If bank notes represent a form of human labour that has never been materialized, they may be a fair image of their owner’s condition: alienated from his original home at Rosnagree, to which he hopes one day to return. He is haunted by letters sent decades earlier by another priest of the family from a mission to South America. If such writing is a metaphor for going into exile, then exile is the condition of much of Richard Power’s writing, which in Úll I mBarr an Ghéagáin (Apple on the Treetop, 1959) and The Land of Youth (1964) had taken estrangement for theme. Even the language in which the characters achieve expression in this book seems like an estranged form of Irish (‘and she munching slowly as she read’) of a people still half-thinking in Irish while using English words. The dialogues which drive this novel are rich and flavourful, the Synge-song of a kind which – like the community itself – is still hanging onto old ways, but near to the moment of its erasure. The younger priests do not speak in such phrases, although the narrative itself often does, as if in tacit endorsement of jeopardized tradition. The lines of farewell in which the ‘last of the bards’, Aogán Ó Rathaille, spoke about going into the clay which held his pre-Christian ancestors, seem to spread like a dye across the final pages.

The novel begins with Father Conroy’s death and the revelation that neither his brother nor sister managed to attend his funeral. This foreknowledge adds a poignancy to accounts of his fumbling encounters with members of his family in the ensuing narrative, while also raising a question as to whether some emotional blockage was a strong element of the family inheritance. There is something rather withheld about Tom Conroy’s very presence in the most central of the novel’s scenes. However, against that must be set his capacity for unexpected moments of passing grace: ‘he’d see a pain inside you’. This is what makes him a vessel of God, yet that very empathy is disabled by a self-protective wit that deflects deep feeling at just those moments when it may become both lucid and intolerable. The loneliness endured by Father Conroy is that of a man who knows more than it is decent to know about the lives of his community. That community finds him essential to its self-definition, but displays remarkably little interest in his priesthood: he is simply part of the givenness of things. He must embody a holiness that ordinary parishioners cannot afford to admit in themselves, but also a clarity of vision found more often in artists.