O'Faoláin is a virtuoso short story writer and teller of tales, an impressive historical biographer (of O'Connell, Newman, and Hugh O'Neill the second Earl of Tyrone among others), an urbane, learned and cosmopolitan travel writer, and a distinguished literary editor, critic and literary journalist who has written such works as The Vanishing Hero (1957) … which show a richness of original insight into the development of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel. Yet in his own creative practice he seems not to have got on with the task of novel writing all that well. (p. 19)

In his introduction to The Heat of the Sun, Stories and Tales (1966), O'Faoláin compares the novel to a giant aircraft carrier whose sole function is to launch a certain number of brilliant flights from the blank expanse of its flat deck. This seems a modern version of Poe's claim that there are no long...