Philip Casey

Both are deeply attached to their children.

Thus their recent pasts are pain­ful, the hurt com­poun­ded by poverty, and they are reluct­ant to tell each other about their true selves. Over a cup of cof­fee in The Wind­ing Stair Book­shop & Café, Mungo, who reads travel books on Spain, hits on the solu­tion of telling a story, dis­guised as auto­bi­o­graphy, of a train jour­ney through the snow-covered Cent­ral Plateau.

Intrigued, on their next meet­ing TESS tells him in turn the fic­tional story of her life in Ber­lin, gleaned from let­ters from her friend MARIAN.

As the love affair pro­gresses, their stor­ies become more deeply rooted in their own lives and obsess­ively import­ant to them, form­ing a double nar­rat­ive and enabling them to con­front truths about themselves.

MUNGO moves to Wex­ford with his wife and fam­ily, and TESS becomes more inde­pend­ent, yet they still need each other to fin­ish the stor­ies. The film with TESS and MUNGO applaud­ing Pres­id­ent Robin­son as she passes in the Pres­id­en­tial Rolls Royce after her inauguration.

The Fabulists is adap­ted from the novel of the same name.

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 is coun­ter­bal­anced by the oblig­a­tion to con­front the truth. His geo­graph­ic­ally centered, 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 (Bristol)

If you haven’t read The Fabulists, and I know there are still a few of you out there, it’s avail­able for free down­load under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons licence, or to read online, at its spe­cial sub­site, or if you want to pop over to The Irish Lit­er­ary Revival, which I cre­ated with poet Patrick Chap­man, it’s avail­able there, too, with works from Patrick and other Irish writers. Actu­ally, if you wish, you can also down­load my last book of poems fromthis site also. See links below.

The Fabulists at Philip Casey’s website