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This book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, 'If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two.' Towards the end of the last century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country's uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture and spiritual values. It was for this reason that Yeates suggested Synge visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships - between and island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic lovliness and savagely unpredictable moods, and Synge himself, formed by modern European thought but in love with the primitive.
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