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Patrick McGinley’s Alternating Current: Allusive Electricity in The Lost Soldier’s Song

When Patrick McGinley published The Lost Soldier’s Song in 1994, it was immediately recognized as a fresh departure for him. Beginning with Bogmail in 1978,McGinley developed a reputation as the author of idiosyncratically bizarre Irish novels that operated on the periphery of the mystery and thriller traditions. Throughout the 1980s, with such novels as Goosefoot (1982), Foggage (1983),The Trick of the Ga Bolga (1985), and The Devil’s Diary (1988), McGinley was frequently lauded by critics for his haunting Irish landscapes, piquantly witty dialogue, and resonant psychological aberrations.1 In The Lost Soldier’s Song, however, McGinley foregoes the murder mystery genre; instead, he presents an historical novel set during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919 to 1921. But the pith of McGinley’s narrative innovation does not center on merely an historical novel framework. Rather, the author sets his novel resonating through matrices of textual allusions, which generate a variety of potent valences with his literary predecessors. In one of the more memorable passages in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-TwoBirds, the anonymous first-person narrator and his friend Brinsley engage in a spirited debate concerning “the subject of Literature—great authors living and dead, the character of modern poetry, the predilections of publishers, and the importance of being at all times occupied with literary activities.” O’Brien continues,