SOURCE: Byrne, Jack. “Note on Higgins' Ladies of Springfield House.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 3, no. 1 (spring 1983): 195-210.

In the following essay, Byrne draws literary parallels between Higgins’s short story “Killachter Meadow” and his novel Langrishe, Go Down through a chronological study of the works’s protagonists.

Fatal accidents like that keep recurring while the stoical Bolivians shrug their shoulders, resigned to it. Es la vida! What they mean is: It's death. I think it must be something like Spain. You've been to Spain?

Yes.

You liked … or perhaps no?

Yes, I like backward countries.

—Balcony of Europe

So do I!

—Jack Byrne

A careful reading of Higgins' “Killachter Meadow” leads one to the reasonable conclusion that this “witty but savage” story of “man's drift towards self-destruction” is in fact an ur-Langrishe, Go Down.¹ Thus it is appropriate to the theme of both the short story (published...