I first encountered Ita Daly in the early 1970s when I was working as assistant to David Marcus in the Irish Press. David, I recall, was very impressed by a story she had submitted for publication in his New Irish Writing page, and when they met soon afterwards, he was obviously as much impressed by the person as by the writer. The feeling was mutual and a year later, reader, she married him.
I mention this personal detail only because the main character in her exceptional new novel, Unholy Ghosts (reviewed on this page), is obsessed by her Jewish roots, and I wondered if that idea came from Ita's life with David. Yes, she says, she supposes' it did - even though David is not Jewish in an orthodox way, others in his family are, and she found herself a fascinated outsider encountering a world she had hitherto known little about.
I wondered, too, how much of the Dublin left wing socialist life, simultaneously fervent and paranoid, that is so vividly described in the book, came from personal experience. Quite a lot, she says - though the setting is the Fifties, this aspect of the novel mirrors her own involvement with the Workers Party (later to become the Communist Party of Ireland) in the Sixties. However, as a teacher in St Louis Convent in Rathmines, she sensibly kept quiet about her political life: "I wouldn't have lasted very long in a convent school if they'd known."
Her disillusionment with the cause came with the brutal repression of the Prague Spring in 1968, just as in the book the repression of the Hungarian uprising causes consternation among the party faithful. She left the party soon afterwards, and now, like others of us, has no time for dogma of any kind.
It doesn't bother her that her four novels to date haven't sold in vast quantities or that she doesn't figure among those names constantly mentioned as constituting a new wave in Irish writing. She just gets on with the work, she says. Anyway, she has seen too many writers taken up by publishers and the media as this year's model, and then dropped, to worry about such things.
Unholy Ghosts, which is very evocative of a Dublin many of us know but up to now haven't encountered in fiction, is beautifully written, and that's not something you can say about many novels these days. The author will be reading from it at the official launch in Waterstone's next Thursday at 6.30 pm.
BEAUTIFULLY written, too, is Conor Cruise O'Brien's new book of essays, On the Eve of the Millennium (Martin Kessler/Free Press), though that's probably not the quality of his that is first thought of either by his admirers or by his detractors. I have long, if unfashionably, been among the former, stimulated by the clarity and force of his insights, even on those occasions when I've disagreed with what he's saying.
That hasn't been often. Indeed, before going to the book's launch on Tuesday evening, I read the five essays (first delivered as lectures in Toronto) and was enthralled by his provocative observations on the Papacy, the British Monarchy, political expediency and the hypocrisy of the West towards the Third World. In one typically wide ranging essay entitled "Democracy and Popularity", I found myself nodding in gloomy agreement with his prophetic prediction, written at the end of 1994, about the IRA ceasefire.
The launch took place in The Open Book Company, Sutton Cross, and Dr O'Brien was in jovial form. He positively chuckled when telling me about an attack on him in the current issue of the London Review of Books by Christopher Hitchens - "decayed, trendy lefty stuff circa 1969," he said with some glee.
In a brief speech, he described the IRA as "serial murderers", but felt that some good may come from the current situation: "After the next seven bombings and the next seven explanations by Gerry Adams that these are due to British intransigence, I think there may be a hardening of attitude towards them in this country.
The Open Book Company is an interesting little bookshop that has been in business for five years at Sutton Cross, and owners Robert Redmond and Brendan Brannigan were obviously very pleased with the success of this first book launch attended by such notables as Patrick Lynch, UCD's Tom Garvin, and about sixty others who think that Dr O'Brien is one of the most provocatively necessary voices in a country cursed by its suspicion of intellectual and moral directness. And, as I say, he writes like an angel, which must be additionally galling to those who try to demonise him.