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It was simple: we are the storytellers. Imagination in Ireland was beyond the beyond. It was out there. It was Far Out before far out was invented in California, because sitting around in a few centuries of rain breeds these outlands of imagination. As evidence, think of Abraham Stoker, confined to bed until he was eight years old, lying there breathing damp Dublin air with no TV or radio but the heaving wheeze of his chest acting as pretty constant reminder that soon he was heading Elsewhere. Even after he was married to Florence Balcombe of Marino Crescent (she who had an unrivalled talent for choosing the wrong man, who had already given up Oscar Wilde as a lost cause in the Love Department when she met this Bram Stoker and thought: he seems sweet), even after Bram moved to London he couldn’t escape his big dark imaginings in Dublin and one day further down the river he spawned Dracula (Book 123, Norton, New York). Jonathan Swift was only settling into a Chesterfield couch in Dublin when his brain began sailing to Lilliput and Blefuscu (Book 778, Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, Penguin, London). Another couple of deluges and he went further, he went to Brobdingnag, Laputa, Bainbarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and . . . Japan, before he went furthest of all, to Houyhnhnms. Read Gulliver’s Travels when you’re sick in bed and you’ll be away. I’m telling you. You’ll be transported, and even as you’re being carried along in the current you’ll think no writer ever went this Far. Something like this could only be dreamt up in Ireland. Charles Dickens recognised that.
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