See The Fabulists main site
to read online, or download copies of the book under a creative commons licence.

Thank you for sending me ‘The Fabulists’. It’s a very strange and impressive book. Mr Casey has managed to make two lost and empty lives obsessively interesting. The print is hard for me to read so I proceed slowly marvelling that he can make so much out of so little action and impoverishment. I wish you would pass on my admiration.
Martha Gellhorn, 11 October 1994, in a letter to the English publisher

This is a passionate, erotic, mature novel that displays many of the virtues which contemporary Irish fiction so conspicuously lacks: an intelligent vision of an adult relationship coupled with an intelligent vision of contemporary Irish society. Plus, he has a supple prose style which is a constant joy to read.
- Ronan Sheehan, The Irish Press, October 1994

Think about it. Why did you enjoy the last book you enjoyed? Five-to-one it’s because you identified with, hated, laughed at, fantasized about, despised, appreciated, admired, or just plain LIKED one of the lead players. Yes, yes, yes - of course other elements contribute to the success of the book. But when you turn the last page of a novel which you’ve savored and begin immediately to miss the company of at least one key character, you know the author must be doing something right, and you know you’ve just finished a certifiable, two-thumbs- up, grade-A Good Book.
It doesn’t happen often. Or not often enough, anyway.
Recent Irish fiction has thrown up only a small fistful of such characters, and you already know who they are because when they do arrive, industry hype machines generate more noise than a low-flying rock’n’roll band. So it’s a doubly sweet pleasure to come across a quietly-published, no-hype novel that isn’t just a Good Book with memorable characters, but one that genuinely stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best Irish fiction of the last few years.
Philip Casey’s The Fabulists, is such a novel, and to a large extent, it’s the author’s mastery of character that tilts it into Must Read Status.
An impressively mature and honest tale of extra-marital love and family obligation on the dole in contemporary Dublin, The Fabulists presents two of the most convincingly flesh-and-blood characters to turn up in an Irish novel for ages, and lays bare with haunting, microscopic precision their struggle to endure profound personal disappointments and grab one last chance at the could-have-been.
Although The Fabulists is his first novel, Casey writes with the even, controlled tone of a much more experienced author, delving so deeply, so completely into his characters that it’s almost impossible to avoid becoming involved, even immersed, in their saga. You’ll wonder about Tess and Mungo. You’ll care about them. You’ll even find yourself going along with the stories they weave for each other, hoping the tales end before the relationship does. Why? Because they’re not flashy high-concept creations, they’re palpably REAL characters, fully realized and drawn with sensitivity and intelligence.
By all accounts, The Fabulists took ten years to complete, and the care Casey took with the novel is evident in almost every sentence. Yes, it’s a little depressing. But it’s also an enormously compelling romance with two characters who’ll still be in your head weeks after the plot details have disappeared.
- Colin Lacey, The Irish Voice, New York, May 9,1995

I first came across Philip Casey as a poet and always admired his work. This is his first novel, published by Lilliput Press in Dublin in 1994. I approached it with some trepidation since it was a first novel, but I found it amazingly accomplished. It’s a book I’ve read now three or four times, and it has that really magnificent quality that great novels have, where you find yourself thinking about them a few weeks after you finish reading them.
You are walking down the street and the characters in the novel are so vivid that you almost find yourself saying, if you see something in the street, ’I wonder what would that guy in the novel think about that?’ It’s a love story set in contemporary Dublin and that’s a difficult thing to do because Dublin novelists sometimes tend to characterize Dublin as a gas place full of incredibly funny taxi drivers and bawdy nights in pubs and all the rest. But the Dublin that Philip Casey conjures up reminds me of Dermot Bolger’s Dublin in a way, it’s just so real and absolutely recognizable right from the first page.
It’s a very tender love story. What holds the affair together is the fact that these two people meet once a week and they tell each other stories. So as well as the story in the novel working very well on its own merits, it also builds into a metaphor for the power of stories generally. I found that aspect of the novel very moving. It’s a magnificent book and it’s just come out in England and I’m sure it will do very well there for Philip Casey.
- Joseph O’Connor in an interview with Seamus Hosey for the RTÉ Radio programme Speaking Volumes. The transcript is published by Blackwater Press.

I adored it when I read it… It’s an absolutely georgeous portrait of Dublin… It reminded me of the film Les Amants des Pont Neuf.
- Katy Hayes, The Arts Show, RTÉ Radio 1

…[a novel of ] linguistic power and emotional strength.
Hayden Murphy, The Scotsman.

