Richard McGuire observes that the canon of postcolonial Irish literature in English insufficiently accounts for novels from the post-independence period. Amending this lacuna, he analyzes the use of realism to narrate the withdrawal of British colonial rule in five Irish novels published between 1925 and 1965, arguing that they are just as invested in representing disengagement from the British Empire as novels in other Anglophone literary traditions, specifically from the Caribbean.

Comparisons of literature from former British colonies have long been used to create large literary corpuses such as commonwealth literature. McGuire’s work, however, stands apart from such sizable projects; the creativity of Parallel Visions, Confluent Worlds rests on his method. Pairing Caribbean and Irish novels thematically and according to shared generic techniques, McGuire’s narratological analysis traces the development of the post-independence Irish novel and compares its trajectory to that of the Caribbean novel, thereby gauging the robustness of the formal strategies used by novelists to decolonize Irish letters in English. As for why the post-independence Irish novel has been neglected, McGuire specifies three reasons: the marginal circulation of novels, the minimized role of novels in Irish cultural nationalist literary production, and the censorship of prose (more so than poetry and drama) following independence. In the first half of the twentieth century, Irish cultural nationalists exalted poetry and drama over prose; anticolonial initiatives often looked to the figure of the male poet, an fhíle, which could be readily Gaelicized. Even today, Irish literature in Irish continues to privilege poetry over prose.

Taking W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” as a case in point, McGuire contends that, while prose that violated sexual taboos was censored, poetry and drama which did the same relied on ambiguity in order to evade censorship. Certainly, censors targeted prose texts that portray the desires of heterosexual men as well as texts sympathetic to sexually expressive women and homosexuals, such as Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) and Brendan Behan’s Bortsal Boy (1958). But, contrary to McGuire’s view, I would suggest that Yeats’s poem avoided censorship because it metaphorizes rape into the mythological birth of a civilization, not because any ambiguity deceived the censors. Ambiguity certainly warrants mention but does not wholly explain how Yeats’s poem could be celebrated for its contribution to an Irish mythology that cultural nationalists have so doggedly contrived.

Comparisons between Ireland and the Caribbean tend to be dialectical and historically based (the Irish in the Caribbean were both emissaries and enemies of British colonialism), framed around theories of language contact, thematically and geographically situated, or figured as simultaneous conjunctures (reciprocal influences among Caribbean and Irish writers and thinkers). To these bases of comparison, McGuire adds processes of canon formation, and in selecting texts for inclusion in the canon, he creates a dynamic account of the post-independence Irish novel. Pairing Alfred Mendes’s Black Fauns and Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, McGuire describes them as some of the first attempts to use socio-realist fiction to represent the difficult experiences and ambitions of the poorest class. In his reading of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, McGuire explores the perspectives and shifting racialization of the young female protagonists, both of whom are orphaned heirs to diminishing estates. Reading C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley and Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn, McGuire demonstrates how in each novel the role of women as the head of their family indicates a late-colonial society and economy; he also argues that Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners portray the travails of migrants in twentieth-century London.

McGuire’s book will interest scholars and students of comparative postcolonial methods of literary analysis. He demonstrates that the little-discussed post-independence period, one during which the material realities of an emerging independent Ireland informed writers’ aesthetic ambitions, marks a critical phase of the novel’s development in English in twentieth-century Ireland.