All Names Have Been Changed

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Nobody wrote about September like Glynn. It was his month. You could say it was his season. September intensified the lush sadness pervading his work, made it complete, corporeal, laden; the late summer drawing to a close, the sun forsaking our remote shores, the long hard winter setting in (he compared it once to an animal settling down to die). A spirit of contented melancholy swept through his eight startling novels, swelling their pages like sea air. You could almost taste it. I could almost taste it.

Abandonment; that was Glynn’s great subject. Abandonment and longing. He wrote about anguish with a lucidity that was exhilarating. The autumn equinox in particular, the sun crossing the celestial equator, referred to in three of his novels, (Prussian Blue, p. 140, Gorsefire, p. 98, Farm Animals, p. 20), mirrored the condition of his narrators — each one of them was the Hanging Man, suspended on the cusp between love and hate, fear and hope, remorse and defiance. Oh, his incomparable skies. He sketched them almost offhandedly with a few deft words, evoking them as metal: pewter, silver, iron. Our northerly latitude became him. The cast of Irish light penetrated his every sentence; our fitful island weather infiltrated his every noun. During the decade or so that he spent in the States, academics and critics eagerly speculated as to the nature of his first ‘American novel’, but Glynn’s absence from his native country only compounded his vision of it, and it was whilst there, in Brighton, Connecticut, that he produced his masterpiece, Hibernia, land of winter, home.

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