Reconsidering Dermot Bolger's Grotesquery: Class and Sexuality in the Journey Home‪.‬

Abstract Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home (1990) narrates an often hyperbolic and overblown diatribe against a litany of social and political ills, which elicited frequently critical responses to the novel from reviewers. Yet Bolger's seminal work remains both popular and controversial because of its capacity to shock and upbraid the false morality of Irish society--a society that the author considered to be riven by class inequalities and official abuses. Bolger employs sexual abuse as a metonym for political corruption in the novel, and this essay explores The Journey Home's surreal story of youth in a working-class Dublin suburb in light of more recent revelations of Ireland's legacy of sexual abuse and what they convey of the novel's milieu. As such, it seeks to provide a timely reappraisal of Bolger's work, an assessment of its phantasmagorical style and how this spectral reminder of Ireland's scandalous past illustrates still the emotive power of repressed social trauma.