"Music at Annahullion by Eugene McCabe (2004)

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year Four

Ways to Participate-you can do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish connected  author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

Eugene McCabe (born 1930 in Glasgow, Scotland to Ulster Irish parents-they returned at the start of WWII)  was an arts graduate of University College Cork.  Upon graduation he ran the family farm for over fifty years, writing when he could.  His most famous work is Death and Nightingales, upon which I have posted.  He is a member of Aosdana and still lives and writes in the family farm on the Monaghan-Fermanagh border.

"Music at Annahullion" is a deeply powerful story centering on the lives of two brothers and a sister running a farm.  It is a work very much in the tradition of stories about the consequences of the emotional constraint of the Irish.   It is also about the way in which family farms and obligations often kept people from marrying.   Like other stories, it reminded me of the magnificent poem, "The Great Hunger" by Patrick Kavanagh.  It is very much in the tradition of the stories of John McGahern.   

Anne Enright in her introduction to The Granta Book of The Irish Short Story said she was so moved by

the power of this 12 page story that she could read nothing else for the rest of the day.   

Life is hard on the farm.  Money has to be watched.  The oldest brother runs the farm and puts up no hunting or fishing signs on the property even though it is so poor there is nothing to hunt or fish for on the land.   The sister keeps the house and the younger brothers pays board and works day labor. None of them are married but the sister says their younger brother knows "every bad woman in the county".   One day the sister learns a piano is going to be put up for auction.   The older brother says it is not practical and will be expensive.   Then one day he brings it home as a gift.   You can tell he feels great pride in this and his sister is overjoyed but no one can express their feelings other than to denigrate the old piano.   The ending is very powerful and it is in fact disturbing.  The undercurrents of emotion in this story run very deep.

Death and Nightngales by Eugene McCabe

Death and Nightingales by Eugene McCabe (1992, 221 pages, 427 KB)

Many consider Death and Nightingales by Eugene McCabe to be one of the classics of the post WWII Irish novel.

Death and Nightingales takes place in  1883  in the vicinity of Ulster, now the border between The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  It was a time and place of extreme political and religious tensions as well as cross generation issues.  The book is one day in the life of Elizabeth Winters, a young woman.   Elizabeth's mother was Catholic, her father an unknown Catholic and she was born shortly after her mother's marriage to a Protestant.   Her mother died long ago and she is determined to set her own course in life, rising above the determinants of religion and caste, but you can see she is doomed to repeat the cycle her mother began for her.   Much of the novel centers on the relationship of Elizabeth and the man her mother married, her legal but not her birth father.  Much of the pain of Elizabeth's life comes from the hatred the act of betrayal that her birth brought about created in her legal father.
The novel deals with the religious hatreds of the time and the very repressed sexuality of the people.

The language of Death and Nightingales is magnificent, especially the first few pages.  I am very glad I read this novel.

Author Data

Eugene McCabe (born 1930) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright and television screenwriter. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to Irish emigrants, but moved with his family to Ireland in the early 1940s. He lives on a farm near Clones in County Monaghan near the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. His play King of the Castle caused a minor scandal when first shown in 1964 and was protested by The League of Decency. McCabe wrote his award-winning trilogy of television plays, consisting of Cancer, Heritage and Siege because he felt he had to make a statement about The Troubles. His 1992 novel, Death and Nightingales has been called by Irish writer Colm Tóibín "one of the great Irish masterpieces of the century" and a "classic of our times" by Kirkus Reviews.