Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Carson, Ciaran - Gregory Dart (review date 20 April 2001)

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Gregory Dart (review date 20 April 2001)

SOURCE: Dart, Gregory. “A Drop of the Soft Stuff.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5116 (20 April 2001): 29.

[In the following review, Dart argues that the catholicity of Carson's Shamrock Tea is both the novel's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.]

Jan van Eyck's “Arnolfini Marriage” is perhaps the most famous of all genre paintings, a man and his wife looking out at the viewer from a painstakingly detailed fifteenth-century interior. What is so fascinating about this picture? Why do we find ourselves returning to it again and again? To the protagonists of Ciaran Carson's new novel, Shamrock Tea, it offers a world of “hallucinatory clarity”, in which everyday objects and their qualities are shot through with religious significance. It is a world so perfectly realized that one is repeatedly tempted to step inside. “Jan van Eyck was here” it says, in Latin, on...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Clair Wills (review date 4 March 1988)
   2. John Drexel (essay date winter 1989)
   3. Mark Ford (review date 19 January 1989)
   4. John Lucas (review date 3 August 1990)
   5. Neil Corcoran (essay date 2 November 1990)
   6. Ben Howard (essay date April 1992)
   7. Michael Glover (review date 12 February 1994)
   8. Clair Wills (essay date 25 March 1994)
   9. Calvin Bedient (essay date October 1994)
   10. Guinn Batten (essay date summer 1995)
   11. Patricia Craig (review date 31 May 1996)
   12. Lawrence Norfolk (essay date 27 September 1996)
   13. Richard Eder (essay date 12 March 1997)
   14. Charles M. Madigan (review date 16 March 1997)
   15. David Nicholson (review date 22 July 1997)
   16. Denis Donoghue (essay date 27 November 1997)
   17. Terry Eagleton (review date 12 December 1997)
   18. Henry Hitchings (review date 12 December 1997)
   19. Christian Wiman (review date February 1998)
   20. Ben Howard (essay date spring 1998)
   21. John Kerrigan (essay date April 1998)
   22. Emily D'Aulaire (essay date October 1998)
   23. William Pratt (review date autumn 1999)
   24. Robert MacFarlane (review date 19 November 1999)
   25. David Carr-Gomm (review date 31 March 2001)
   26. Gregory Dart (review date 20 April 2001)
   27. Bernadette Murphy (review date 18 October 2001)
   28. Michelle Reale (review date fall 2002)
   29. Sean O'Brien (review date 10 January 2003)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright