Pig in the middle
With nice ecumenical parity, Peter Somerville-Large derides equally both Ireland’s principal Christian churches as they compete for the soul, or at least the membership, of young Paul Blake-Willoughby. His discordant Ascendancy parents, a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, are on what the late Brian Inglis, an esteemed Spectator editor, called ‘a descendancy course’. Somerville-Large, who was born in Dublin and educated partly at St Columba’s, — a boarding school modelled on English public schools — is a historical social observer of merciless accuracy and caustic wit, moderated with just a touch of nostalgia. He has written a wonderfully entertaining novel about the decay of a traditional Irish big house