Abstract for NEICN conference, University of Sunderland, November 2009

Title of Paper: Fantasy landscapes for the English traveller: Patrick McGinley’s textual indebtedness to Flann O’Brien in The Trick of the Ga Bolga

Abstract:
Donegal born author and émigré Patrick McGinley (1937-) is currently undergoing a critical reassessment in Irish Studies, mainly thanks to the work of Thomas F. Shea. Often praised for his dry wit and dark psychological realism, McGinley develops fantasy landscapes and disquieting local and national identifications in his novels, which include Bogmail (1978), Goosefoot (1982), Foxprints (1983), The Devil’s Diary (1988) and The Lost Soldier’s Song (1994). Considering McGinley dedicated his fourth novel The Trick of the Ga Bolga (1985) ‘To Myles’, my interest lies in tracing the influence of the writings of Brian O’Nolan (Myles na gCopaleen/Flann O’Brien) on McGinley’s text. Set in the Emergency period, the novel re-imagines O’Nolan’s depiction of the Irish rural landscape as an absurd and indecipherable space for the traveller protagonist in The Third Policeman (1967). In McGinley’s novel, Englishman George Coote comes to Donegal seeking solitude and a discovery of a sense of self away from the chaotic modernity of World War Two. Just as the narrator of The Third Policeman has to navigate a landscape where things do not cohere, Coote, like the previous English traveller Arthur Spragg, attempts to decode the key to the mysterious trick of the Ga Bolga in order to uncover a sense of communion with the Irish landscape as an outsider. Coote must constantly re-imagine the Donegal landscape based upon the codes available to him, whether they be mythological, geographical, linguistic or sexual, as his level of integration into the community is reflected in his level of understanding of the trick. However, McGinley, like O’Nolan, blurs the narrative distinction between the real and the fantastic in his novel, as identities and meanings are obscured and refuse be easily reduced to the level of ‘truth’. Instead, rather than being a place of refuge for the English traveller during World War Two, McGinley’s unsettling landscapes play a sly and ambiguous game with the reader who, like Coote, must also traverse the text in search of meaning.