Casey’s main achievement in The Fabulists lies in his skilful handling of the elements of fact and fantasy, realism and surrealism that make up the novel. Fabulous, seductive fictions are anchored in mundane realities and the compulsion to invent counterbalanced by the obligation to confront the truth.
His geographically centred, metaphorically open narrative allows us to read Tess and Mungo’s journey from immurement to freedom as a parable of a maturing Ireland.
… The subtlety and ease with which Casey achieves such symmetry between private and public worlds makes The Fabulists an assured and impressive debut.
Liam Harte, Irish Studies Review, 9, Winter 1994/5, p. 49.

Easily overcoming the potential pitfalls of the novel’s bleak setting, Casey has created an involving, mature drama of a man and a woman struggling to endure profound personal disappointments.
Publishers Weekly, USA

Fabulists are tellers of fables: improbable tales designed to amuse and instruct. Fabulous, which comes from the word fable, suggests vast, amazing or excellent - all of which apply to this first novel by poet Philip Casey.
An Irish love story for the 1990s.
Anthony Glavin, The Sunday Tribune

This is a deeply accomplished novel. Casey has a penetrating eye for the stuff of everyday relationships and the compassion to turn the ordinary into compelling and vivid fiction.
Eoin McNamee, The Irish Times

Equally important to the development of the relationship between the two characters, Tess and Mungo, and indeed to the structure of the novel itself, is their imaginative tale-spinning courtship involving exotic European locations.
Affecting the entire tone, however, are the women in the story; by choosing this emphasis, Casey creates a ’modern’ fable which is paradoxically liberating for both sexes.
…. and let’s not forget the considerable craft of the author. A highly impressive debut.
Sharon Barnes, In Dublin

This is an impressive first novel, primarily for its insight into both the male and female characters. I look forward to more.
Casey Evans, IT Magazine

In his first novel, The Fabulists, the Irish poet Philip Casey is ostensibly concerned with describing a love affair between Mungo and Tess, two unemployed and unhappily married Dubliners. But what makes this novel so remarkable and compelling is not so much his detailed tracing of their intense affair, but the way in which Casey succeeds in integrating the affair with their drab lives, their city, and their stifled imaginations, all three of which are transformed for brief periods by love.
… Another important element that contributes to the success of the novel is how the lovers amuse each other by telling tall tales about their pasts. This is done to give their affair an exotic quality and to hide the disappointments which define their “actual” lives. But the stories they tell of adventures in places they haven’t visited (Tess’s Germany and Mungo’s Spain) form a fascinating double narrative, one which allows for deep insights into both of their lives, and which contributes to the novel’s complexity.
Most Irish novels are written in a realistic mode, but The Fabulists is a more innovative work in which Casey shows not only a gift for writing in the traditional manner, but also the imagination and daring to introduce new novel techniques, which few Irish writers have bothered themselves with, into his fiction. It is clear from this excellent first novel that Casey is an exciting talent and a writer to watch in the future.
- Eamonn Wall, The Review of Contemporary Fiction

I just picked up Philip Casey’s The Fabulists, by Lilliput. It won this year’s Listowel Book of the Year,* and quite often books win prizes and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re great books, but this I’m just delighted to say was a really, really interesting, unsentimental, very sharp look at two people, both of whom are on the dole, both of whom are trying to raise children in different ways, and they start having a love affair. (It’s also a great mapping of north Dublin, starting with the Ha’Penny Bridge, Liffey Street, Stonybatter, all around there; shops, different kinds of food - a great sociological study of what people eat who are on the dole and all the rest of it).
They fall in love - well, they’re going to have an affair - but what’s terrific about it is they tell each other stories, which are untrue. She supposedly spent some time in Berlin, and he supposedly in Barcelona, and they recount these stories to each other and both of them know that the other one has never been there. But in order to create some kind of wonderful thing out of what really could be a quite sordid sort of love affair, they tell each other these stories.
Just a beautiful book, beautiful.
[That’s The Fabulists] by Philip Casey, who’s a poet, I think, before a novelist, so it comes as a surprise, really, that this book was so interesting.
- Evelyn Conlon Talking about her choice of Books of the Year 1995 with Mike Murphy of The Arts Show RTÉ Radio

* The inaugural Kerry Ingredients First Book of the Year Award, Writer’s Week, Listowel, 1995

incomplete bibliography

Barnes, Sharon. The Fabulists. In Dublin, p.28 November, 1994, p40

Brankin, Una. Rich fantasy springs from harsh reality for Philip (interview) The Sunday Press, November 6, 1994.

