Death and Nightingales [Hardcover]

Eugene McCabe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2002

It is 1883 and the farms of County Fermanagh, on the border of Ulster and what we now know as the Republic of Ireland, are crisscrossed with religious, political, and generational tensions. Through the events of a single day in the life of Elizabeth Winters, we see decades of pain, betrayal, and resentment build to a devastating climax.

Against the fearsome beauty of the Fermanagh landscape, the fate of McCabe's heroine, Beth, slowly and suspensefully unfolds. Born to a Catholic mother and an unknown Catholic father, conceived shortly before her mother's marriage to Protestant Billy Winters, Beth has lived a life of silent suffering since her mother's death. Determined to decide her own fate but doomed to repeat the tragic circumstances of her birth, McCabe illuminates her quiet, searing power with the tenderness of a poet, offering up a powerful, lyrical indictment of the tensions that tear families and nations apart.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in England in 1992, McCabe's powerful, gruffly lyrical novel, released for the first time in America, chronicles the struggles of a spunky, courageous young Irish woman in strife-torn Northern Ireland in the 1880s. Beth Winters enters the world with a strike against her: her mother is Catholic and her father is Protestant. Pregnant at the age of 25, Beth thinks back on the wretched existence of her late mother, Catherine, who was constantly badgered by her violent husband, Billy. Though he could never forgive Catherine for a particularly galling act of betrayal, of which Beth is a constant reminder, Billy conceives a grudging love and admiration for Beth. In moments of weakness, his love takes an unpleasant turn, and Beth is driven toward Liam Ward, a young Catholic who hates Billy for his wealth and power. McCabe, equally adept at scenes of furious action and heated intimacy, never lets the reader forget the Catholic-Protestant violence lying beneath the surface, even in the brutal clashes between father and daughter. Beth herself is acutely aware of the contradictions of her birth and heritage. When she finally steals away after a vicious beating by her father, McCabe cleverly sets up the riveting climax of the book, in which Beth is revealed to be as ruthless as Billy. It is the relationship between father and daughter, charged with a bitterly affectionate love and shared cleverness, that drives this novel, a fine book that rarely blinks at the bitter truths of life, loss and war. (Mar.) Forecast: Known as a playwright in the 1970s, McCabe disappeared from the literary scene in the 1980s, only to return in 1992 with Death and Nightingales, a novel accorded high praise by Colm T¢ib¡n and Michael Ondaatje. Strong reviews could give McCabe a fresh start in the U.S.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

This taut novel recounts a day in the life of twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Winters. The year is 1883, and the name Parnell is on everyone's lips; Beth's mother, a Catholic, is dead, and the truce between the girl and her stepfather, a Protestant landowner, is uneasy. At first, all this seems familiar, if uncommonly well told—an intimate rendering of the smell of meadowsweet and boiled bacon. But after the day encompasses both a botched theft and a drowning—events that illuminate not only Beth's fate but also a nation's saga of violent betrayal—it becomes clear that McCabe has written a heartbreaking modern fable.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (March 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582342377
• ISBN-13: 978-1582342375
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,917,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flawed, maybe, but a rare, genuine, 90s masterpiece, January 26, 2000

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death and Nightingales (Hardcover)

This is one of the great, underrated novels of the century. The opening three pages are among the best things I have ever read - a young woman hears an injured calf lowing in the early dawn and contrives to help her: the mixture of Gothic mystery, personal trauma, the dark violence of nature, the evocation of space is relayed with such elliptical intensity that you are left reeling.

The rest of the novel can't hope to follow this, and there's a little too much explanation in it when continued suggestion would have been much more powerful, but these are minor complaints. It has been called a Victorian novel, and the plot and range of characters have a similar richness, but there is none of the authorial dogmatism, excessive verbiage or fear of loose ends that mars the works of, say, Dickens. Almost every character, no matter how reprehensible, is portrayed with stunning fairness, my favourite being the landowner Willie, whose repeated, drunken brutality can't hide his essential, helpless decency.

There are some remarkable set-pieces, especially the Percy French concert, but what is eventually most memorable is the evocation of nature, Ted Hughes like in its ominous power and violent beauty, it looks on immemorially at the comparatively petty human dramas that would eventually lead to an appalling Irish century.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning drama of Anglo-Irish and gender politics ;, May 15, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Republic of Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death and Nightingales (Hardcover)

This is a story about two women ; a mother now dead and her surviving daughter now grown up and at a crossroads in her life. It is also a story about a key time in Irish history ; late 19th century Nothern Ireland. This is a beautifully written book. The book resembles strongly that part of Northern Ireland, it is set in. Beautiful, stark and forbidding. Beth is the daughter of a local wealthy Protestant, whose wife, a Catholic, is dead. Beth will face choices between her life with her father and a life with the man she loves. There are twists and turns handled superbly against the backdrop of the hauntingly beautiful Fermanagh countryside. This book is worthy of a single sitting read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My first to read by Eugene McCabe..boy,what a writer!, March 14, 2006

By 

J. Guild (Toronto,Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Death and Nightingales (Hardcover)

I am continuing to find Irish writers who amaze me with their superb abilities with language and storytelling. After reading this author for the first time,I must say I am as impressed with his work as I am with Roddy Doyle,Frank and Malachy McCourt,Sean O'Callghan,Brendan O'Carroll,Tim Pat Coogan,Don Mullan,Liam O' Flaherty,Morgan Llywelyn,Brendan Behan and many more of my favorites.

In this novel we get a story that keeps us totally engrossed from beginning to end. Not only a good story,it is set in 1883,just a quarter century after the Great Famine in the northern County of Fermanagh. We are given a great insight into the social issues of Irish/Anglo,Catholic/Protestant,Wealthy Landowner/Poor Tennants,Parnell and the struggle of Freedom from the British and other elements that influenced every apect of the society in late 18th Century Ireland.

McCabe uses language like a great painter strokes a brush,a great guitarist fingers the strings or a balladier like Paddy Reilly sings a ballad. Let me give you just a taste of what you'll be in for in this novel;

"Up here,this place is half-way to heaven!"

"Billy Winters watched them watching the Bishop of Clogher.Cheeky,smooth little bugger ticking me off like that. Doesn't need wiskey;intoxicated with himself. This room packed with Tammany Taigs,vindictive unforgiving pack,outbreed us yet,that's what they're up to,get the land back,get us off it or bury us in it,convert us or kill us,burning zeal...Still got a half notion he'll make a convert of me...no bloody fear, Sir,not my soul...not my land,not my gold,defend it to the death."

And how about this for Irish banter?

"Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse,that's what the Duke of Wellington said about being born here."

From the half-light of the hollow Donnelly's voice came back:

"It could also make you a God. He rules the universe!"

"A bloody bad job he made of this wee corner." Billy muttered.

"I've only the two sons left out of the dozen I've reared. The poet fellow inside never laves the bed and this fella here's hardly ever in it!"

And then ,how's this for blunt talk?

"I'll give you death and nightingales...you'll fly from here,forever,with rooks,daws,and magpies,you'll croak like scald crows from now on with fellow thieves and vermin."

And finally;

"Nature's a terrible tinker,full of tricks and contrariness."

This could only be an Irish novel and will be a great read now as well as many decades ahead.