Formerly banned novel The Bogman deserves renewed attention
Novelist Walter Macken in 1966: Swerves beautifully into meditative contemplation of competing worlds, the known and the unknown, the actual and the possible.
FOR those who might wonder why the Irish writer Walter Macken seems to have disappeared from our cultural history something like an answer might be found in this novel. It reasserts the often headlong pace of Macken’s creativity which, given his tough physical realism, swerves a little too often into contradiction. There is a sense in these chapters, as in much of his work, that credibility is sacrificed to speed, and no wonder, as this man who wrote nine novels, four collections of short stories and four plays died at 51 years of age. (His book The Flight of the Doves was filmed in 1971.)
These are not a negligible legacy and in their day some publications – including this one - were taken seriously enough by the Irish government to be banned. The pious reasoning for such a prohibition was to protect the innocent Irish readers from an interest in any of the things the Irish people in the books – or plays – were doing anyway. This almost fascist responsibility for public morality must have had some influence on writers such as Macken, Brian O Nolan and Patrick Kavanagh who spiked their work with vengeful ridicule and fantasy, to the enrichment of Ireland’s literary heritage.
