Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe.
It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous day come to him: a mysterious research institute, a dead forest, a rickety boat captained by a gruff old fisherman, an eccentric academic named McGovern who believed that the Moon was about to crash into the Earth, destroying everything. Confused, weary and sore, and with the tide rising inexorably and strange sea creatures circling, Smyth tries to make sense of an arbitrary world in a desperate bid for survival.
'A dark, courageous novel for those who like their fiction experimental, no chaser. Smyth, too prone to be called a protagonist, is an academic who awakens one day to find himself injured and stranded on a rock in the Irish Sea. What follows is an ineffable fragmentary flow of consciousness and memory unspooled by switches in narrative voice, with lots of literary references (Arendt, Beckett, Rilke, etc), and Camus-flavoured discourses as Smyth clings to his rock, rather than roll one uphill. Smith is a fine writer, imbued with the gothic and metaphysical. This is his second book following The Failing Heart, and he possesses a lapidary style; a ruminative voice that echoes in the mind. He fables with a flourish on life's futility, and our failings.'
NJ McGarrigle in The Irish Times
'[A Provincial Death] is seriously Irish — and Irishly serious: the ridiculousness of Smyth's predicament doesn't stop its being terrifying. For all its formal adventurousness and linguistic playfulness, this is a novel "about" what makes us human, about why we should cling on to the rock instead of loosening our grip. Smyth realizes that "his mind is coextensive with the world," that the firmament above his island and the multitudinous seas around it are unceasingly dying and being born, but that his end, however lonely and unremarked, means something.'
Andrew Deacon in The Irish Literary Supplement
