Tarry Flynn

by Patrick Kavanagh

A man's mother can be a terrible burden sometimes. For Tarry Flynn - poet, farmer and lover-from-afar of beautiful young virgins - the responsibility of family, farm, poetic inspiration and his own unyielding lust is a heavy one. The only solution is to rise above all - or escape over the nearest horizon.

Like The Green Fool, his autobiography, Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn is an idyllic and beautifully evocative account of life as it was lived in Ireland early in the last century.

Genres: Fiction, Irish Literature, Ireland, Novels, Poetry, 20th Century, Classics

189 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. Regarded as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, his best known works include the novel Tarry Flynn and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.

When the Irish Times compiled a list of favourite Irish poems in 2000, ten of his poems were in the top fifty, and Kavanagh was rated the second favourite poet behind WB Yeats. The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award is presented each year for an unpublished collection of poems. The annual Patrick Kavanagh Weekend takes place on the last weekend in September in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, Ireland. The Patrick Kavanagh Centre, an interpretative centre set up to commemorate the poet, is located in Inniskeen. [wikipedia]

Reviews

[Richard Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tarry Flynn is Patrick Kavanagh's semi-autobiographical novel about life as a young farmer in a small Irish community.

Tarry Flynn is nearing 30, but is still very much at the beck and call of his mother. His life is rooted in the landscape he farms, but is also about the vain pursuit of young women.

This book is also incredibly rooted in its location, and I know that Irish people I have spoken to find it avery evocative and faithful portrait. Although set in the 1930s and 1940s, the rural community it describes still feels familiar today.

And that for me may be part of why I did not feel that resonance. Tarry Flynn felt to me like a book that you had to be Irish to really appreciate. Perhaps Kavanagh is less known on the UK side of the Irish Sea because his work has a specific cultural resonance which might not travel as well outside of that culture.

There was though much humour to enjoy and a range of eccentric characters, and a real sense of Tarry Flynn's connection with the land. You could sense this was a poet's eye view of the Irish landscape.

But for me the book lacked incident and tension. Elements you thought might lead to some drama and plot development fizzled out. That made it hard to engage with and care about the fate of Tarry and the other characters. It just became one thing after another, rather than a coherent work.

Nevertheless, there was much to enjoy in Kavanagh's use of language and dialect, and a bond with the landscape that may have been lost in the present day.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely do you find a book which gives insight into the hopes, fears frustrations aspirations and general worldview of the voiceless, the peasant. Tarry Flynn achieved this.

The world the book depicts is not that long gone, but it is almost entirely gone from Ireland. Nevertheless, anyone with friends or family in Ireland might appreciate this book for the insight it gives into the struggles of their forebears.

Clearly, having ideas, trying to rise up and express what was in your heart, trying to do something different, trying to move beyond the boundaries of your family farm, your clan or your class was a threat to social order. The health and welfare of a family depended on the commitment of the men and women in the family to not stray away from the work. Tarry Flynn tells the story of one young man who can imagine a life beyond the limits of his neighbors' farms, and neighbors' worldview.

Unlike Angela's Ashes which has a storyteller's distance from his subjects, one feels that Kavanagh was utterly "of" the world he writes about. It's as if the Irish earth itself is able to speak.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a fictionalised autobiography, Tarry Flynn is both a loving and critical portrait of rural life in Ireland of the 1930s. Unsentimental books about rural Ireland are definitely more common today, but when Kavanagh was writing they were rare. Rarer still was the book actually critical of the all-powerful institutions of the time, especially of the Church. As such, a contemporary reader of Tarry Flynn might miss some of the power of the book. But, it is a great book, full of beautiful, poetic images of the simple beauty of the rural landscape, and equally full of dark, damning accounts of the small-mindedness of rural society. If you like Kavanagh's poetry, Tarry Flynn is a great prose account of the land that inspired that poetry.

