Mr. Shane Leslie's novel has a two-fold interest—the interest of
fact and the interest of fiction, incompatibles that mingle more easily in the Celtic twilight than elsewhere.. To appre- ciate fully the historical aspect of Doomsland, one must be familiar with the Irish nationalist movement of the past twenty years, and especially familiar with its personalities and its literary excavations. Possessed of. such familiarity the reader will be able to give names to a score or more deftly-drawn figures and enter with zest into the arena where contending scholars dispute over the half-animated body of the Gaelic language.. Altogether, Doomsland is an admir- able account of the Ireland of yesterday. Its defects as a book, the over-coloured, sometimes inexact writing, the tendency to sprawl and to indulge richness of detail at the expense of clearness of outline—these faults, while they make it at times hard to read, also make it seem, to an English- man, irrefutably Irish.
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