Author Description

Written in the final years of the Second World War, Máirtín Ó Cadhain's novel Cré na Cille (1949), is set underground in the graveyard of a Connemara village. The novel is composed almost entirely of speech and dialogue, as the dead of the village tell stories worn by repetition to the point of meaninglessness, and continue feuds related to property and marriage. These dead are not ghosts, and there is no prospect of interaction with the living--news of life above ground comes only when a new corpse is interred, and can bring the residents up to date with events in the village and in the dimly conceived world beyond. The wartime setting of the narrative is established by a sparing series of references, which nevertheless condition its atmosphere. One character insists repeatedly that 'Hitler is my darling', and eagerly contemplates the prospect of a German invasion of Britain; another recalls the 1941 sinking of the German battleship Graf Spee shortly before his death; towards the end of the novel a new arrival updates the graveyard with news of the war's progress, at a time when the success of the Allied landings in France in June 1944 are seemingly in doubt. Most prominently, the sole outsider in the community is a combatant in the conflict, a French pilot whose aircraft crashed in the village harbour, and whose horizons transcend those of his new neighbours