Long Larkin was a mason in an old Scottish ballad who, seeking revenge for not having been paid by Lord Wearie, forces his way into the lord's castle and kills Wearie's wife and son. Nightspawn plays with literary conventions in order to show their exhaustive nature. It is an inside-out novel, one of the very few metanovels to have come out of Ireland. Ben White tells of a coup d'etat in Greece and his embroilment therein. White is a writer and he succeeds in working his account into a gripping thriller.
Most scenes end in farce.
But he fails, is bound to fail, because every artist must necessarily fail in this respect, beauty and truth defying efforts. The novel treats of the fall of the big house Birchwood and its inhabitants, the Godkins. Gabriel Godkin, the sole survivor of the family, searches among the madeleines of his memories for the sense of his life. He himself speaks of madeleines, thus slyly referring to Marcel Proust's masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu. Like Marcel in Proust's novel, Gabriel strives to come to terms with his life by writing it down in the form of a sustained narrative.