If there is magic in Ireland, it lies in the west. This is where W B Yeats and Lady Gregory, who saw it as Ireland’s most purely Gaelic region, collected folklore at the end of the 19th century. In the 1960s and 1970s, this legacy of “faery”, coupled with a supply of cheap land, attracted countercultural dropouts looking to build Utopia.
The magical west exerts a pull on Kevin Barry’s work, too, although largely stripped of whimsy. His futuristic first novel, City of Bohane, planted a lawless coastal city on the “Black Atlantic”, surrounded by the wilderness of “Big Nothin’”, and in his story “Fjord of Killary” a poet migrates west to outrun his nervous breakdown:
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