Book description
In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with
The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands,
published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in
1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of
which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas.
Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge
the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, "If
Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then
Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is
Ireland raised to the power of two." Towards the end of the last
century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country's
uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture and
spiritual values. It was for these reasons that Yeats suggested Synge
visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a
passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships
between an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but
solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic loveliness
and savagely unpredictable moods, and Synge himself, formed by modern
European thought but in love with the primitive.
