Book Review: “Island Cross-Talk”

Island Cross-Talk: Pages from a Blasket Island Diary. By Tomás O’Crohan. Translated by Tim Enright. Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 208 pp. $19.99 (paper).

“The sun was high when I wandered out. The way the day had cleared would make you reflect that it was not the end of the world yet, maybe. New grass was sprouting like a living creature, as if invited by the radiance of the sun to rise out of its sleep. The grim aspect had vanished from the mountains and hills by this time and they wore a look of gaiety and joy, for the sunshine that had come now had the power to bring swift change. The sky has not cleared like this since All Hallowtide.” Island Cross-Talk: Pages from a Blasket Island Diary, p.72.

The Great Blasket is a small island three miles off the coast of west Kerry. Before the island was abandoned in 1953 it was the most westerly inhabited settlement in Europe.

The island was and still is, a beautiful, windswept, and weather-beaten place, where for generations out of mind a tiny Irish-speaking community survived by subsistence fishing and farming. It is also the birthplace of a surprising literary movement, the Great Blasket Writers, of which Tomás O’Crohan and his slim volume Island Cross-Talk was the beginning. O’Crohan was a farmer, fisherman, and stonemason who gained a reputation on the mainland as a master of the Gallic language and a storyteller of the old breed.

Island Cross-Talk is, on the surface, an unassuming little volume of about two hundred pages, composed of diary entries, stretching from April of 1919 to New Year’s Day 1923.

In these pages, O’Crohan describes the life of the islanders as they fish the wild ocean in three-man open “curraches” chasing shoals of fish. As they cut turf, plant crops, and wrangling stubborn donkeys. As they collect seaweed, limpets, and hunt seals. Weathering ranging storms that beat down on their isolated home. He documents the jokes, disputes, and friendships of the islanders in lively language. O’Crohan introduces a small cast of regular names: Tadhg the Joker and his wife Nell, the perpetually bickering Séamas and his uncle Séamaisín, and “The King” among many others.

O’Crohan kept this diary at a pivotal time in Ireland’s history. A time that saw the aftereffects of the First World War, the Irish War for Independence, and the Irish Civil War.

Meanwhile, several years of successive bad weather and potato blight saw the failure of crops time and again. The scarcity of fish and the unpredictability of trade and supply lines during the wars all resulted in great economic and social hardship. O’Crohan’s diary captures not just the struggle for survival in his small village, but the struggle for independence and unrest in Ireland. Amidst this suffering and helplessness, O’Crohan takes comfort in his community, their traditions, songs, and the immense beauty of their home. Reflecting often that their survival is in God’s hands.

O’Crohan was a natural storyteller, steeped in the oral tradition of his people. His diary is a direct translation of that ancient tradition into the written word. It captures the liveliness, the lilt, and the peculiar cadence of the spoken word. To read it aloud is, in a clumsy way, to hear the very voice of the author and islanders. Many of his entries are simply recorded conversations in back-and-forth dialogue, but they brim with personality and a depth of communal history. This talent for capturing a moment is perhaps strongest in the descriptions of the island and wildlife, which are equal parts stirringly beautiful and haunted by the knowledge that it cannot last. Indeed, a common theme throughout the book is the Islanders fear that their survival is on the line, along with the fate of their nation as war rages and trade vanishes. Although O’Crohan could not know that his home would be abandoned in only thirty years, he reflects that the end is coming for their existence on the Great Blasket and for their traditional way of life. He reflects in “The Islandman” his autobiography: “I have written minutely of much that we did, for it was my wish that somewhere there should be a memorial of it all… for the likes of us will never be again” (p. 244).

Island Cross-Talk is a peculiar book. Its form and subject matter make it extremely specific to the lives and concerns of a remote community in a particular context. Yet its themes, reflected through clean and expressive prose, opens a window into a life lived close to the earth and the elements. Acquainted with hardship yet sprinkled with beauty. To read this work is to momentarily step into that life, and be reminded that, though we may be separated from it by a century of change and great distances, human life is still comprised of the same essential element. While the world may spin on with disasters and conflicts, O’Crohan reminds us that our lives are fleeting, precious, and filled with both pain and beauty.


Aubrey Lidden

Mr. Lidden is a writer and storyteller from the Southern Highlands of NSW Australia. He is a keen student of Medieval writers, the European Folk Tradition, and Christian creatives of all kinds.


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