Eugene McCabe's tale about sex and rural Ireland was ahead of its time

Eugene McCabe’s 1964 tales of a rich farmer who encourages a neighbour to impregnate his wife was well ahead of its time, writes Alan O’Riordan.

Eugene McCabe is a chronicler of borderlands, his writing both informed by and excavatory of the Fermanagh-Monaghan region where he has live and farmed for most of his life: its social codes, its barely buried histories, its uneasiness.

His reputation is somewhat liminal too, though. He has written a novel widely regarded as a classic, Death and Nightingales, and a play of mythic proportions in King of the Castle — works of the first rank, yet from a writer who is sometimes overlooked or half-forgotten.