“Contradiction is everywhere,” Sean O'Faolain observed in the Bell, arguably the most influential Irish magazine during the years of the Second World War. As the rest of Europe was thrown forcibly together, Ireland was increasingly inward looking, with a self-imposed literary censorship stifling debate. “The Revival of Gaelic and the Revival of Industry are not happy bed-mates,” O'Faolian continued, “A natural urge to keep out the alien supported the Censorship. World Radio replies night after night. On the other hand, a world-war has assaulted our isolation, and we have replied by armed neutrality” (“1916–1941: Tradition and Creation,” [April 1941]: 5–12, at 6–7). As Clair Wills's masterful cultural history of Ireland during World War II, That Neutral Island (2007), showed us, Ireland during what was euphemistically called the “Emergency” was a strange place. More recently, Guy Woodward's Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War (2015) has focused on the cultural consequences of Northern Ireland being at war while the southern part of the island remained neutral. Damien Keane's Ireland and the Problem of Information is thus part of a larger challenge to what he calls “the received and complementary narratives of Irish inwardness and Irish exceptionalism that for decades have formed the governing perceptions of Ireland during the war years” (5). The reasons for this interest are clear enough: on one hand, even the most cursory account of literary modernism in the 1930s and 1940s will feature prominently Joyce, Beckett, and the late works of Yeats; on the other hand, these writers came from a country whose deeply entrenched cultural conservativism had been codified in the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, which made access to many of the key works of literary modernism difficult (not to mention illegal). Reconciling the contradiction of insularity and the cosmopolitan spaces of literary modernism thus presents itself as a challenge.

Keane's Ireland and the Problem of Information tackles this conundrum by focusing on the ways in which radio (and, to a lesser extent, other recording technologies) had created a new kind of informational field by the late 1930s, a global web of voices, a kind of counter-orality to the much-vaunted orality of the fading Irish folkloric tradition. Keane's approach is necessarily oblique. One of the methodological challenges here is the elusiveness of radio before postwar developments in magnetic tape made the recording of transmissions a viable prospect. Keane allows an awareness of the paradoxical ubiquity (the ether was full of voices during the war) and absence (few of them have survived) of radio broadcasts to shape his overall approach, allowing figures such as Walter Starkie, Shaemus O'Sheel, and even Francis Stuart (about whom little has been written recently) equal airtime with more prominent voices, such as Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett.

This oblique approach is more successful in some chapters than in others. For example, as a way into a fascinating account of Walter Starkie (a far-from-insular Irish intellectual of the period), Keane provides the reader with rather more information than the argument really requires on the role of radio in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 as a contextual frame. Perhaps Keane's book went to press before Jacqueline Hurtley's fascinating and detailed study, Walter Starkey: An Odyssey (2013), appeared (it is not mentioned in the bibliography); whatever the case, in this chapter there is probably a bit too much Ethiopia and not enough Starkie. Likewise, in what could have been a much more detailed engagement with Louis MacNeice's extensive broadcasting work for the BBC, Keane's preliminary account of Louis Aragon's “Zone Libre” (which, we eventually learn, MacNeice translated) is probably too labored for what is a relatively short book (153 pages, excluding notes). It is also worth noting that there are points, particularly in the book's opening sections, in which Keane's syntax becomes a bit more convoluted than is necessary or helpful, although there are also sections of exemplary clarity.

Indeed, when the book hits its stride (particularly when it is animated by fresh archival finds) the result is invigorating. The chapter on Shaemus O'Sheel, an Irish American poet (primarily known for a popular piece, “They Went Forth to Battle but They Always Fell”) and publisher of Nazi propaganda, will break new ground for most readers. As with Starkie, who was not unsympathetic to Italian fascism (Keane's accounts of his interviews with Mussolini are fascinating), these sections of the book have value not simply for the ways in which they extend our understanding of cultural production in the period; they also suggest new ways of approaching the vexed and much-debated question of modernism's imbrication in fascism, with implications for our reading of far more prominent figures, such as Yeats and Pound. The dark thread of fascism developed in these earlier chapters is most fully played out in the final chapter on the Irish novelist Francis Stuart, who chose to spend the Second World War in Berlin making radio broadcasts for the Nazis. Working with transcripts from wartime monitoring stations (a further level of mediation that Keane conceptualizes adroitly), the chapter on Stuart not only allows us to tune into this problematic writer, but it also vividly demonstrates the ways in which radio produced “a fundamental skewing of geopolitical lines” in ways that must compel us to rethink notions of Irish wartime insularity. Ultimately, when the author brings to bear all of the book's concerns with mediation, voice, silence, and modernist reconfigurations of space in a few concluding pages on Beckett's 1946 unaired radio script “The Capital of Ruins,” the reader glimpses the suggestive potential of this vigorously original work.

Finally, for a book that is so acutely conscious of the extent to which the medium is the message, acknowledgement must be given to the fine physical object Pennsylvania University Press has produced in Ireland and the Problem of Information, with its two-column layout, illustrated inner flyleaf, and lovingly designed dust jacket: an impressive package for an impressive book.