Eamon Maher is to be commended for his enterprise. It is hard to think of a more unfashionable theme than "Echoes of religion in twentieth-century fiction", but rather than being daunted by this, he seems to enjoy the challenge. In fact, the topic is more limited than the sub-title might suggest: the book actually deals, almost in its entirety, with echoes of just one religion, Catholicism, and "twentieth-century fiction", in a perfectly reasonable limitation, consists of five French and five Irish writers, Kate O'Brien, John Broderick, and John McGahern among them.
To anyone who was "around" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reading this volume will be a somewhat nostalgic experience: it is fun to hear tell once again of Mauriac and Bernanos, of existentialism and Gabriel Marcel, the Catholic existentialist. These, the young may be surprised to discover, were big in them times, and certainly the volume will be informative and useful to those who would like to know more about them. (It is valuable, too, to learn of another writer to join this band, Jean Sulivan, who was not in fact well known at the time.)
It is also good to see a continuity between French and Irish literature being reasserted. There is such a continuity, and it has a great deal to do with religion, as well as with a certain resemblance in social structure, between, for instance, the bourgeois worlds of Mauriac and Kate O'Brien, or the rural worlds of Bernanos and McGahern.
The real question, however, is whether this work is likely to prompt any kind of reassessment or revaluation of these writers or this theme, and the answer, unfortunately, is no. It is not that these writers will not receive continued attention - they will, and fully deserve to - but it is unlikely to be this kind of attention. The quality of critical discourse achieved in this fairly slim volume is not, in general, conducive to further exploration along these lines. Eamon Maher, a lecturer in French at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, is very clear and perceptive about some things: for instance, the strengths and limitations of John Broderick as a novelist (probably his best chapter), but in other cases, the theme and the writer do not really come together. Instead, the discussion lurches off, rather disconcertingly, into more general considerations, usually along the lines that the Catholic Church in Ireland has had a worse press than it deserves. One may agree or disagree, but the relevance is not always apparent.
The volume also has its share of factual errors: there is a gap of 27 years, not 10, between McGahern's The Barracks and Amongst Women (though this rather underlines the author's point about the unchanging nature of McGahern's fictional world). The book Banned In Ireland is edited by Julia Carlson, not Carson. On another level, it is rather depressing to find James Joyce still being blamed, as he was by Augustine Martin in the 1960s, for leading Irish writers into anti-clericalism (even the term is tellingly old-fashioned). And to refer to the "famous, or infamous" Edna O'Brien is a surprisingly cheap shot and reinforces the air of archaism that hangs around this study.
Having said that, however, and since one of the main pleasures of this book is simple nostalgia, it has to be added that the author has an eye for an apt quotation. Much of the atmosphere of the Catholic 1950s in Ireland is summed up in this passage from Brian Moore's The Feast of Lupercal, after the hero has suffered a sexual mishap:
If I had been a Protestant, this would never have happened, he thought. I would have had my fill of girls by now. I would never have had to go to confession.
Even better is this line from Kate O'Brien, probably the finest of the Irish writers studied here, from a novel which appeared in 1936 but which really says it all (it is uttered in a lesbian context):
Oh, everything's a sin!
Terence Killeen is a critic and an Irish Times journalist