[Darrell Pendergrass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tarry Flynn is not a book for every reader - there's a lot of information/stuff/things that you would know only if you're from Ireland, which I am not. With that said, I enjoyed this story very much. Tarry Flynn is a 20-something young man living with his widowed mother and his sisters, on an unsuccessful farm, in a rural area of Ireland. I believe it's on the eastern side of the country, south of Dublin. He longs for love, and physical affection, but he doesn't know how to find it. Tarry struggles with the farm, finances, girls, his family - everything. And he wants to be a poet. And he wants to have money. Along the way he gets into confrontations with his neighbors. Makes poor business deals. Yet, there's something about him that draws the reader in; you root for him to succeed. I love this book, but I know not everyone will.

[Denerick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of earthy wit, colourful characters (Mainly his battleaxe of a mother, his travelling uncle, and his dirty minded neighbour Eusebius) Tarry Flynn is a novel that unravels the role of the church in an insular rural society, the importance of land, land disputes in general, and is also surprisingly raunchy for a 1940s Irish book. My favourite part was the dispute between Tarry and Jimmy Finnegan over two fields, how Tarry gave him one clean punch to floor him, resulting in all kinds of hysterical rumour mongering in the locality. The gossipy nature of society and his inconsolable mother is the constant target of Kavanaghs acerbic wit.

Another enjoyable scene comes early in the book. The parish priest delivers a stereotypically denunciatory sermon, and lambasts a local girl who had been 'defiled' by a local young man. The way Kavanagh describes the local people from the townload leaning forward with a smile on their faith is priceless - as he says himself, everyone is always eager to hear about the sin in their own townland.

Kavanagh peers through in every scene. The young and distracted poet farmer, Tarry Flynn, is Patrick Kavanagh through and through, who interprets the world around him with a typically iron humour and a constant sense of the importance of 'being' in a world where very little is under his control. All in all, a very enjoyable read.

[A. Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, this book is delightfully funny and its protagonist an agonized combination of farmer, poet, and suitor. He is so repressed and lacking in confidence that in spite of his lustful thoughts, he is powerless to propose a formal courtship, to think a worthy woman would find him a worthy man. On top of that, he doubts the virtue of almost every unmarried woman around. He loves the land and everything about it, and he does work the land, but he's just as likely to wax poetic. His world is his mother and sisters, his neighbours, and the church. Tarry has dreams but is impotent to take charge of his life. There's all manner of scheming and mistrust. It's a splendid read, a book that has a genuine understanding of the land and of dreaming.

[Clodagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

catholic power, s€xual repression, small town begrudgery, the dominant matriarch, her son the golden boy... the unrelenting misery! it can only be... ireland in the rare ould times. told with a wry, satirical outlook on people mixed with poetic romanticism regarding the beauty of The Land. funny and tragic.

[Laura Daly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, touching, funny, fantastic, first read this aged 12 and have re read it dozens of times and it still makes me smile. A treasure from a genius.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is classic Kavanagh and anyone who enjoys his poetry will enjoy this. The main character is very similar to Kavanagh, they're both small farmers in isolated rural areas who struggle to relate to other people, while having a poetic love for everything around them. The best part of the book is how Kavanagh accurately captures the way people talk and the turns of phrase they use.

Plot isn't a major part of the book, which is more about the atmosphere of the place. This is deliberate because there is a sense of loneliness and a feeling that little ever happens there. There is a great mixture of frustration and contentedness.

[Audenbae · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful picture of a very specific time and place in Irish history. Kavanagh's work is a portrait of loneliness and frustration intermingled with a genuine love for the land.
It's his own A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, an artistic soul struggling to escape his dreary rural life. Timeless in a sense, well worth a read.

[Eimear · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear avid readers,
A realistic telling of rural Ireland. Funnily enough I wasn’t alive in the 1930’s yet I can still tell that it’s true to life because the basis of our rural society hadn’t changed all that much 50 years later .
Personally I think watching the play version of this book is probably better as I kind of missed out on all the humour . To be honest it wasn’t particularly gripping or exciting which is why I personally wouldn’t read it again . A lot of Tarry Flynn’s feelings of being trapped and using reading as a method of escapism felt very relevant to me. His inner thoughts on life in general is what made me enjoy this book. Doesn’t mean Tarry Flynn wasn’t a complete creep.
Also I really relate to how Patrick Kavanagh just left Ireland and went to live on an isolated Island , so bonus points for that!
Until next time,
Yours sincerely,
Lady Desmo

