The Digital Divide

Abstract

In Élís Ní Dhuibhne’s Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (2007), protagonist Anna Kelly looks up at the architecture of the famous Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba in Andalusia and reflects upon the nature of ‘great civilisations’. As she walks through the ‘forest’ of pillars, Anna thinks about the Mosque’s builders, oblivious to the eventual fate of their civilisation constructed out of faith and a ‘sense of their own invulnerability, their permanence’ (p.119). In spite of the lesson which surrounds her, Anna’s own civilisation, or more properly the products and the privileges associated with it, seems immune to any equivalent threat. Anna’s civilisation, twenty-first-century Ireland, manifest in affluent, middle-class Dublin suburbia, encloses her in what Susan Cahill calls the ‘bubble of the Celtic Tiger’ (2011, p.162). As Cahill so convincingly argues, it is precisely because Anna inhabits ‘a perpetual present’ (p.162), blind to the influence of past or future, that her life comes to symbolise the period’s short-sightedness. Lauded as a standard-bearer for the ‘Celtic Tiger novel’, Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow engages with the epic themes of morality and betrayal, refined through specifically Irish concerns, such as the endemic flouting of road safety laws and the contradistinction between the quality of life in urban and rural settings. It is a novel shaped around frustration, dissatisfaction, awkwardness and disconnection, but most of all, around the nature of self-awareness and self-centredness.

It was unimaginable, unconscionable, that the civilization to which Anna and Alex belonged could disappear. What could replace it? How could they imagine anything other than what there was now, planes and city breaks, computers, four-wheel drives, new books every week, concerts and operas and a constant stream of easy entertainment.

(Ní Dhuibhne, 2007, p.119)