If you ask most people why Ireland remained neutral during the Second World War, you will be told that it was because the Irish hated the British and wanted to see them beaten. Mind you, no one talks about the matter much at all anymore because the Allied struggle for victory, about which an endless procession of books has been arriving at my door over the last few years, has never been more popular thanks to the war in Iraq. The Second World War is a cause for celebration and a great big relief. To notice that the doughty Irish, so tied in personal history to this country, opted out of that conflict presents itself as an awkward detail.
But it's not a detail. It's an enormous, complex, mutating story, one in which Irish animosity toward Britain - such as it was - is only one strand. Clair Wills's "That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War" (Harvard University, $35) is a many-layered, dissecting account not only of the reasons for Ireland's initial decision to remain neutral, but of the evolving character of that neutrality; the use and effect of propaganda and censorship on the Irish people; the effects on the economy and political system; and the consequences of neutrality for the national self-image.
The Emergency, as Ireland's state of being was known during the war, began the day before England's declaration of war on Germany. Though the country, at the time called Eire, was still nominally part of the British Commonwealth, there was no question in the minds of most Irish people - and especially in the mind of the Taoiseach (prime minister), Eamon de Valera - of Ireland's declaring war herself. She was a poor, underdeveloped country with no military manpower or equipment to speak of, and as such was defenseless. Furthermore, in the previous two decades the country had seen the War of Independence, an unsatisfactory treaty with Britain, and the Civil War, a conflict rising out of that treaty and one that had had no formal end. To enter the war with Britain at this point would have guaranteed renewed civil strife. These are practical matters. At another level, as de Valera pointed out, Ireland had played her part in the First World War but, along with other small countries, had had no say in the Treaty of Versailles. Instead she had to watch as the big, powerful countries created a world that ensured the subsequent conflagration.
At the war's beginning there were a few voices, mostly Anglo-Irish, who said that Ireland should join with Britain against Germany, but as Wills points out, the general opinion, both at home and abroad, accepted Ireland's neutrality. The war in the Atlantic changed that, and Ireland's refusal to allow British ships back into the Treaty Ports, only recently restored to Ireland - which permission would have been Ireland's de facto entrance into the war - inflamed British and, increasingly, American opinion. Winston Churchill, still not at all reconciled to Irish independence, was particularly vicious.
Wills lays out the case for Ireland's neutrality clearly, but then there is neutrality and neutrality, which is to say partiality. She shows that despite the Irish Republican Army's hostility to Britain, the existence of Irish Fascists, and the admiration by some members of the clergy of pro-Axis Francisco Franco and Oliveira Salazar, Irish neutrality was essentially supportive of the Allies. Large numbers of Irish citizens enlisted in the British Army, while the government itself provided military intelligence and other covert aid to the Allies.
This is all very fine and agreeable to read. But Wills goes on to explore in depth the noxious effect that censorship and relentless propaganda had on the nation's consciousness and conscience. Neutrality was increasingly painted within Ireland less as a necessary position, and more as a "superior moral calling." Censorship prevented the majority of people from knowing about the realities in Ireland herself: about the interning (without trial) of suspected IRA members, about the extreme hardship in rural areas, about the countless dead bodies washing up on Irish shores - to say nothing of the devastation on the Continent. The nation led, as she puts it, "an uneasy, suspended form of existence" during the war. Wills examines the nature of that existence coolly from countless perspectives and in the lives and works of writers and politicians. In the end, what we have here is a three-dimensional, untendentious, often unpalatable - we are dealing with human beings, after all - view of a period that has been obscured in murk.
An Irish friend of mine calls Anne Enright, whose "The Gathering" (Black Cat, paperback, $14) won the Man Booker Prize last year, "a dirty, noisy writer." So, in taking up her book, I braced myself for graphic sex on the page. (Literary sex always gives me the same feeling of mortified horror I first had when I saw two middle-aged persons doing the twist.) But instead I found a familiar, though not especially salubrious, demonstration of the ancient faith sometimes called Irish Jansenism. This is the theologically tinctured view - alive and well despite the self-immolation of the Irish Church - that holds the human body, its flesh and appetites, to be corrupt, disgusting, and the font of sin. Or to demonstrate it in Enright's words: "The living with all their smells and holes," and the dead laid out at a wake: "that piece of garbage in the front room." Beyond that, I discovered a more recent but exceptionally well-worn element in the novel: child molestation, though described, I am happy to report, most austerely.
This novel simply is not for me. It is a clangorous mess of ill-fitting parts as far as construction is concerned. In addition, Enright's writing is wildly uneven: deft phrases and images are followed by scattershot routines that suggest writer's Tourette's, the typing hand helpless before the miscellaneous conceit: "There were eleven months between Liam and me," the narrator tells us of her brother, the seventh of their mother's 12 children. "We came out of her on each other's tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity." That concluding outbreak of pointless bravado means absolutely nothing - though it is, to be sure, dirty and noisy.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at kapow3@gmail.com.
