A Man in a Distant Field

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

A quiet farming corner of Northern Ireland, near Belfast, was no place
to hide from the “Troubles,” not in the early 1920s. The
Anglo–Irish Treaty of December 1921 had been signed but served mostly
to split the IRA and put Nationalists on further alert. Declan
O’Malley, Theresa Kishkan’s protagonist in her second novel (Sisters
of Grass appeared in 2000), discovers tragically that the County Mayo of
his ancestors cannot escape the sectarian and political upheaval of the
times. When his wife and daughters are murdered by the Black and Tans,
his farmhouse in Delphi burned to the ground, Declan runs from his
memories to North America, finding refuge in a small cabin in Oyster
Bay, a fictional settlement on B.C.’s Sechelt Peninsula. The
narrative, however, is much more than a story of healing. In luminous
prose, Kishkan layers Declan’s odyssey with its prototype, Ulysses’s
journey home from Troy. The parallels run deep; Declan spends much of
his time attempting a new translation of the epic, using the Greek he
learned from the priests at school. Like Odysseus, Declan must return
home, though he realizes he will have no family there to welcome him.
The second part of the novel, autumn 1922 to spring 1923, covers this
homecoming.

Kishkan brings a poet’s sensibilities to her writing. Her images are
sharp and personal, such as when Declan compares his village to his
Canadian refuge: “It was landscape plainer in its bones than the one
surrounding Oyster Bay but he saw it with his heart as well as his eyes.
It was as though it took the fuss of those coastal rainforests, the lush
growth of the estuary, to make this one clear to him. Now there was a
reference point, a transparency to hold to the land of his birth, to
make its contrasts evident, shaped by stone and a history of
hardship.”

Kishkan lives in Sechelt, just north of Vancouver, where she and her
husband run a small press.