Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street

In the second volume of Eimar O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy (the first, King Goshawk and the Birds, was reissued by Dalkey Archive in 2017), we meet the “man on the street,” Aloysius O’Kennedy, an erstwhile grocer’s assistant who has been transported against his will to the city of Bulnid on the planet Rathé—a kind of egalitarian paradise of which O’Kennedy wants no part. His Gulliver-like adventures among these otherworldly idealists (all recounted in great detail to his former employer the grocer, in an effort to explain his long absence from work) are the subject of this sui generis novel, which demonstrates again that Eimar O’Duffy is an Irish writer like no other.