The Waking Of Willie Ryan
Willie Ryan returns to his home town having escaped from the asylum where he was committed by his devout Catholic family for twenty-five years. The given pretext for his commitment was an attack on his sister-in-law, Mary Ryan. The true reason: an affair with a hedonistic young man who introduced him to art, literature and music. Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid‑century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him. Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s. A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.
Willie Ryan returns to his home town having escaped from the asylum where he was committed by his devout Catholic family for twenty-five years. The given pretext for his commitment was an attack on his sister-in-law, Mary Ryan. The true reason: an affair with a hedonistic young man who introduced him to art, literature and music. Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid‑century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him. Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s. A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.
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$7.51Description
Willie Ryan returns to his home town having escaped from the asylum where he was committed by his devout Catholic family for twenty-five years. The given pretext for his commitment was an attack on his sister-in-law, Mary Ryan. The true reason: an affair with a hedonistic young man who introduced him to art, literature and music. Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid‑century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him. Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s. A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.