“In an era of all sorts of separatism and sectarian hatred and very, very narrow definitions of what Irishness should be, here’s this man who is a Protestant and from the land-owning class, who thinks that the country is great. I think if you trace back, Synge was at the start of so many tributaries of storytelling, in ways that he didn’t even understand. “There couldn’t have been Samuel Beckett without Synge, which means that there couldn’t have been David Mamet without Synge – it goes on. “He’s so important and so influential,” O’Connor said, talking over the phone from his home in Killiney, Dublin, where he lives with his wife, Anne-Marie, and their sons James and Marcus. It is a good point, but it’s nothing new to Joseph O’Connor, or to those who have read his latest novel, Ghost Light, which zeroes in on Synge’s final, most prolific years before his death from Hodgkins disease at age 38. “A century after Synge’s last works were published, he may be the writer Ireland needs,” he concluded. “The great discovery made in his study of the Irish character,” Sullivan explained, “is the idea of survival as an act of imagination,” he said, speaking to Ireland’s current troubles. Over the course of his stay, he kept returning to John Millington Synge, the Anglo-Irish playwright who made the Aran Islands and their inhabitants famous in such provocative masterpieces as Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea.

The accompanying feature was by an Irish-American writer, John Jeremiah Sullivan, who had revisited Ireland and traveled to the islands for the first time. The Aran Islands appeared recently on the cover of the New York Times magazine – green, quaintly barren, and lined with stone walls. Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, talks about his new novel, Ghost Light, the Irish diaspora, and why he doesn’t write historical fiction.

Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor