This collection's fictional protagonist, Herron, is a cadet in the Irish diplomatic service, a young literary Irishman of a type that moved to Paris in the 1930s and got to know the surrealists - Denis Devlin being the model. Herron is a bit Barnaboothian, a bit W.V. Balloon, and a bit Karl O'Hanlon. The book is an elegy for poet and existentialist Benjamin Fondane, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. It is a book about dreams, Surrealism, and low dishonest decades, then and now, exploring bureaucratic sclerosis in the face of atrocity. It attempts to do what Walter Benjamin described as "remembrance" making the concluded (suffering) into something open-ended.
"Brilliantly sharp, shifting use of language lights up a demanding, intriguing subject, which includes the encounters between the new Irish state and modernity, between diplomacy and chaos. Herron confronts a segment of the past that seems closer every time we look, a cast of characters so at odds with history that only poetry can cope with them and their time." -Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
"About halfway through Karl O'Hanlon's marvellous Herron's Dream Diary, I was slowed to a stop by the following lines: 'a family man, upright, moderate in learning and wealth, / was fashioning a whip out of sunlight to beat a slave to death.' The idea that the mildest among us would be willing torturers under the right conditions is an idea we have all, unfortunately, learned and re-learned. But that the whip is fashioned 'out of sunlight'! The world and social order that made the torturer are contained and revealed by that phrase, and the old idea is made new. A poet who can do that must be read. This is a brilliant debut." -Shane McCrae