‘The trouble with you, Tarry Flynn, is — you don’t know what you want!’
Peter Fallon displays a special intimacy with the world that Patrick Kavanagh’s novel delineates. For more than twenty years, his poems have recorded the news and weather of a farming community in the Irish midlands. Now he playfully transforms Kavanagh’s portrait of a mother and her children, including her only son, on whom she dotes and who is prone to rhapsodic flights and insights.
Tarry Flynn examines the great hungers of a society with a stifled need not only to be loved, but also to love. It centres on an indictment of the Church’s complicity in the repression of individuals’ spirit and its characters’ schemes to gain advantages. Laced with moments of tenderness and comedy, it records the satisfactions each risk of courage secures. As Tarry struggles to find his right place in the world, we wonder if the appearance of a reprobate uncle could offer salvation from his fate.
