Fine Irish writing

Today I am writing about the LIBOR scandal and there is nothing fine about my writing. That is why I distract myself with the good stuff. Not whiskey, but the likes of Colm Toibin, Bernard McLaverty, and, currently, Sebastian Barry. Here is how fine he is, describing a priest attending to a teenager slain in Ireland's civil war:

"Fr Gaunt himself was young and might have been expected to feel a special kinship for the slain. But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music.

"But let me not speak against him. He went everywhere in Sligo in his ministry, he walked into bleak rooms in the town where impoverished bachelors feasted on tinned beans, and lousy cabins by the river that looked like ancient starving men themselves, with rotting thatch for hair, and little staring, dull, black windows for eyes. Into those too he went, famously, and never took flea or louse out with him. For he was cleaner than the daylight moon.

"And such a small, clean man when crossed was like a scything blade, the grass, the brambles and the stalks of human nature went down before him, as my father discovered."

The book is The Secret Scripture and I highly recommend it.
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