[Gemma Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patrick Kavanagh's novel is about a feckless young farmer with the soul of a poet who spends his days alternately lusting after and fleeing from the local girls. There's a wonderful contrast between the lyrical passages suffused by real love for the land, and Tarry's petty vanities and schemes. Although on one level it seems odd that the sensitive intelligent poet is also such a clumsy, awkward, dishonest and cowardly young man, on another it makes perfect sense and is totally fitting and rings true. It is not easy to read, dense and full of expressions I might have understood if I'd heard them said but didn't really get on paper. But it is rich and at times really quite funny, as well as a beautiful but unsentimental portrait of rural Ireland.

[Gill · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you see that Patrick Kavanagh wrote it you think that the whole book is going to be spent extolling the beauty of fields, bogs potatoes etc..


Which is exactly what it does! But it shows the kind of mindset in rural Ireland in those days, and Tarry's personality is kind of how I imagine Patrick Kavanagh might have been.

[Eamonn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read. kavanagh takes us in to rural life in 1930's with no reservations. He lets loose with poetic prose and black comedy, which makes the whole sorry mess Tarry has to live with, an easier toil. One of my favorite books in ages.

[Patrick Taggart · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you weren't Irish or from a rural background I'd imagine this is hard enough to follow, but overall it's a very creatively drawn out account of rural life, in how it seems so unbelievably tedious until suddenly it vanishes, never to be quite the same again.

The ending is excellent too.

[WigWam]

Irish Independent Great Irish Writers Series

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personal Memo: During our December 2021 trip to London, we visited Joan in Chelmsley our first afternoon. From the look of her shelves, Joan is a reader. During tea, our conversation turned to poetry. I told her I was reading an anthology that included "Innocence" by Patrick Kavanagh. She sprung up from her chair to find a 1972 print edition of Tarry Flynn and recommended the read by this Monaghan man. I bought the same edition off eBay and read it while Caroline and I soaked up the Oaxacan sun.

Tarry Flynn is a throbbing little book (with a wistfully bucolic watercolor cover). It is also evidence that the Irish vernacular is gibberish - and utterly hilarious - by most other English-variant standards (e.g. literally every line of dialogue).

Poor Tarry has a poet's heart, whose daydreaming distracts him from his workaday duties. And it isn't that he's torn between but rather he's familially and socially obliged to be disjointed in his love for the boundless beauty of his birthplace and his unmanageable itch to imagine, to read, to write. His heart is capacious enough to love it all.

"She couldn't see that apparent indifference and laziness was not laziness but the enchantment of the earth over time, and the wonder of a strange beauty revealed to him" (76).

In this little book of prose, Kavanagh the poet also shines. An ordinary field or flower could not be more colorful and alive. This admiration for the land and for a place is bittersweet⁠—what happens when home becomes too small for you? When you are called to image a bigger world beyond? The story builds slowly, stumbling along like poor Tarry, until destiny - or rather his worldly wise uncle - arrives.

Some lovely quotes...
"May was one of the girls with whom he was in love. She was reality. But nothing was happening after all his spring daydreams. The land keeps a man silent for a generation or two and then the crust gives way. A poet is born or a prophet" (20-21).

"These maggots would become winged if they had lived long enough. Some day he, too, might grow wings and be able to fly away from this clay-stricken place. Ah, clay! It was out of clay that wings were made. He stared down at the dry little canyons in the parched earth and he loved that dry earth which could produce a miracle of wings" (44).

"Walking through the meadow in summer was a great excitement. The simple, fantastic beauty of ordinary things growing - marsh-marigolds, dandelions, thistles and grass. He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story[...] Every weed and stone [...] evoked for him the only real world - the world of the imagination. And the rank smell of the weeds! What is a flower? Only what it does to a man's spirit is important" (47).

"But Tarry was a sensitive man, not a countryman, but merely a man living. And life was the same everywhere. He walked in a maze through the street, leaned over the bars of the road gate. He was always expected something. Down that silent road something or someone different, not of this world, seemed to be about to come. That bend hid - what did it hid? His destiny, perhaps" (147).

