The Public House of the Dagda: An Irish Inferno in Ten Rounds

The Public House of the Dagda: An Irish Inferno in Ten Rounds is a comic-metaphysical novel of Ireland, argument, memory, guilt, drink, mythology, literary vanity, imperial wreckage, clerical paperwork, historical grievance, and the terrible danger of being clever in public.Giles na Magaleen, antiquarian, controversialist, and involuntary moral exhibit, enters a pub that is not quite a pub, in a country that is not quite Ireland, among companions who are not quite alive. There, under the presiding shadow of the Dagda, he is drawn through ten rounds of disputation, confession, evasion, judgement, and comic punishment.This is an Irish Inferno, but not one of neat damnations. Its sinners argue. Its judges contradict themselves. Its ghosts have footnotes. Saints, poets, landlords, rebels, clerics, bureaucrats, soldiers, patriots, informers, philosophers, frauds, martyrs, snobs, and professional Irishmen all arrive with grievances in hand and explanations already prepared. No one is allowed the comfort of innocence, least of all the narrator.From mock-Vatican apparatus to pub metaphysics, from historical trauma to literary parody, from theological absurdity to very practical questions of rent, wages, coal, boots, illness, burial, and who is expected to pay for the round, the novel asks what happens when a nation turns its suffering into rhetoric and its rhetoric into furniture.Funny, learned, savage, humane, and frequently disgraceful, The Public House of the Dagda is for readers who enjoy Flann O’Brien, Swift, Dante, Joyce, Beckett, Irish argument, unreliable narrators, metaphysical jokes, and the solemn discovery that history, after all its speeches, may still expect you to stand your round. Read more