M HKA Ensembles

Book, 19.6 x 12.9 cm, 314 p, language: English, publisher: London: Arcadia Books Ltd., ISBN 1-900850-68-0.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/542).

Literary synopsis

The Deposition of Father McGreevy is a story of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where the women mysteriously die and a gripping exploration of both the locus of misfortune and the nature of evil. Rich in the details of Irish lore and life, its narrative evokes both a time and a place with the accuracy of a keen, unsentimental eye, and renders its characters with heartfelt depth and as World War II rages through Europe. Father McGreevy struggles to preserve what remains of his parish. In the fictive memoir the village's priest recounts the macabre events that began with the swift deaths of six women in the winter of 1939, and ended with the village deserted, himself defrocked, others dead, rumors of men copulating with beasts and a man charged with murdering his own son. Father McGreevy vows to be "as honest as I can in this deposition, and the word can't help but bring to mind the Deposition of Our Lord Himself from the Cross." Trying to explain what he has seen, he draws on Catholic theology, Irish history and folklore and Irish-language literature. O'Doherty works overtime with local color, pathos and religious symbolism in this elaborately constructed homage and elegy to rural, Gaelic Ireland.

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