Travelling With Desmond Hogan: Writing Beyond Ireland

Abstract

The uneven and at times tentative development of Desmond Hogan’s fiction, based in Ireland for over some twenty years, was transformed in 1995 by his novel ‘A Farewell to Prague’ when Hogan discovered that while he could still assemble fragments from Irish life and history, now he had at his command a new means of incorporating insights from his restless travelling in many countries and a way of moulding diverse experiences into personal encounters with inner landscapes, the imagined worlds of others and visions in art. The most exhilarating effect of such travel writing is the perspective where one’s own indigenous culture may appear insignificant by itself, yet when viewed in certain ways may become a linking and a bonding with the peoples of other cultures. Hogan’s ‘miracle’ occurs when the human tragedies of history do not divide but actually help to unite individuals from whatever culture when they are moved to join in the crosscurrents of mutual understanding and guarded hope.