Literature invests topography and history with enhanced significance. This outstanding work of popular scholarship might well be titled the truth of the land. Here is a meticulous catalogue raisonne of the landscapes and townscapes of Ireland's most extensive county and the richly various literary civilisation it has engendered.
Mary Leland, a journalist, critic and novelist who was born and educated in Cork, conducts readers through the whole county, region by region, from Youghal to Crookhaven. She shows the way along every familiar beaten track and also ventures off them, as in south-west Cork: "latticed with tiny roads which all lead somewhere and, eventually, even to the desired destination".
The book is a comprehensive, descriptive guide to physical surfaces, enriched with cultural depths dating from the querulous observations of that earliest recorded alien tourist, Giraldus Cambrensis, who arrived in 1183.
Within a framework of historical events, such as the Battle of Kinsale, the Algerian kidnappers' raid on Baltimore, the French Armada's abortive attempt to invade Bantry and the Famine, Leland has traced the major achievements and minutiae of the literary careers and associations of native men and women, immigrants and part-time residents. Cork is fiercely proud of its identity, yet tolerantly cosmopolitan.
Leland has not been able to present any coherent, overall pattern of the country's peculiar literary influences on its inhabitants for the simple reason that there isn't one. As elsewhere, Cork's literary causes and effects, she demonstrates, are individualistic and largely haphazard, although, of course, it is true that living in bucolic isolation or a teeming slum or a loftily academic society may inspire different writers to write differently.
In her modestly tentative introduction, she concedes that "inevitably, there are omissions from this patchwork of writers' lives". (I can vouch for that.) "From such a catalogue who is to say who were minor figures and who major?" "It is with some temerity that the literary archaeologist selects from the artisans uncovered in a dig of this kind those who are now most worthy of attention or of notice."
Even so, her roll-call is as fruitfully dense as a Christmas pudding. The countless fragments of biography will stimulate reference to specialised fuller accounts. The bibliographical notes offer helpful suggestions.
"It is uncomfortable, and therefore unfashionable, still for us as Irish writers or critics to accept the Elizabeth Bowens, the Somervilles and Rosses, the Wildes, Shaws, Swifts and Yeats as wholly Irish," she writes. "As Irish in literary terms as Kate O'Brien or Frank O'Connor or Brian Friel, let alone as truly Irish as O Bruadair or Mairtin O Cadhain." However, she allows that "visitors, invaders, settlers, as much as any native-born green-blooded Gaelicspeaking commentators, are to be numbered not for their birthright but for their words".
As an earnest of her determination to make her work all-inclusive, Leland suggests that Elizabeth Bowen's book about her estate is an apt metaphor to "act for this book" - Leland's own - "as a whole". "In Bowen's Court we have an edifice with its principal inhabitants; we have its landscape, its languages, its tenants and neighbours. We have its walled garden and its stables, its arable acres, its church. We have its legends, its battles, its defeat. We have news from abroad creeping across its pastures like a mist. We have its journeys, its ghosts, its beginnings and endings, its letters and its visitors. Its failures. Above all we have its literature."
Leland realises this metaphorical prospectus in full. Much of her book is entertaining; all of it is interestingly informative, written with sensitivity to regional atmosphere and character, and with clarity and wit. The text is divided, arbitrarily but sensibly, into geographical sections of the county, with final emphasis on Cork city and its college, the city's "cultural centrepoint, now spreading its campus across the city".
She usually maintains a manner of transcendent objectivity, but also feels free, quite legitimately, to give occasional expression to her own feelings, if only by allotting extra space to writers that she seems to be partial to. One of these is Sean O'Faolain, who wrote: "I never can - such is the force of a truly creative mind, a powerful and affective imagination - travel across this wide limestone plateau of North East Cork, between the Nagles and the Galtees, without seeing it all, north and south, in the light and under the imprint of that swooning, sensuous, silvery poem The Faerie Queene." She also shares O'Faolain's appreciation of the tranquil beauty of Gougane Barra, near the source of the River Lee.
Another writer who, I surmise, must be one of Leland's favourites, is Sylvester Mahony, who sometimes found it politic to write under the pen-name "Father Prout". It was he who wrote the celebrated verses on Blarney Castle that begin: "There is a stone there,/ That whoever kisses,/ Oh! he never misses/ To grow eloquent." Mary Leland has obviously kissed it. She proves that she is a loyal, true Corkonian when she writes that O'Faolain wrote his autobiography, Vive Moi!, "in exile" - in Dublin.
The Lie of the Land is illustrated, and there are maps.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic