In 1923, Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre introduced a new playwright, Sean O'Casey (1880-1964), whose tragicomedy The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) was the first of three plays dealing with pivotal events in recent Irish history. (The other two plays are Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars) The Shadow of a Gunman, set in a Dublin tenement during the war, takes as its satirical target the romanticizing of heroism. Its protagonist, Donal Davoren, sees himself as a poet, but his neighbors are convinced that he is an IRA gunman, hiding out from British forces. Once he realizes that the other tenants, particularly the young, attractive Minnie Powell, see him as a hero, he does nothing to dispel their illusions. His deception is matched by his self-deception, for Donal is no more a poet than he is a gunman. Like many of the other residents in his building, he indulges in verbal fantasies, keeping at arm's length the reality of the guerrilla war raging in the streets. But Donal's impersonation comes home to roost when a real IRA gunman hides a bag of bombs in his room. When the Black and Tans come to search his room, Minnie moves the bombs into her room, and she is arrested and killed trying to escape.

Like his predecessor at the Abbey Theatre, J. M. Synge (1871-1909), whose Playboy of the Western World satirized the Irish predilection to hero-worship outlaws while recording the colorful language of common people, O'Casey adds a serious note to his work--an expression of his socialist creed meant to show that the working poor are the real victims of the war. As one of his characters puts it, "the gunmen are blown' about dyin' for the people, when it's the people that are dyin' for the gunmen."

In The Last September (1929), the novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) offers a view of the war from a distinctive perspective, that of the Anglo-Irish gentry, a class to which Bowen herself belonged. The Anglo-Irish, English by manners, religion, and custom but Irish in their love of the land and their own sense of national identity, recognize that they are a dying breed but remain in denial of that fact because they see the alternative--relocation--as unimaginable. Their world centers on the "big house," the gracious manors that dotted the Irish countryside, symbolizing their hegemony. In The Last September, the big house is the home of Sir Richard and Lady Naylor and their ward, Lois, the central figure of the novel. Caught in the conflict between the brutal Black and Tans and the equally brutal IRA, their position is summed up by one of them as "our side--which is no side--rather scared, rather isolated." The ambivalence is embodied in Lois, engaged to a British officer garrisoned in the area and drawn to a fugitive rebel hiding out in an abandoned mill on the estate. The novel concludes with the inevitable burning of the beautiful house, a deed that is seen as both terrible and liberating for Lois, who has known all along that the house, and the world for which it stood, is gone.

Thomas Flanagan's (1923-2002) The End of the Hunt (1994) opens in 1919. Within a wide range of historical and fictional figures, the novel focuses on Janice Nugent, a young Irish Catholic widow of an officer who has been killed in Gallipoli, and Christopher Blake, a trusted aide of Michael Collins, the charismatic leader of the Irish rebels. Christopher and Janice fall in love, creating a moral crisis for Janice, who abhors the violence surrounding them, but cannot deny her love for a man who helps to orchestrate a significant portion of that violence. Flanagan skillfully maneuvers her story in order to recreate Collins's successful military campaign and his fatal decision to participate in the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty talks in London. The decision is fatal because at the bargaining table the Irish are overmatched by the British threat that if they do not accept the treaty, it will mean all-out war. Collins, knowing better than anyone the completely weakened condition of his troops, agrees to sign, but acknowledges: "I may have signed my actual death warrant." Collins's words prove to be prophetic in the Irish civil war that ensues. The treaty negotiations are skillfully rendered, particularly the portrait of Collins, who emerges as an imposing, courageous, ultimately tragic figure. Tragic too is the sense that the consequences of the events of the novel continue to be played out in the Troubles of Northern Ireland today.

The End of the Hunt completes the author's trilogy covering modern Irish history, beginning with the best-selling The Year of the French (1979), which dealt with the 1798 uprising, followed by The Tenants of Time (1988), which covered the period from the 1860s to the early years of the 20th century.

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