Hogan, Desmond

New York. 1984. George Braziller. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket . 0807610992. 194 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Clementson. keywords: Literature Ireland. FROM THE PUBLISHER - ‘2 September 1977. I go into a newsagent's on the Falls Road, Belfast. I pickup a Southern Irish newspaper. In a paragraph on the bottom lefthand side of the front page I see that Alan Mulvanney, a bachelor, has been found shot in the head beside the Shannon in Althone, No foul play is suspected.' Alan Mulvanney has intrigued Jeremy Hitchens, son of an Irish mother and English father, from childhood. Alan was his mother's would - be lover, a tormented romantic, and now a suicide. His shadow brings people together, links events from different times and places, and eventually forces Jeremy to write his memoir, A CURIOUS STREET, in a military barracks in Belfast where he has ended up a soldier. Fragment by fragment, Jeremy unfolds the personal histories of his characters' lives in a mosaic inlaid into the history of Ireland itself. Every character merges with a previous incarnation, and every historical moment - Cromwell's rule of terror, 1916, Belfast in the 1976s - is haunted by its causes and effects. Jeremy's progress is a halting and fitful retreat into ancestral darkness, with only the energy and urgency of his quest to guide him. ‘But now in a military barracks I, Sergeant Jeremy Hitchens, can see I went much further . . until I saw him, more clearly than before, Alan Mulvanney, that unwreathed laureate of Ireland, his world, his innocence - and I felt the tremors, but inherited this, a chaos which will go on and on, which nothing will stop, neither journeys, nor movement, nor change of role, nothing except a gesture of love.' inventory #23546 ISBN: 0807610992.