even in the 21st century, the first World War remained almost virgin territory in Irish fiction. The war gradually returned to public consciousness in the Republic from the early 1980s onwards.

Journalists (most notably Kevin Myers), historians and some politicians began to explore its Irish dimensions. Writers such as MacGill and the poet Francis Ledwidge were rediscovered. Frank McGuinness brought the western front to the stage with Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Sommein 1985. But the war had not become the no-man's-land rutted with swampy craters of cliche that it is in England. In fiction, before Barry's book, the only other recent work of stature by an Irish novelist was Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon?

This does not, of course, either explain or diminish the power of Sebastian Barry's novel. But it does help to explain the conditions in which such a novel could be written. The sense of freshness, of compelling urgency, that makes A Long Long Wayseem hardly a historical novel at all is the more remarkable because it is, to some degree, a revisiting of material that Barry had already used in his superb 1995 play The Steward of Christendomand his 2001 novel Annie Dunne. The Dunne family - Thomas, the Catholic chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police under British rule, his son Willie and his three daughters - might have seemed more than adequately chronicled already. But instead of making the novel doubly repetitive, this sense of other presences behind the text gives it not just its richness but its appropriateness to the kind of recovered memory that the novel represents.

In the play, Willie appears as a silent ghost haunting the memory of his deranged father in 1932. In A Long Long Way, the ghost becomes flesh, and this is in itself an appropriate metaphor for what the novel does. It takes a disturbance that haunted Ireland as much as any other part of Europe and gives it a local habitation and a name. This is, above all, a feat of language. Barry's writing has always had its own dreamlike beauty, a high, mesmeric lyricism. What makes the book so powerful is that he does not abandon it in the face of the horrors he has to describe. He is utterly unflinching, not just about the physical violence of the war but about the psychic violence too. Yet he manages to maintain his linguistic poise, rolling out sentences that, even as they connote the greatest obscenity, retain in their shape the possibility of compassion and redemption. Within them we connect at last to a necessary part of the past that made us.