Plot
The Field is set in a small country village in southwest Ireland.
Rugged individualist Bull McCabe has spent many hard years of labour cultivating a small plot of rented land, nurturing it from barren rock into a fertile field. He has always considered the land his own, and dreams of buying it; now it is being put up for auction. The McCabes intimidate most of the townspeople out of bidding in the auction, to the chagrin of auctioneer Mick Flanagan, but Galwayman William Dee arrives from England, where he has lived for many years, with his own plan for the field. An encounter between Dee and the McCabes ends in death and a cover-up.
John based the story on the 1959 murder of Moss Moore, a bachelor farmer living in Reamore, County Kerry. Dan Foley, a neighbour with whom Moore had a long-running dispute, was suspected of the murder, but the charges were denied by Foley's family.
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“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)