In the second volume of Eimar O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy, we meet the “man on the street,” Aloysius O’Kennedy, an erstwhile grocer’s assistant who has been transported against his will to the city of Bulnid on the planet Rathé . . .
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In the second volume of Eimar O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy (the first, King Goshawk and the Birds, was reissued by Dalkey Archive in 2017), we meet the “man on the street,” Aloysius O’Kennedy, an erstwhile grocer’s assistant who has been transported against his will to the city of Bulnid on the planet Rathé—a kind of egalitarian paradise of which O’Kennedy wants no part. His Gulliver-like adventures among these otherworldly idealists (all recounted in great detail to his former employer the grocer, in an effort to explain his long absence from work) are the subject of this sui generis novel, which demonstrates again that Eimar O’Duffy is an Irish writer like no other.
Eimar O’Duffy (1893-1935) was born in Dublin. Both a participant in and, beginning with the publication of his first novel in 1919, a critic of the Irish nationalist movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, O’Duffy devoted much of his prolific fiction writing to the satirizing of modern Irish culture.