Katherine Ebury et al., Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman, Cork: Cork University Press, 2024, 336 p.

Abstract

Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman was published in 2024 and represents a valuable foray into Flann O’Brien’ s work and connection with fields such as animal studies, climate studies and all matters pertaining to the nonhuman. The collection consists of fourteen essays split into three sections, each dedicated to a theme: environments, animals and machines. The contributors are reputable scholars and with the supervision of editors such as Katherine Ebury, Paul Fagan and John Greaney, all established in the field of Flann O’Brien studies and Irish Modernism, the collection promises to offer interested readers a valuable experience.

Said editors begin the collection with an introduction that establishes a primary reason for its existence: that O’Brien has been largely left out of discussions on the non-human in twentieth-century Irish modernist writing.

Nicholas Allen begins the section on environments with an essay focused on the use of water. He introduces the term “blue humanities” (25) which refers to studies of water, the sea and the coast. Allen identifies watery structures in the way O’Brien writes characters in At Swim-Two-Birds. An example of this is Finn Mac Cool, whose speech emphasizes watery imagery. This also plays into how O’Brien uses Irish mythological creatures that are associated with water and therefore invoke the idea of transformation. This is the effect that the Irish writer achieves, a sort of ‘liquid’ writing that becomes disorienting for the reader but which embodies Irishness. Water represents an unstable world, but it also encompasses the idea of “determining national temperament” (37) in Myles na gCopaleen’s column, used to serve the author in his commentary regarding public health and infrastructure. Allen describes O’Brien’s writing as “liquid modernism”(40), due to his “water-powered prose” (40).