68 February-March 2026
February-March 2026 69
A sustained prose poem which
touches moments of lyric intensity,
multilayered, rich in inventive imagery
O
stensibly, ‘Beyond the Pale’
narrates the childhood of
a boy in the early-to-mid-
1960s fostered to a family
in north County Dublin,
reconstructing through various devices
a world that eectively no longer exists
and has not existed for some time. One of
the outstanding eects for this reviewer
was the complete reconstruction through
language of an entire universe which
those of us who experienced that world –
or at least its tail end – will immediately
recognise as it all comes to life, just as
it was. The reconstitution of locale is
consummate, kitchen chatter, the smell of
freshly baked soda bread, the reassuring
warmth of the AGA, the drinking habits of
local figures, fishing spots, country lanes,
minute topographical details, seemingly
all the flora and fauna of Ireland, the
history of all the local landmarks, and a
host of characters; Molly, Mr Sweetman,
Mrs Marmion, the Viscount Taafe, Fr Flynn,
Msgr Hanly, who played a leading role in the
cause of Oliver Plunkett, ‘Periwinkle’ Tom
(PT), and many others. The text glides across
styles and voices, sometimes descriptive,
sometimes satirical, sometimes stream of
consciousness, all flowing in and out of
each other seamlessly.
The framing is a witty literary conceit;
‘Beyond the Pale’ presents itself as the
edited manuscript of a recently deceased
Irish émigré scholar in Amsterdam. The
document has been entrusted to a literary
executor who is frankly in over his head,
as he readily admits, for he lacks any
background in the diverse scholarly fields
“The past is a
foreign country:
they do things
differently there”
Recreating an entire universe: Brendan O’Byrne reviews ‘Beyond the Pale’
by Patrick Healy (November Editions, Amsterdam: 2025)
One of the most remarkable
recent literary works
MEDIA
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68 February-March 2026
February-March 2026 69
‘Beyond
the Pale’
repudiates
the standard
quasi-official
narrative that
Catholic Ireland
of the 1950s
and 1960s was
nothing but
a backward,
repressive
society
and languages that interested the author,
topics as diverse as Hittite etymology,
Presocratic philosophy, the works of the
Greek poet Constantine Cavay, biology,
and the ‘Corpus Hermeticum’, to name only
a few.
These interests continuously inform
the text rendering it highly elusive as well
as allusive and, as readers, we start to
develop a regard for the editor on account
of his refreshing candour in the matter of
his own scholarly shortcomings and all-
round ill-preparedness for the immense
task at hand, namely to produce a readable
final text from the forbidding literary
remains of what will eventually become
‘Beyond the Pale’ as we have it. As a side
note, one cannot help wondering how he
ended up being appointed literary executor
in the first place but in this we never get the
full back story.
‘Beyond the Pale’ is a sustained work
of prose poetry which explores memory
and identity, language and the textures
of consciousness, the fate of Gaelic
Ireland, Irish Catholicism, major currents
of European intellectual history, and all
the while at times freely moving from the
reconstruction of mid-1960s rural Ireland,
to amusing anecdotes from a later time as
folk history of Dublin café society of the
1980s and 1990s.
Healy ingeniously disrupts our
conventional expectations about temporal
flow in narrative as we move across time,
backwards and forwards, childhood
moments then the sudden interpolation of
incidents from the 1990s then back to the
mid-1960s, discrete transitions that are not
indicated but which heighten the sense that
we are involved in an interior monologue.
There is a tremendous musicality in the
text, onomatopoeia in multiple languages,
at times playful cascades of words real and
invented, the text dances to its own music.
Reflections on language and folkways
are never far away, not only as scholarly
preoccupations of the deceased author
but as things immediate and living, for we
see a continuity in the everyday lives of the
people of present day (c 1965) Baltrothery
with their more remote ancestors going
back to the post-Norman founding. We
are given a history of the area, even how
it appears in the Irish mythic tradition, as
well as extensive etymologies of many
place names associated with the area.
Many topographical features, their unique
names, the local flora and fauna appear, the
cumulative eect bringing the area to life in
this celebration of nature as the material
basis to the life of human community.
There is a kind of timelessness in rural
life which survived unscathed, at least up
to the advent of the so-called Celtic Tiger
and perhaps even beyond, although this
largely falls outside the timeframe of the
book.
Running throughout the book is a
somewhat muted yet discernible tone
of lamentation over the Tudor-initiated
destruction of the Gaelic order which
continues down to our own time, most
tangible in the frequent return to Irish
terms and etymologies, but a lamentation
counterbalanced by the spirit of individual
opposition in, for example, the narrator’s
explicit repudiation of the Caighdeán
Oifigiúil, a determined preference for
Georey Keating as a paradigm of good
Irish prose, and an adherence to classical
Gaelic script and orthography.
In all this Healy obliquely addresses
the endlessly rehashed question of Irish
identity but in a fresh and original way
which subtly exposes the psychology of
denial which always seem to frame the
public discourse of identity which has
tracked the lifetime of the Irish state since
its inception. We are provided with a litany
of Cromwell’s crimes and desecrations in
the area and the wholesale expropriation of
the Irish, Gaels and Old English alike which
reminds one of Joyce’s phrase about “the
incurable ignobility of the forces” that have
overcome Ireland, a legacy that continues
to shape Irish reality into our own time.
As one previous reviewer has most
aptly noted, ‘Beyond the Pale’ repudiates
the standard quasi-ocial narrative that
Catholic Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s was
nothing but a backward, repressive society,
a kind of massive open-air religious gulag
with no redeeming features in contrast to
contemporary liberal secular Ireland where
everything is just wonderful. Instead of the
usual picture we have here a warm and fond
recollection of a world where the presence
of the transcendent dimension was ever-
present, where clergy and religious were
full members of local communities, where
praying for the suering souls in Purgatory
was of vital importance, and where the year
was navigated by reference to Saints’ Days,
Holy Days, and major religious festivals like
Christmas, a reconstruction of traditional
Ireland that is celebratory but without any
trace of sentimentality.
I hesitate to call ‘Beyond the Pale’ a
novel because it refuses to be contained by
such generic classifications, it confounds
conventional expectations about what a
work of fiction should look like and this is
a good thing. It would be nearer the truth
to describe it as a sustained prose poem
which touches moments of lyric intensity,
multilayered, rich in inventive imagery. For
this reviewer ‘Beyond the Pale’ is one of
the most remarkable new literary works to
come along for quite some time and will
repay re-reading.
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