A gentle character - "a simple man to whom a complicated thing has happened" - he is remorseful, not belligerent. This is the Ireland of Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, where the isolated Anglo-Irish families saw their own and their neighbours' houses burn, and many of them left.Īt Lahardane, Captain Everard Gault, a veteran of the great war, shoots at a group of intruders, and wounds one of them. It begins in the summer of 1921, in County Cork, during the Troubles, when the big houses of the Protestant landowners were being set on fire, caught in the battle between the IRA and the British army. But it is also, over its 70-year spread, the story of how "calamity shaped a life". To tell "the story of" the novel is to give it away, and readers who prefer to be startled when they read it should look away now: for this is the story (in its own rather formal, antiquated words) "of a great, and unexpected calamity".
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