Death and Nightingales (Paperback)

(Eugene McCabe)

Death and Nightingales is a novel set in Ulster at the end of the nineteenth century. It is not very often that we find a historical novel in Irish new fiction. This, as in Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, provides the reader with a historical perspective of the Troubles. To solve a problem it should be essential to understand it fully first. As usual with Irish fiction, the political is all that matters. This novel deals with the hatred between Protestants and Catholics, exemplified in a mixed family. Billy Winters married Cathy Maguire, with whom he was deeply in love. However, we soon learn that not only was Cathy pregnant before her wedding, but also that Billy is not the father. Billy is thus made to hate his wife, and in their quarrels Cathy accuses him of belonging to the pack of robbers who colonised Ireland and robbed the land and farms of the Irish. Meanwhile, their "daughter" Beth grows up in an environment of hatred, and finds herself deprived of her inheritance rights by his father, who won't pass on his land to Catholic hands. The story takes place in just one day, on which Beth has decided to elope with her lover after robbing Winters' hidden gold. However, something unexpected prevents this elopement, and the chain of events moves in a surprising direction. The reader is bound to be impressed by this dark gothic story, in which the beauty of the Irish land and the love Beth feels for it are not enough to save her from her doom to hate.

Primarily a domestic drama, the novel describes one day in the life of Beth Winters, a Catholic in a community which is equally divided between Catholics and Protestants. Depicting her cleverness and resilience in the face of her difficult farm life, McCabe focuses on her 25th birthday and the events which have led to the crisis which is the novel's focus--the circumstances of her birth, her abuse by her putative father, and her attraction to Liam Ward, a Protestant firebrand. Full of local color, lively dialogue, sometimes mystifying dialect, and powerful nature imagery, Beth's personal drama achieves wider significance as the characters, confronting issues of life and death, separately reveal the inherent (natural) violence lurking in everyone just below the surface. Political and religious rivalries complicate the personal conflicts between Beth, her father, and her lover, and the suspense builds to a crescendo.

In terse prose which is so restrained that the reader must bring his/her own intelligence to the interpretation of the action, McCabe creates a final scene of devastating power, addressing the violence within us all and making it understandable, plausible, and ultimately shocking. The traumas here are the traumas of real life, the characters are practical and tied to the earth, the prose is unburdened by excessive verbiage, and McCabe's message rings true. Mary Whipple