The Wind Bloweth

Donn Byrne opens on Shane Campbell’s fourteenth birthday in the Glens of Antrim, when the boy is let off school and climbs the mountain to watch for Dancing Town, the white mirage with its palm trees that hangs in the air between Ireland and Scotland. Shane goes to sea in the age of square-riggers, and the novel’s seven parts take their names from the places and moments that mark him: The Wake at Ardee, The Wrestler from Aleppo, The Valley of the Black Pig, The Bold Fenian Men. The women he loves divide the years into eras. Byrne told it in a Gaelic-inflected, incantatory prose that made him one of the most popular novelists of the 1920s. Century Magazine ran it as a seven-part serial in 1922, and the book that followed carried illustrations by George Bellows.