The Captain with the Whiskers
Benedict Kiely
Afterword by Thomas Kilroy
"What a pleasure it is to see the Captain with the Whiskers once again arriving on our bookshelves, just as fine and invigorating as it always was. If one of the functions of literature is to speak freshly across the decades, then Ben Kiely and this
"When the old captain died the family went strange and it wasn't with grief, and if you want to know why, you should talk to somebody who knew the old captain. He had soldiered against the Boers and one look at him and your heart went out with quivering compassion to Kruger, De Wett and all those pliant, easy-going, gentle, civil, amenable, soft-spoken half-Hollanders. You couldn't think of anything they or their forebears had done to draw down upon them the punishment of being matched against the captain."
In Bingen House, guarded by shale-white Ulster mountains, and on the edge of the Atlantic, lived Captain Conway Chesney: a small, neat, efficient and diabolical domestic tyrant.
Owen Rodgers, son of the local doctor, a kind father and a man of music, came one day to look at the sheepdog trials on the wide green before Bingen House. There in the early morning he peered down from a stable loft into the farmyard and discovered the evil secret of Bingen. Thereafter the house and its owner possessed him like a perverted love, and his story became the story of the Conway Chesneys.
An extraordinary study of a psychopath "so diabolical that he would hurt himself to hurt others", and of the terrible consequences of his life and death, The Captain with the Whiskers is one of the most compelling novels Benedict Kiely has ever written. This new edition includes an Afterword by the novelist and playwright Thomas Kilroy. "The first meaning of 'the state of Ireland' is that it's a place where stories are still told, deliciously and by masters of the art, of whom Benedict Kiely is perhaps the foremost." New York Times
"Ireland's leading man of letters." Irish Times
"The Captain with the Whiskers is an extraordinarily good novel. Kiely can write most English writers into the ground." Observer
"His book is that rare thing today, a deliberately hewed and chiselled piece of writing." Listener
"This haunting and remarkable novel." Times Literary Supplement
"Kiely is a unique voice...his technique is so good as to be invisible." Sunday Times
"Uniquely bewitching writing." John Updike
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About Benedict Kiely Benedict Kiely is internationally renowned as one of Ireland's finest writers. Born in 1919 in Dromore, County Tyrone, he was raised in Omagh where he attended the Christian Brothers school. He intended originally to become a Jesuit priest, but changed his mind and took the writer's path instead.
Counties of Contention, about the partition of Northern Ireland, appeared in 1945 and was followed by his first novel, Land Without Stars. Other novels include The Cards of the Gambler (1953), Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968), Proxopera (1977) and Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985). His Collected Short Stories appeared in 2001; earlier collections include A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963), A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (1973), A Cow in the House (1978), The State of Ireland: A Novella and Seven Short Stories (1980) and A Letter to Peachtree (1987). He has also published a children's story, several works of criticism on Irish literature and politics, and two memoirs, Drink to the Bird: An Omagh Boyhood (1992), and The Waves Behind Us (1999).
Benedict Kiely has received the Award for Literature from the Irish Academy of Letters and was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1996. He lives in Dublin.
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