Ballybucklebo: Blog 7!

Ballybucklebo: Pastoralism and Irish Turmoil in Patrick Taylor’s Novel, An Irish Country Doctor

Erin Davis

The fictional town of Ballybucklebo is, as imagined by author Patrick Taylor in his novel An Irish Country Doctor, nestled in the rolling hills of Ireland’s County Down and embodies 20^th century pastoralism at its finest. I have always been attached to the pastoral, from reading Beatrix Potter as a child to Patrick Taylor’s series of eleven novels. When beginning this series, I had imagined the “pastoral” in its raw state, a Merriam-Webster defined word that is “expressive of the life of…country people especially in an idealized and conventionalized manner”. However, I had never previously considered that the pastoral tradition is a reactionary motif rather than purely imaginative. Taylor’s An Irish Country Doctor, similarly, notes that Ireland, especially in the early to mid-1900s, experienced significant religious and political turmoil. Therefore, the ‘utopia’ of Ballybucklebo springs from political strife. This particular Irish village, though, refrains from any tension or violence—a true pastoral ideal.  There is an intrinsic value in this setting and its meaning in the larger, social context, one with a surprising amount of underlying progression.

The latter idea is one in which I will be exploring for this paper—both the pastoral ideal and its significance in British and Irish history. Pastoralism is a flattering concept in itself, and appears in countless essays and poetry, especially throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries. However, it has a variety of different connotations, from literary to escapist, even to quixotic. However, its overarching concept still holds strong today, despite the disappearance of small villages and homogenization of peoples through cities and dominant culture. Many of the critics that I have chosen for this paper have been far more interested in the literary and social presence of pastoralism and in the incorrect usage of “ideal” when describing a pastoral setting. This all stems from Patrick Taylor’s novel An Irish Country Doctor, which the author claims is based off of his childhood experiences. He lived through some of the worst of Ireland’s turmoil and, growing up in Northern Ireland, he saw the hellish brutality of Irish against Irish. However, he still stays strong in his pastoral beliefs.

Therefore, in this essay, I will be exploring Patrick Taylor’s novel, An Irish Country Doctor, through the context of Irish pastoralism, utilizing a lens of political and religious upheaval in the early to mid-20th century. Though pastoralism has been a widely critiqued concept, I will be analyzing its significance to reality and its place within the realm of the pastoral ideal. Closer attention to actual historical context will not only help define pastoralism as a whole, but will show the disunion between Irish factions (loyalists and nationalists) and its significance to the changing view of simplicity and rurality, suggesting that Taylor’s novel is not merely an escapist concept, but rather the result of unimaginable suffering. Through his focus on romantic, simple settings, modern progression is slowed to reveal human nature and Taylor’s reaction to Irish violence is exposed.

I have chosen a multitude of different sources to bolster my thesis.  Paul Alpers in his study “What is Pastoral?” describes the wide range of views on pastoralism. He explains that the only thing, really, that critics can agree on is that there is not one answer to this broad question. Really, it is just a phenomenon that has been picked and critiqued to its core, centering on its timeless literary tradition (Alpers 8). However, for this essay, I am not utilizing any pastoral literature in its poetic form. Rather, Alpers helps me understand why such books as An Irish Country Doctor are popular. Alpers quotes Rapin within his text in attempt to answer this very question. Rapin states that those who wrote in the pastoral were aiming for “simplicity and innocence” that was once found in “The Golden Age, if there was every any such” (Alpers 17). On the other hand, R.E. Best discusses the idea of  the pastoral through what is known as “pastoral care”. Though not working in a classroom setting (which is what this study focused around), Dr. O’Reilly, Taylor’s main character, can be seen as practicing “pastoral care”, since he goes out of his way to invest himself in the lives of his patients, rather than seeing them as mere cases on the examining table. The way he conducts his daily routine goes beyond advice or guidance but, as Best et al. describe, he executes pastoral care like “teachers [who] are concerned with the personal welfare of an individual child” (Best 125). This is a symbiotic relationship between child and teacher, the latter of whom feels “personal responsibility for a specified group of pupils” (Best 126). Therefore, pastoralism does not have to be a physicality, nor does it have to be an ideal.

//

Patrick Taylor’s fictional town of Ballybucklebo has never been formally critiqued, nor had it been of any professional debate. Its copies sell in the millions, and its world is digested by readers in all nations. In effect, the pastoral is brought to the front doorstep of every modern household, ever changing and never ceasing to digress from the ideals, visions and practices of the pastoral ideal. No one has stopped, though, to question the reality of such a township. Yes, Ballybucklebo is fictional in itself, but what exactly is this “pastoral” trying to teach the masses, what is its value? Ironically, Taylor’s character O’Reilly jokingly states, “how long [will it] be before some clever American anthropologist comes over here and writes a learned paper on the ‘Tribal Customs of the Primitive Ulster Races’?” (Taylor 187). Of course, lots of different studies have been conducted on the races of the Irish, both in Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. However, there has been little to no explanation of the pastoral lifestyle in accordance with Ireland, in its times of religious and political turmoil. Maybe such towns did exist, though there were no bubbles surrounding these villages, sealing off all negative emotions and rivalry. Yet, fiction is able to break boundaries, and Taylor’s novel does so in protest of Ireland’s never ending conflicts. An Irish Country Doctor is not fantasy, it is truly a political statement.