Tim MacGabhann | Tolka, Issue Three, May 2023 As I get older I find myself better able to let things live under their own aspect: isolated, apart – like a single dart of seed blown from a dandelion or the colours in Cézanne which become their own blocks of solidity – as though beyond form. It’s a young person’s illness to look backwards so much. When I knew Sam I was coming into the last of those years when I might have been able to think of myself as young: that is to say, in those years when I already felt as though I were no longer young. When you get past those years, you start to feel young again. You don’t want them back, either. The low burnish of things as they are is enough: that gleam on the rim of a cup, early in the morning, a weathervane...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 This Plague of Souls is Mike McCormack’s fourth novel. It follows Nealon, an artist who has returned from prison following the collapse of a criminal trial against him. His family home in rural Mayo is empty, and he is besieged by phone calls from a stranger determined to meet up. The third act of the novel stages this meeting against the backdrop of a national security crisis. Through a breadth and style that is typical of McCormack’s writing, the distinctions between the local and the global begin to break down: ‘Those oil spills and poisoned lakes, those great gyres of plastic waste spiralling in the southern Atlantic. There were things coming apart, falling from their proper being’. McCormack is the author of the novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005), as well as the short-story collections Getting It in...

Molly Hennigan | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Ghost) is a book that, in a swift, sensitive movement, has achieved something that many people speak about, think about and slowly edge closer towards after years of scholarship and research. Across various interviews and within the folds of the text itself, Ní Ghríofa relays how she comes to the story of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill on the periphery of other paths that are well-worn. In Ghost, charting a timeline between the 1700s and the present moment, Ní Ghríofa traces the life of the poet Ní Chonaill through a series of personal reckonings. Stretching the text over the edges of her own experiences of motherhood and tragedy, she fills the gaps in our knowledge of the poet by listening out for echoes of her life today. Ní Ghríofa is not researching from within academia,...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, July 2023 Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence, is about Malcolm Macarthur, who, in 1982, murdered a nurse, Bridie Gargan, and a farmer, Dónal Dunne. Macarthur was from an aristocratic background, but at the time of the murders he was on the brink of bankruptcy and risked losing his leisured lifestyle. His actions were part of a flawed plan to rob a bank, characterised by what O’Connell has called ‘the peculiar foolishness of the intellectual’, and Macarthur was eventually arrested at the home of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, a friend of Macarthur’s, who had no idea he was hiding a fugitive. The resulting political scandal almost brought down Charles Haughey’s government. The unlikely events were famously summarised by the acronym GUBU: grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. Macarthur served thirty years in prison for the murders. O’Connell is strangely haunted by Macarthur’s...