'But there's no necessity to live in this sort of place, is there? The best way to love a country like this is from a range of not less than three hundred miles. And the same applies to the women of it' (185, the uncle).

'Do you know,' said the uncle with lofty reflection, 'it often occurred to me that we love most what makes us most miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned. All the angels in Heaven couldn't drag a damned soul out of the Pit - he likes it so much' (186).

"O the beauty of what we love! O the pain of roots dragging up!" (188)

[Terry Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn is more than just a novel to me—it’s a reflection of a world I know intimately, a world I have walked through, spoken with, and, in many ways, struggled against. It captures not only the place but the people, their rhythms of speech, their quiet philosophies, and the way the land itself shapes them. Reading it, I don’t feel like I’m looking into the past but into something deeply familiar, something that still lingers in the air and the fields around me.

Tarry’s restless longing is something I understand. His hunger for beauty, for poetry, for something beyond the hedges of home—it’s the same yearning that creeps in on long walks through familiar lanes, that lingers in the stillness of a field at dusk. And yet, there’s a contradiction in him, in me, in all of us who see the world this way. The beauty is not just beyond us; it’s here, in the way the wind moves through the grass, in the sharp wit of a neighbor leaning on a gate, in the half-embarrassed charm of a girl at a dance who will not look at you twice.

And then there’s the failure with women—Tarry’s fumbling, his misplaced affections, his frustration at the distance between what he desires and what is real. That too is painfully familiar. The way hope flickers at the smallest sign of kindness, the way rejection, even when expected, still stings. Kavanagh doesn’t dress it up, doesn’t turn it into some grand romantic tragedy. It’s just part of life, as natural and inevitable as a poor harvest or a stretch of bad weather.

But what makes Tarry Flynn truly remarkable is the poetry of it. Not just in the language—though Kavanagh’s prose is as lyrical as any of his verse—but in the way he sees the world. The same world I know, the same one I sometimes take for granted, is rendered here with a reverence that makes me pause. It reminds me that the beauty I seek elsewhere is already under my feet, that even the smallest things—how a horse stands in a field, how the rain falls on a tin roof—are poetry if I only stop long enough to see them.

Tarry Flynn is not just a novel about rural Ireland; it’s a novel about the tension between longing and belonging, between wanting to escape and being rooted to a place so deeply that even in leaving, it never really leaves you. It’s about the dreams we have, the ones that come true, and the ones that quietly fade. And in that, it is one of the most honest, beautiful things I have ever read.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

1948

So sad it was hard to keep reading it. I got about halfway, saw I would not have time to finish before leaving Toronto, so skipped to the last couple chapters to the end.

Apparently Kavanagh was highly valued as a writer in his day. Some other of his books are said to be very good, but if they are as depressing as this one I don't think I am up to them.

The competition over scarce resources in this time and place is appalling, and the resulting bullying [e.g. of the main character Tarry]. Tarry is shown to realize he loves the rural life, the farm work, the plants and insects, the weather, the sky. His mother [dad died] directs everything, and Tarry has little gumption of his own. Mother is said [by author] to love Tarry more than anyone else, yet that's not what she shows.

If you wonder why people left Ireland, I guess this book helps answer the question. I wasn't sure if Tarry changed during the book, I started feeling we were hearing the same things done and said, over and over again. That's the main reason I skipped to the end.

Quite a few local expressions which of course I didn't know; author does try to let us hear the dialect.

[Rachel Barry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Taking this as it is - a book of its time, for its time - it is possible to appreciate it more than taking it afresh.

Banned by the Irish censorship board on its initial publication in 1948, its easy to see why - certain themes such as Tarry’s distaste for the clergy, the parish obsession with women (but not with marriage) and the general discontent of a would be poet with the life of a country farmer would not have gone down well to say the least. In spite of Tarry’s unique ability to see beauty in the land, his inability to get on with his neighbours renders his position hopeless.

For a modern reader, there is too much that has already been done and said - extolling the land is all very well, but it could do with more poetry and less plodding to keep it going. Several pages spent clearing a ditch are wasted. Tarry isn’t particularly convincing as the would be poet - for a man supposedly versed in books, he tends to read by opening pages at random rather than reading the way through. There are some great one liners, and some rich characters, but for a book under 200 pages to be too long is a poor thing.

