SOURCE: Deane, Seamus. “Introduction to The Diviner, by Brian Friel,” pp. 9-18. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Deane explores the essential and enduring qualities of Friel's short stories.

If a story takes its form from the author's desire, it also gives form to the desire of its reader. The reader of this selection of Brian Friel's stories will find his desire moulded into form by the pressure of that local, intimate detail which emerges out of the author's knowledge of his society's moral code. Each story is social in its setting, moral in its implication. Time and again we have the impression that the small-town or village society, no matter how sharply it may be observed in its conformity to the powers of Church or class, has a moral code that belongs elsewhere. The narrowness of the social life is bitter, but the complexity of...