James Hanley was born in Dublin in 1901, though his family moved to Liverpool when he was very young. Like many of his early fictional characters (including various members of the Fury family), Hanley left home in his teens (in his case before he was fourteen), and joined the merchant navy despite the not very encouraging model of his father's experiences in that area. During the First World War he served on troopships in the Mediterranean, then, using an assumed name, joined the Canadian army and fought in France with the Thirteenth Battalion. After the war, Hanley returned to Liverpool and his parents’ home and spent the next ten years working on the railways, reading voraciously, writing and having his writing rejected by a variety of publishers. After his first book, Drift, was accepted in 1929, Hanley left both Liverpool and the railways, and moved to the Welsh village where he spent much of the remainder of his life producing a steady, sometimes remarkable, quantity of work, principally novels, but also, particularly in later years, short stories and plays. With the determination and application which characterized his entire career, he continued writing into his eighties. James Hanley died in 1985.

Few twentieth-century writers can have suffered a more contradictory fate than James Hanley: on the one hand, consistently praised by reviewers in lavish, if not extravagant terms, and on the other, consistently ignored by that academic section of the literary establishment whose kind attention guarantees a proper posterity. As Edward Stokes notes, Hanley has been compared, usually favourably, with (among many others) Beckett, Conrad, Dickens, Faulkner, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence, Melville, Pinter, Dylan Thomas, Balzac, Maupassant, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Strindberg. At the same time, critics have been unable to find a place for Hanley among the ‘serious’ contemporary writers that such a formidable list of comparisons would seem to demand. Whether this contradictory fate owes anything to the contradictory nature of Hanley's writing is clearly a matter of debate. Without pretending to resolve such issues, the present chapter will examine some of the contradictions in one of Hanley's most important novels from a particularly productive decade.