SOURCE: “Bogged Down,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 23, 1999, p. 30.

In the following review, Maddox offers unfavorable assessment of Crazy John and the Bishop.

This combative book [Crazy John and the Bishop] is aimed at unnamed foes. In the small world of Irish Studies, they presumably know who they are. The innocent reader can only guess.

What the enemies are guilty of is less obscure. Terry Eagleton, Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, dislikes postmodernism and revisionism applied to Irish culture. He wants the philosophy, poetry and prose written on what he calls “the wrong side of St George's Channel” to be read in the social and historical context of Ireland's religion and education, not in terms of signifiers and post-colonial utterance.

He despises the tweezering out of the great names, such as Joyce, Yeats and Beckett, for world literature, as if the lesser lights of Irish writing...