Casey, Evans. The Fabulists, by Philip Casey. IT Magazine, October 1994. p112.

Doyle, Martin. The Ties that Bind (interview). The Irish Post, December 17, 1994. p.12

Donavan, Katie. What the Writers are Reading, In Dublin. December 1994. p 41.

Dunne, John. The Fabulists, Philip Casey. Books Ireland, March 1995.

Harte, Liam. The Fabulists. Philip Casey. Irish Studies Review, n 9, Winter 1994/1995, p49.

(unatributed, but based on an interview with Shirley Kelley). Social realism - with a touch of magic. Books Ireland, October 1994.

McNamee, Eoin. Tales of love and damage. The Irish Times, November 5, 1994. Weekend/Books.

Sheehan, Ronan. The Fabulists, Philip Casey. The Irish Press, September 30, 1994, p. 19.

Wall, Eamonn. Philip Casey, The Fabulists. Review of Contemporary Fiction.(USA) Spring 1995. pp 182-3.

See Also:

The Right to the City: Re-presentations of Dublin in Contemporary Irish Fiction, by Gerry Smyth
Contemporary Irish Fiction Themes, Tropes, Theories Edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker (London, MacMillan Press/
New York, St Martin’s Press, 2000)

THE FABULISTS:
TRA FINZIONE E REALTA Tesi di Laurea di Paula Meucci, Istituto Universitario Lingue Moderne, Milano (Anno Accademico 1996-1997)

Note: I’m indebted to Paula Meucci’s thesis on The Fabulists for much of this detail. I’d never thought to keep records of dates etc.

See The Fabulists main site
to read online, or download copies of the book under a creative commons licence.

A seamlessly achieved, questioning work

This is the story of two adults forced to grow far beyond the boundaries of their own expectations. It is also the story of history, and how the separation of past and present which we casually insist on in day-to-day discourse, is challenged by chance, one-in-a-million events, in this case, the inexplicable birth of a black child to London-based white parents, Kate and Dan. Kate is fascinated by the presence of black figures in Renaissance paintings, and there is even a hint of her attraction to the black husband of a friend. After the birth of their (black) baby girl, Dan’s blind rage in the face of the seemingly impossible is one of the central emotional notes in the narrative, and thus begins a journey in which he is compelled to look at his own past and how this past has impinged on his present. Nothing is comfortable. No character in these pages is allowed the easy option. Complacency is the great moral failure that almost overwhelms Dan time and again. Gradually, he explores stories and situations which - one imagines - he would never have envisaged. He learns about his own ancestors’ involvement in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, about inexplicable rages and passions equal to his own, and he comes to understand the great, arduous journeys of those forced to flee abroad to America and to Montserrat.

The tectonic overlapping of black and white, of love and what? prejudice? complacency? past and present? continues beyond the novel’s closing words. Casey began his writing career as a poet. One senses that the poet in him contributes to a complex and often metaphoric refinement of the problem of confronting what seems alien and ‘other’. There are no right-on pronouncments in ‘The Fisher Child’, no ‘correct’ views on either race or nationality. Instead, the characters are human and as such they explore what they need within their own terms and within the terms of history.

The novel’s final image is startling, enigmatic, beautiful and challenging. Through it, Casey appears to urge a re–examination of that which we assume to be philosophically ordered, and to confront our own dreams just as Dan does: which implies that nothing is separate and that the world has a wild inter-dependance that rises even from the genetic, cellular mine of our own bodies. A fresh and intriguing book that many writers would love to have written.
Mary O’Donnell Amazon.co.uk review, 3 December, 2001

Philip Casey’s third novel, The Fisher Child, is a beautiful, evocative tale of love tested. Kate and Dan, happily married with two children, have their lives turned upside down after the birth of Meg.
The novel is divided into three parts: the first told through Kate’s eyes and the third through Dan’s. The novel changes style for the forceful middle section dealing with the Rebellion and subsequent life in Montserrat through the eyes of Dan’s ancestor, Hugh Byrne.
The history told in this engrossing section makes sense of the novel as a whole. From its mesmerising opening chapters in Florence, through the shocking climax to the close, the complicated inter-family relationships threaded with echoes of the past are woven with exquisite skill.
Sue Leonard, The Irish Examiner February 23, 2002

Dan is never granted as much historical knowledge as the reader, but even without all the facts he learns he can have a little more trust, in his wife, but also an implicit trust; one shared by the other characters in this wise, tender novel, in the muddled connections and continuities of their lives.
Paul Magrs, TLS November 9, 2001

