The Heather Blazing was published by Picador in 1992. Eamon Redmond is a High Court judge in Dublin — a pillar of the Fianna Fáil establishment, educated by the Christian Brothers, shaped by the nationalist narratives of his father and his party. He has spent his career interpreting the Irish Constitution with conservative rigor: upholding the ban on contraception information, ruling against women’s reproductive rights.
The novel alternates between Eamon’s present (his wife’s illness, his estrangement from his children, his summers at the family home in Wexford where the cliff is literally falling into the sea) and his past (his childhood with his gentle, politically engaged father; his years at University College Dublin; his rise through the legal profession). The pattern that emerges: every emotional connection in Eamon’s life has been sacrificed to intellectual discipline and institutional loyalty.
Toibin based Eamon partly on real conservative Irish judges of the 1980s and 1990s, but the novel is not a polemic — it is a portrait of how a man’s virtues (discipline, principle, loyalty to tradition) become instruments of emotional destruction when applied to human relationships.
Collecting The Heather Blazing
First edition (Picador, London, 1992): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first: $80–$200