The wildfowler, a tale of the Shannon estuary [first edition]

On a good day the salt marshes of the Shannon Estuary would be black with birds - geese, snipe, teal, widgeon, woodcock, plover... Armed with a puntgun, a cumbersome but deadly muzzle-loader with a barrel nine feet long, you could lift a hundred birds on one outing - a veritable hunter's paradise. Pad Moran, the wildfowler of the title, ranged these marshes with his dog, his guns and his young son - a free spirit on the edge of society. The author now recalls their expeditions together with a beguiling blend of lyricism and humor that belies the barbarity of their weaponry. But "The Wildfowler" is more than a portrait of a hunter; almost imperceptibly it draws the reader into a world of apparently casual savagery, where the political upheavals of the young Irish State are expressed in electric violence, where a repressive religion reigns alongside ancient superstition, and a man's life is worth less than the animals he tends. The result is a heady mixture of mayhem and murder, sadism and ignorance, buffoonery and backbiting, which, while it appears naturalistic, at the same time taps the dark forces of the primitive subconscious. The energy and power of his narrative place Moran firmly in the tradition of the seanchaithe, the storytellers who were the custodians of Ireland's ancestral lore.