Description
A hilarious book from the Irish master, Flann O’Brien. This magnificent work confirms the author’s reputation as the funniest man who ever lived, and the foremost satirist to come from Ireland since Jonathan Swift. At War was edited by John Wyse Jackson, co-author of John Stanislaus Joyce, from the more than 3,000 columns which appeared daily in the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen.
For the first time, this collection of wartime columns treats the Myles na gCopaleen and his hectoring associates as the fictional characters Flann O’Brien intended them to be. Tracking the shocking disintegration of this bright young writer, philosopher and social commentator, John Wyse Jackson chronicles Myles’ steady decline, as his sparkling wit darkens in an alcoholic tragedy of the mind.
‘John Wyse Jackson died suddenly in February of this year aged 66. He was a bibliophile in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. When being interviewed by the renowned London bookseller, John Sandoe, for a job at the latter’s eponymous bookshop in 1978, Wyse Jackson recalled some years later that he told his interviewer that “I love books, the feel of them, the texture, the smell of them”. He went on to work at Sandoe’s for 25 years, becoming eventually a partner in the business, before returning to Ireland with his wife, Ruth Matthews, and their family in 2003. Although by then a writer himself of some reputation as a literary historian and journalist, Wyse Jackson re-entered the book-selling business, this time as the owner and very hands-on operator of his own shop on Main Street, Gorey, Co Wexford – Zozimus Books’.
Irish Times Obituary, March 2020
