“Awkward” is a word often applied to the history of Northern Ireland, and never more fittingly than to its Second World War experience. Directly involved in the conflict, the territory hosted hundreds of thousands of US Army troops, underwent devastating civilian bombing, and churned out military materiel and men for the war effort. Yet due to its sizeable and politically suspect Catholic minority, it avoided conscription; these same political and religious tensions would later bleed into the modern Troubles, staining wartime memory and largely serving to exclude Northern Ireland from the British narrative of the “People's War.”

In Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War, Guy Woodward approaches the sensitive matter of culture in Northern Ireland between 1939 and 1945 by organizing his study into four sections: autobiographical fiction, poetry, visual art, and political writing. Unsurprisingly, though, and inexorably, politics seep into each section. Both Irelands were young states at the outbreak of war, and scars were fresh. Intercommunal bitterness is illustrated from the off, with Woodward quoting Brian Moore's novel The Emperor of Ice Cream and its account of Catholic youths perched on a rooftop watching Luftwaffe bombs rain down on Belfast:

“Uncomfortable reading,” claims Woodward, but telling of the dilemmas thrown up by world war (58). Many Catholics and nationalists who, like the boys in Moore's memoir, felt themselves repressed by “Orange fascism” nonetheless participated in the war effort. Unionists, too, were caught between a well-worn yearning for a simultaneously regional identity and a British one. And for Northern Ireland's socialist authors and artists, who were generally anti-partitionist, Britain's alliance with the Soviet Union invalidated Dublin's neutrality.

Left-leaning literary types hoped that a new air of internationalism would blow away Northern Ireland's ancestral divisions. Interestingly, Moore's air-raid exhilaration was echoed by a writer from the other side of the divide—Northern Ireland's most renowned poet of the period, Louis MacNeice—when witnessing the destruction of affluent west London. The Belfast author Robert Greacen, too, hailed the “splendid Guy Fawkes flashes and fun and fervour” (quoted at 59). Some writers from south of the border, like Nazi sympathizer Francis Stuart, welcomed what a group of young British literati conceived of as the New Apocalypse.

However, Ireland's tribalism would prove stubbornly resistant to any new world order. The author is cautious about situating Northern Ireland within the various “isms” sweeping the British cultural scene but neither, on the other hand, does he indulge narratives of “Ulster exceptionalism.” Paradoxically, as Woodward shows, the war actually enhanced Northern Ireland's isolation and its openness. This is most clearly demonstrated in the chapter on visual art with its accompanying imagery.

One of the problems with Woodward's study is that it is unapologetically metropolitan, focusing chiefly on Belfast's cultural scene (or lack thereof). This means that his exploration of culture more broadly is underdeveloped. The fertile cultural territory of Ireland's border region in wartime is largely overlooked, along with the colorful interactions it inevitably produced. Likewise, exchanges between the thirty thousand or so US servicemen stationed in Northern Ireland and their hosts are underplayed. Moreover, better editing would have eliminated pretentious turns of phrase that may get by in a doctoral dissertation but not a published book.

For a history adhering to the political boundaries of Ireland's partition, Woodward's study does at least attempt to introduce an all-Ireland perspective. This is necessary, not least because as the book progresses it is clear that the contemporary cultural pickings of Belfast and its industrial war economy were a lot slimmer than Dublin's. While independent Ireland was by no means a land of milk and honey, Éire's neutrality and its air of escapism lent the Irish capital a cultural swagger absent north of the border. In Dublin there was steak, nylons, no blackout, and pubs populated by wits such as John Betjeman and Flann O'Brien. For all that, this study remains, as the author admits, “aligned more with British than Irish cultural history” (14). This shows. While the at times bizarre logic of Irish anti-partitionists is given short thrift, too much oxygen is given to the diatribes of bigots like St. John Ervine, a polemical playwright who may be handy when in need of a politically incorrect quote about Anglo-Scottish racial superiority to spice up an academic monograph, but also a man capable of blaming the Great Famine on the laziness of Catholics. He should be taken down from the shelf much less frequently.

Woodward also misreads much of the material emanating from Dublin literary magazine the Bell and its editor Seán O'Faoláin, who is taken to task for an editorial criticizing the “hyper-internationalism” (184) of wartime Northern Ireland. Unlike most of his contemporaries south of the border, O'Faoláin at least admitted that Northern Ireland existed as a separate entity to Éire and, at heart, his output was ranged against cultural conservatives. The book's treatment of O'Faoláin exposes Woodward's general lack of thoroughness in interrogating contemporary Irish Catholic and nationalist cultural influences, in particular the pervasive spirit of antimaterialism and how this underpinned the ruralist culture that he picks up on.

An image of submariner James Magennis, Northern Ireland's only recipient of a Victoria Cross in the Second World War, adorns the dust jacket of Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War, and the book is full to the gunwales with maritime metaphors. The cultural history of Northern Ireland, Woodward claims, “has often existed in a submerged or sunken state” (3). While rightly corrective of some of the older historiography, Woodward ignores how the historiography of Ireland during the Second World War has been enriched in recent years by many histories that he omits. Among several, a particularly glaring absentee is Philip Ollerenshaw's Northern Ireland in the Second World War (2013). If included, these would have anchored some of Woodaward's sniffier cultural pronouncements in the thick mud of solid political and economic history.