There was too much filth for one episode, so I made another one! I needed to rant about Mary, one of the women wronged by Sebastian Dangerfield. How did Mary, a strong woman with her own bank account and coalshed, fare when she joined Dangerfield in London? There’s shagging aplenty but it’s not a happy ending.
A riotous, whirling, silly read that hides it’s rudeness with classical allusions and puns. The blasphemous, punning and lewd title earned it’s ban but there was a profusion of filth within.
The censor hated Keene’s pulp noir, banning his work many times. This taut thriller was full of violence but it was also a morality tale.
Is it a book about a promiscuous wife, a pilgrimage or queer life in 1960s Ireland? Banned for indecency and blasphemy, Broderick’s novel is a multi-layered text.
Endore combined violence and blasphemy in this classic of the werewolf genre. It’s impossible to know whether the radical politics or freaky sex most offended the censor.
America was horrified when the Kinsey report showed women were capable of sexual misbehaviour. Wallace’s book trashed Kinsey but it still too sexy for the Irish censor.
Is it a subversive lesbian romance or a psychological thriller? The hetronormative censor saw a dangerous text with a ‘general tendency to deprave’.
Marie Stopes’ advocacy of contraception was radial in 1918 but it was 1980 before the Irish public could read her sex manual.
Was it literature or porn? With sex on nearly every page, it wasn’t surprising this Irish novel was banned for decades. Sebastian Dangerfield is as dirty and unwashed as he is filthy minded.
If you like florid descriptions of sex spiced with psychoanalysis, this is the book for you. Unfortunately, it is not my kind of book.
