SOURCE: Dart, Gregory. “A Drop of the Soft Stuff.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5116 (20 April 2001): 29.

In the following review, Dart argues that the catholicity of Carson's Shamrock Tea is both the novel's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

Jan van Eyck's “Arnolfini Marriage” is perhaps the most famous of all genre paintings, a man and his wife looking out at the viewer from a painstakingly detailed fifteenth-century interior. What is so fascinating about this picture? Why do we find ourselves returning to it again and again? To the protagonists of Ciaran Carson's new novel, Shamrock Tea, it offers a world of “hallucinatory clarity”, in which everyday objects and their qualities are shot through with religious significance. It is a world so perfectly realized that one is repeatedly tempted to step inside. “Jan van Eyck was here” it says, in Latin, on the far wall above the mirror in the...