The black shore

the long version

"In The Black Shore, O'Neill finally expresses his criticism of Ireland, Irish nationalism, and Irish Catholicism, often in hilariously satiric scenes and with a cast of characters as ugly and unsavory as any to be found in modern Anglo-Irish literature. The novel is also an Irish love story of sorts and traces the perverse relationship between the local doctor and the niece of the parish priest - he, the confirmed and vocal atheist in a fanatically Catholic country, who is sadly incapable of expressing love and she, the wife who, looking for romance and glamour, in the bogs of Ireland, sees herself the possible instrument of his salvation. The Black Shore is also a fitting final statement of the man Joseph O'Neill who spent twenty-five years buried in the bureaucracy of the Irish Department of Education, loathing the petty, bourgeois life he lived, longing for the heroic past, for the time - if it ever existed - when a man's thoughts and actions functioned in accord."--BOOK JACKET.