[Asiem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite evidently a semi-autobiographical account, Tarry Flynn creates a delightful meander through the Ireland of the 1930s. Through his bucolic prose, Kavanagh vividly conjures an impression of the Irish countryside. It isn't difficult to imagine oneself walking alongside Tarry or Eusebius, minding the farm, leading the cow to be impregnated by the bull, indulging in banal pleasantries. The atmosphere is suffused with the smells and sounds of the country, and little wonder that Tarry is prone to daydreaming his days away, surrounded as he is by such a glorious bounty of nature. However, as is most often the case with small towns and villages, there is always a yearning for 'greener pastures', for the sights and sounds of big cities, and a desire to leave one's travails behind. This affliction follows Tarry throughout the book, and Kavanagh does a wonderful job of keeping alive this dilemma throughout the book - to leave or to stay?

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was as eager to get the back of rural Cavan and its inhabitants as the protagonist turned out to be, so I can give three stars to a book I can't say I 'liked' at all for that evocative hold it placed over me, of Irish talk and trouble, that place I can only hold fondness for while away...and sadly enough for the moment, am very much present in. I didn't know much of Kavanagh the novelist and this book deserves a nice bit more praise, if that's the word, for an early realist account of the big small world of the Irish countryside. If I was still in the throes of my English degree I'd love a chance to contrast this with Edna O'Brien and John McGahern, but without any professional interest at stake, my only urge is to retreat hastily from a mental Ireland while I remain situated in the physical one.

[Gurldoggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty but plodding picaresque novel of farm life in 1930's Ireland. The language is lyrical as befits young Tarry Flynn, our hero and budding poet, but his observations are exclusively bitter and his outlook unceasingly grim. Even relatively bright and hopeful moments - a flirtation over a broken bicycle or a long set piece at a village dance - are darkened by loneliness and cynicism. Despite the pastoral scenes, this book hardly presents a romantic vision of mid-century Ireland. More like an indictment.

[David Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kavanagh accomplishes what he seeks to achieve in this novel and should be commended for it. In focussing on one parochial community, the entirety of the human experience is exposed. The ambition and evil, the naivety and longing, the affection and resentment which are the building blocks of earthly life are all to be found in one humble parish. Yet, what Kavanagh achieves in the broad detracts from the detail, leaving some characters murky and some plots lacking which injures the coherence of the text.

[Dayna · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK. After reading the description, I thought there would be more, just more. It was just very basic. I was hoping for more intimate details of his struggles.
The description would be more accurate if it read; ‘A tale of Tarry Flynn- farmer and poet. The responsibility of farming, family and his awkwardness with women is tough but not as tough as his mother. His only solution is to rise above or walk away.’

[Kevin Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I have read it when I was in my late teens and again now over 30 years later. Kavanagh gives a great depiction of life in rural Ireland in the 1930s. Tarry is a delusional day dreamer with a huge appreciation of the natural world, and has some very amusing thought processes. I have grown up in Ireland, in a farming context, often listening to stories of my father’s upbringing and maybe this gives me a relatively unique appreciation for this book. One of my favourites.

[Korny Caswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical, slow account of a young man's love of his rural upbringing and his long-suffering mother—and of his painful final decision to leave both behind in order to allow his imagination to flourish. Many beautiful passages and a fine melancholy feel, as well as plenty of humor in the mother's lamentations and errors, but don't be looking for plot please!

[Devs38 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay book. Not bad, not good either. Set in rural Ireland circa 1935. It's disjointed with a fair amount of negativity. lots of gossip and in fighting between families and neighbors. it is engaging, some good descriptive prose about nature and farming in Ireland. It also brings to life a lifestyle that no longer exists.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the final page, Tarry Flynn produces a stunning poem which sums up the entire novel in an ecstasy. But it would be futile to open the book on its final page; it is necessary [and entirely worthwhile] to read the novel in order to appreciate this.

[AT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evocative, painful, anti-pastoral. The first time I have read Kavanagh and I don't know why it has taken me all this time. A gifted writer who captures the ambience of the era. The dialogue rings utterly true to life. A masterpiece.