A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

Overview

In a wind-battered Mayo cottage, playwright Jack Ferris tries to salvage something from his broken love affair with Catherine Adams. Drink and despair drove her away; can his imagination call her back? But as he summons up her past, Jack finds he has also called up Catherine's RUC father and a whole dangerous world of opposed traditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781446475416
Publisher:	Random House
Publication date:	06/30/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	447 KB

About the Author

Dermot Healy was born 1947 in County Westmeath, Ireland and was a novelist, playwright and poet. He won the Hennessy Award (1974 and 1976), the Tom Gallon Award (1983), and the Encore Award (1995). His novels include A Goatsong, Fighting with Shadows and Sudden Times. He lived in County Sligo, Ireland, until his death in 2014.

What People are Saying About This

James Kelman

A beautiful piece of work; no doubt about it, the real stuff.

E. Annie Proulx

A rare and powerful book....At the end, intellectually aroused, emotionally wrenched, stunned with the imagery of place and drink and crumpled hopes, I was literally shaking.

EBOOK COMMENTARY

A rare and powerful book....At the end, intellectually aroused, emotionally wrenched, stunned with the imagery of place and drink and crumpled hopes, I was literally shaking.

Editorial Reviews

Its melancholy beauty resonates with the deepest truths.

EBOOK COMMENTARY

Its melancholy beauty resonates with the deepest truths.

Boston Globe

One of the most powerful Irish novels of recent times.

Sunday Independent

Healy addresses the antipathies of contemporary Ireland-the whole island, both Ulster and the Republic of Ireland-with dogged intensity and honesty. Effectively the story of the breakup of the relationship between Catholic playwright Jack Ferris and Protestant actress Catherine Adams, the novel opens in Donegal, in the west of Ireland, as Jack slowly realizes that a combination of cultural misunderstandings and his own alcoholism have driven his lover from him. Forced to come to terms with his loss, he determines to recreate Catherine in his imagination, and the novel delves into the past to examine the social and psychological landscape of the fractured world to which they both belong. Protestant and Catholic Ireland are drawn together in the complex person of Jonathan Adams, Catherine's father, a stern Northern Protestant policeman equally attracted to and repelled by the Catholic South. Towards the end of his life, Jonathan finds himself spending more time in his holiday home in a relatively unsophisticated Southern community; but, after years of summerlong visits there, he remains an outsider-unable even to master the rudiments of casual greeting and conversation. Jonathan's difficulties are mirrored by Jack's later attempts to maintain a normal life as a playwright in violence-torn Belfast, where he has moved with Catherine, and where he begins to understand that he, too, is fundamentally an outsider. This long, resolutely bleak story (the title derives from the Greek word for ``tragedy'') evokes both the bitterness and the wistfulness of people caught in the center of Ireland's religious divide. Although the prose is occasionally less than beautiful, Healy's complex characterizations and powerful narrative drive make this a consistently gripping and ultimately moving novel. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this story of a doomed love affair, novelist-playwright-poet Healy humanizes the strife in modern Ireland, vividly illustrating the atmosphere of fear and the pain caused to persons on all sides of the conflict. There are strains in the relationship between actress Catherine Adams, a Protestant from the north, and playwright Jack Ferris, a Catholic from the south; the role he writes for her in his new play releases her from him, and the drinking they share eventually drives them apart. Jack's boozy grieving in the first section of the book is excessive and overlong. But persistent readers will reach the splendidly told story of Catherine's family, featuring her father, a failed preacher turned constable, who is tragically caught in Ireland's troubles. With its finely drawn and complex characters, this is a memorable portrayal of a country and its people by one of its notable writers.

Michele Leber