With nice ecumenical parity, Peter Somerville-Large derides equally both Ireland’s principal Christian churches as they compete for the soul, or at least the membership, of young Paul Blake-Willoughby. His discordant Ascendancy parents, a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, are on what the late Brian Inglis, an esteemed Spectator editor, called ‘a descendancy course’.
Somerville-Large, who was born in Dublin and educated partly at St Columba’s, — a boarding school modelled on English public schools — is a historical social observer of merciless accuracy and caustic wit, moderated with just a touch of nostalgia. He has written a wonderfully entertaining novel about the decay of a traditional Irish big house and the demoralisation of its inmates, a perfect blend of realism and satire, which has been recommended as ‘a splendid book’ by William Trevor, himself a Columban old boy and an expert on all the nuances of Hibernian intercourse.
During the second world war, Paul’s father, a blimpish Sandhurst man, though Irish for many generations, goes overseas as a major in a British guards regiment.
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