Merciful Hour

by Bernard Share

1970. No Edition Remarks. 159 pages. Pictorial dust jacket over brown cloth. Pages and binding are presentable with no major defects. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. Overall a good condition item. Boards have mild shelf wear with light rubbing and corner bumping. Some light marking and sunning. Unclipped jacket has heavy edgewear with areas of loss, heavy tears, chips, and creasing. Light tanning to spine and edges. Sticker to front panel. Light foxing overall.

164 pages, Hardcover

Published December 7, 1970

About the author

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Bernard Share has taught English Literature in Australia and edited Books Ireland and CARA, the inflight magazine of Aer Lingus. He has written extensively on language and Irish social history and the third edition of his dictionary of slang and colloquial English in Ireland, Slanguage, was published recently. He lives in Co. Kildare.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having taken me over six years to learn (by chance, in an issue of the RCF on Alan Burns) of this novel’s existence (no reprint, Dalkey?), it is with pleasure I can announce that the follow-up to the slab of comic barm that was Inish is almost as successful. The publisher’s attempt to summarise the “plot” of this anti-plot, anti-structure, anti-conventional novel of madness on the cover flap is almost as amusing as the multi-character antics taking place: various narrators and characters, narrating “on tape” and on the pages of the novel itself, cut across one another in a sort of endless meta-limbo, couched inside a cockamamie tale of a tourist castle scheme(?) and some folks arriving from The Delegation(?): a “plot” sprinkled with copious Irish history references that might explain some of the more esoteric aspects of the novel. Otherwise, let the lunacy, wordplay, excellent dialogue, and overall weirdness entertain, and the impressive if inconsequential levels of narration, chronology, and history leave you in a state of impressed bafflement.