The Heather Blazing

Colm Tóibín's novel The Heather Blazing was published in 1992. It was the author's second work, and it enabled him to pursue a career as a full-time fiction writer. The intensity of the text, as well as the emotional strain created by the colder eye with which the events are seen, earned him a loyal audience both at home and abroad. It received the Encore Award for a second novel in 1993. Tóibn visits the seashore and the hamlet of Wexford on a regular basis, where the erosion of the Wexford shoreline acts as a metaphor for change in Eamon's life. Tóibn's descriptions of the land and water are so vivid and intense that the environment almost becomes a character in the novel.

The novel follows Eamon Redmond, a judge in Ireland's Irish High Court in the late twentieth century. It reconstructs his relationships with his wife and children over the course of his life, as well as memories of a boyhood scarred by his father's death. The narrative material is the County Wexford landscape and the loss of the father, which Colm Tóibn would return to in The Blackwater Lightship. The title comes from a phrase in the song "Boolavogue", especially "a rebel hand set the heather burning". The narrative also follows the evolution of Fianna Fáil from Éamon de Valera's austere republicanism and style to the corruption of the Charles Haughey era. This work is supposed to have made Tóibn the heir of John McGahern. The mood of McGahern's novel Amongst Women is comparable to that of this book.

Detailed information:
Author: Colm Tóibín
Genre: Fiction, cultural, European, literature
Published: 1992
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/1052644