Sam Baneham's highly original, satiric Irish novel, The Cloud of Desolation (1982) creates through memorable story and singular language a technocratic dystopia. Irrational people, as Baneham clearly shows, may yet bring about the Biblical 'day ... of wrath, a day of desolation,... a day of clouds and thick darkness'. Although written almost three decades ago, its fear of all-out nuclear war remains all too pertinent to the twenty-first century. Baneham's parable of a possible City of the Future warns against unleashing the Bomb's Cloud of Destruction that inevitably must become a Cloud of Desolation.
In a small town in 1950s Ireland a fifteen-year-old boy has illicit meetings with a thirty-five-year-old woman - in the back of her car on sunny mornings, and in a rundown cottage in the country on rain-soaked afternoons. Unsure why she has chosen him, he becomes obsessed and tormented by this first love.
Adultery is always put in terms of thieving. Oliver Orme is a painter who has abandoned his art. His days are now haunted by loss: loss of desire; of artistic vision; of the people he has loved. And only now does he realize that those around him understand him more than he does himself.
Opens with a shipwreck, leaving a party of sightseers temporarily marooned on an island. The stranded castaways make their way towards the refuge of the isle's reclusive savant; but the big isolated house which is home to Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his laconic assistant, Licht, is also home to another, unnamed presence.