Clair Wills's primary objective in this latest treatment of neutral Ireland during the Second World War (better known as the “Emergency”) is to delve below the political and diplomatic radar and record the social and cultural experience of Irish neutrality, as reflected both in the lives of “ordinary people” and the work of reflective or creative writers. She sets out to capture the “strange, ghostly existence of Ireland both in and outside the war” (11), simultaneously surrounded by and detached from global conflict, mainly through probing the dynamics of wartime Irish writing but also by recording the opinions and experiences of those, such as emigrants and the Anglo-Irish, for instance, who she feels have received too little attention in the historiography. Following an opening chapter that paints a broad-brush picture of the postindependence southern Irish state on the eve of war, her first war chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book: the Irish government's adoption of a policy of neutrality and survival and the immediate socioeconomic impact of the outbreak of war are deftly summarized before the picture is deepened and enriched by an engagement with the contemporary, conflicted responses of creative writers, such as the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, working-class maverick republican Brendan Behan, and urbane, middle-class man of letters Sean O Faolain. We are also introduced to Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice, whose wartime poem “Neutrality” inspired the book's title (“The neutral island facing the Atlantic, / The neutral island in the heart of man” [127]). The poem reflected a particular strain of bitterness at neutrality, the denial to the British of the use of Irish ports, which developed following the fall of France and the onset of the “war at sea” in the Atlantic, which resulted in over 200 bodies being recovered, mainly by fishermen, from Irish coastal waters in the second half of 1940—the mackerel, wrote MacNeice, “Are fat—on the flesh of your kin” (128). Wills gives extended treatment to the issue of washed-up bodies on Ireland's periphery, embracing, like MacNeice, its metaphorical power but eschewing the poet's political judgmentalism.

Ireland was not a “neutral island,” of course, given the belligerence of the North, and partition was an integral part of the neutrality jigsaw, in terms of justifying it and as a factor in its survival, due to the Allies having a crucial foothold on the island. At a practical level, as Wills demonstrates, the porous border facilitated smugglers and shoppers, to which the southern authorities largely turned a blind eye, concentrating on the monitoring and surveillance of spies, who were far fewer in number than British propaganda suggested. British intelligence was aided by reports from one of the prominently featured authors in this book, Bowen, as well as by Irish army intelligence, which maintained close cooperation with its British (and later, American) counterparts throughout the war, exemplifying the extent to which Irish policy was secretly pro-Allied while maintaining a public illusion, underpinned by a fierce political censorship, of strict impartiality. Another writer who played a direct political role was John Betjeman who, as a British “press attaché,” ingratiated himself in Dublin cultural life and worked to subtly shift Irish opinion in a pro-Allied direction. Dublin-born playwright Denis Johnson worked for the Ministry of Information with a similar purpose and, along with MacNeice, broadcast propaganda on the BBC. Francis Stuart, however, worked for the Nazi's Irish propaganda station, Irland-Redaktion.

As the war progressed, Irish neutrality became increasingly irrelevant at a practical level, with the opening of the eastern front and the entry of the United States. For the bulk of the population, as Wills puts it, “the Emergency had settled into the fixed realities of restrictive legislation, censorship, shortages, and rationing. For the worst hit it meant poverty, unemployment and emigration” (222–23). We learn how writers played a practical role with details of novelist Maura Laverty's contribution to “food and household propaganda” (242) with her pamphlet “Flour Economy” and how the flour shortage was responsible for “what may be Patrick Kavanagh's very worst poem” (244): “White bread, you give us hope; you break / The grey monotony of the story” (quoted on 244). One of his very best, “The Great Hunger,” was published in 1942 and demonstrated, among other things, “the desolation of the Irish countryside in the war years” (253). Poverty and malnutrition were particularly evident in urban Ireland, as exemplified by the scourge of tuberculosis. Her treatment of the class dimension is weak, and she totally fails to acknowledge the high level of class conflict that characterized the early years of the Emergency or the potentially paradigm-shifting growth in left-wing politics that was eventually smothered by the government and the state.

“The Static Generation” chapter examines the cultural battles that raged in the war years, which became centered on the issue of literary censorship, which Irish writers, largely cut off from the Anglo-American market and publishing industry on which they relied, were finally forced to confront. Allied to the zealous moral censorship during the war years was the stringent Emergency politico-security censorship that neutralized newspapers, films, posts, and telegraphs and deepened the sense of cultural isolation felt by many. However, as Wills shows, the influx of a number of artistic “refugees” added a certain vibrancy to cultural life, especially in the capital, while wartime conditions gave birth to the legendary Bell magazine, founded by Peadar O’Donnell and edited by Sean O Faolain, which exemplified the documentary turn taken by many writers in these years. O’Donnell was also an advisor to the government on migratory labor, and Wills devotes the bulk of a chapter to “the vanished generation” who flooded across the Irish sea, including thousands from the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht areas on the western seaboard. Connemara-born writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain was one of the thousands of the Irish Republican Army “vanished,” who languished in the government's wartime internment camps. His novel, Cré na Cille, written in 1944–45, is set in a Connemara village graveyard and peopled entirely by the talking dead, symbolizing the dire state of the Gaeltacht and the Irish language and, Wills argues, partly reflecting his internment camp experience and the neutral state more broadly (echoing her earlier statement about the “strange, ghostly” nature of wartime Ireland).

The penultimate chapter examines the moral superiority that became associated with Irish neutrality and locates it partly in Catholic social teaching. This section would have gained much from a reading of Don O’Leary's Vocationalism and Social Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2003), which she appears to have missed completely in her near-exhaustive bibliography. The chapter finishes with a discussion of Francis Stuart's wartime propaganda and concludes that he, like many others, freighted the pragmatic policy of neutrality “with more significance than it could bear” (382). The backlash against the policy by the Allies, enlivened by de Valera's stupid correctitude in offering condolences to the German minister on Hitler's death, begins the concluding chapter, which goes on to deal with the immediate aftermath and the retrospective challenges to the “moral” underpinning of neutrality posed by the lifting of censorship and the revelations from the death camps. Press reaction is perused, and Denis Johnson's wartime diaries and postwar fiction are used to explore the “conundrum of neutrality” (407) and how it had become “ingrained as a central element in the Irish world-view” (408), as are the views of writers and critics such as Ben Kiely, Thomas MacGreevy, and, more obscurely, Samuel Beckett.

Clair Wills has skillfully synthesized a wealth of political, military, diplomatic, and socioeconomic historical research on Emergency Ireland; has added some useful “history from below” of her own; and has capped this off with a well-integrated cultural/literary history that builds on the pioneering work of Terence Brown. All in all, an indispensable addition to the literature.