Deciding that he was still not ready to return to Ireland, he shipped out to the Mediterranean and then to Canada, where he worked as a laborer and was introduced to the Industrial Workers of the World. After this he went to Boston, where his brother was active in socialist movements, and his interest in communism increased. O'Flaherty then returned to Dublin, and in January 1922 he and a group of unemployed men captured and held the Rotunda, a public building, for a few days, flying the red flag from the top of the building and proclaiming an Irish socialist revolution. After this escapade, he fled to Cork and eventually to London. There he began writing and met Edward Garnett, who for the next ten years had a salutary effect upon him, encouraging his work and helping him get his books published.
O'Flaherty's first two novels, both written in England, are set in the Aran Islands. The first, Thy Neighbour's Wife (1923), has as its protagonist Father Hugh McMahon, an intellectual, a poet, and an outsider in the Islands. This character of the loner, the outcast, reappears in various manifestations throughout O'Flaherty's fiction.
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