Máirtín Ó Cadhains novel
Cré na Cille, about life in Connemara as explained by the dead of the area, is generally regarded as one of the most important 20th century works in Irish. Its reviewer in 1950, David Greene, recognised its importance but was not so sure about its literary merit.
- JOE JOYCE
THIS IS undoubtedly the most important novel written in Irish for a long time. It has the necessary ingredients for greatness; that is to say, it is written by a man who handles his native Connemara Irish flexibly and confidently, who writes about his own people and has chosen an original and striking technique.
And it has the necessary ingredients for popular success in being published, not by the moribund Gúm, which has given the kiss of death to so many books, but by a new and enterprising firm with a flair for publicity – and, of course, it has been chosen by the Club Leabhar. All these factors make the book an important landmark in the slow and unsatisfactory development of the novel in Irish.
The question of its value as literature is more difficult. We cannot compare it directly with the work of Irish novelists who write in English, because of the general accessibility of the standard language used by writers in English, compared to the difficulty arising from dialect variations in Irish. Nearly all this book is in dialogue (which is just as well, considering the dreary fustian in which Stoc na Cille expresses itself at the beginning of each interlude) and there are few pages without at least one word which is unfamiliar to me. There would be nothing derogatory about supplying a glossary, as I have seen done for the Caernarvonshire dialect words in a novel of Kate Roberts written for a public whose knowledge of Welsh may be taken to be much greater than the knowledge of Irish of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s public. I say this because I feel strongly that it would be a pity if anybody were put off the dialogue by meeting too many unfamiliar words.
The elaborate convention whereby the story unfolds itself in a graveyard where the dead talk to each other, remembering the past but unaware of events in the world until there is a fresh arrival, involves an unnecessarily tortuous treatment, with many characters who are difficult to keep apart while reading the book, and a great deal of repetition which ultimately becomes boring. Sometimes the account of one incident is given to us in six or seven flashes, with long intervals between, recalling the discarded experiments of Dos Passos; it is hard to see what useful purpose this serves. Sometimes Máirtín appears to me to make fun of his own technique, eg when he introduces the figure of a French airman, shot down and buried in Connemara, who has to learn Irish in the grave before he can take part in the general conversation. Another serious lapse of taste is the putting into the mouths of his Gaeltacht characters observations on aspects of Irish life with which it is unlikely that they would be familiar; to make them discuss Rotary and colloquiums – it’s like finding the people in a story by Elizabeth Bowen arguing heatedly about litriú simplí and cló Rómhánach.
I do not think this is a great novel, but it is an encouraging one. It is encouraging that a man can be found to write seriously and well in Irish; that a private publisher can be found; and that so much public interest should be taken in the book. One swallow does not make a summer, but if this process continues we may yet have a contemporary literature in Irish worthy of the name.
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