Casey, one of the quiet men of Irish writing, is a careful, diligent storyteller, and, as he has shown here, daring…
Casey’s attempts to describe the emergence of modern Irish society, its myths, its realities and bitter truths, through his Bann River Trilogy, remains brave and honest.
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times November 10, 2001

Its linkage to The Water Star is highly interesting (even if occasionally there is a lot of having to explain details of personal histories). The only comparison I can think of is the films The Godfather and Godfather II, which managed to function as both a sequel and a pre-sequel to the original, a difficult imaginative feat which Casey more than successfully pulls off. In doing so he has created a complex novel of contrasts and parallels within the emotions, prejudices and self-awareness of two males linked by a name and a secret and the irresistible pull of a Wexford mountain calling them home. The Fisher Child is a stand-alone novel that can exist without reference to any other book. But read along with The Water Star is to have a rare treat in store.
Dermot Bolger, The Sunday Independent November 25, 2001

Dan and Kate appear the epitome of smug marrieds. We first meet them, with two children behind them and a home in Islington, on a weekend break in Florence. So far so dull, as they take in the sights, but Meg, the unplanned fruit of holiday lovemaking, shows how quickly a comfortable, even complacent, existence can be destroyed. Casey’s portrayal of Kate, rejected and depressed, yet experiencing a fierce need to defend her child, is finely realised, and Dan’s sense of masculinity betrayed and his flight to Ireland also ring true.
Isabel Montgomery, The Guardian, August 17, 2002

A New Start in Finsbury
JOHN TAGUE
TLS

Philip Casey
THE WATER STAR
434pp. Picador. £14.99
0 330 37190 8

Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, confronts the central Irish experience of the twentieth century: exile. It is distinguished by the finely wrought lyricism that has characterized much of his poetry. His first novel, The Fabulists (1994), won acclaim; his new one confirms that he is a writer with a gift for uncovering the tortuous impulses of his characters with a lucid and affecting eye.

Set in a post-war London still recovering from the Blitz, the novel follows the overlapping lives of five characters who inhabit the ruins of North London. Three – Brendan, his son Hugh and Sarah – are Irish; another, Karl, is German. Only Elizabeth, an East End girl who has moved north to escape the claustrophobia of her cramped family life, is English. All carry the marks of exile: disorientation and melancholy, a sense of rupture in their personal history and a relationship with the past which contains both longing and denial. Loss is the feeling they share: loss of homeland, and loss of family as the war has taken its toll. Cut off from home and family, each labours to reconstruct a new life on the ruins of the old, as Brendan, Hugh and Karl, all building workers, toil on the bomb-sites of Holloway and Finsbury to raise new buildings from the shattered wreckage of London.

Casey escorts his reader through the labyrinth of his characters’ minds, unpicking the jumbled mosaic of mourning, desire and fear. The German Karl, his family punished by the Nazis for harbouring a Jewish friend, is overwhelmed by distress when he recalls again and again the bomb attacks on his home town of Hamburg. His suffering eventually drives him to a lunatic asylum; his breakdown has been caused by the weight of the past. Casey’s descriptions of this process, and of the destruction of the German city, are finely evoked; in his reconstruction of the wartime attacks, the smell of smoke, the mortar and the panic are fully imagined.

The troubled relationship between Brendan and Hugh is also well handled. Casey has a feel for the bitter reality of the Irish exile. Rendered emotionally numb by the death of his wife, Brendan nurses dreams of a return to County Wexford. Hugh, spurned by his father’s inarticulacy and still mourning his dead mother, is so raw in his grief that one evening he imagines he sees her. A gauche, unconfident young man, he is both haunted and sustained by the idea of home, which he thinks of as his father’s small farm in the Wicklow hills. In the novel’s opening chapters, we see the harsh life of the two men renting a single room, labouring all hours on a building site to save enough money to return home. But Hugh, unlike his father, realizes that his only chance of survival is to move away from the past, and to put distance between himself and his heritage. He strikes out alone, leaving his father to establish his own life.

Despite its sombre tone, The Water Star is a novel about reconstruction; it tells how those severed from their roots reconnect and reconcile their atavistic impulses with their need to reach a settlement with the present. A structural weakness comes from its preoccupation with detail. The narrative is a lengthy roster of marriages, fallings out, childbirth, death and grief, which at times overwhelms the beauty of individual passages. But those fine intense moments – and there are many of them here – show Philip Casey to be a compelling writer. The Water Star is a bitter–sweet testimony to the never-ending struggle between exile and assimilation.

© TLS, May 21 1999