Irish Emigrant Book Review, No.62 (Sept 2000)

Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy
- For what she has declared will be her final novel, Maeve Binchy has followed the tried and tested path of introducing a mix of characters who live out a portion of their lives in the familiar territory of Dublin and its environs. Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather, once college students together, decide to set up their own home catering business, a move which leads to eventual success. The success is achieved, however, only after a parade of incidents both tragic and humorous involving family, friends and lovers. Cathy’s mother-in-law has never reconciled herself to her son Neil’s marriage to someone from “the wrong side of the tracks”, while Tom’s relationship with aspiring model Marcella is less than stable. Neil’s extended, and extremely dysfunctional, family is the cause of much of the action but the stars of this story are his cousins, the nine-year-old twins Simon and Maud, who provide the link between many of the disparate characters. Their literal approach to life is at the root of much that is entertaining.
The narrative is infused with both disappointment and a struggle for recognition. Hannah Mitchell is disappointed with her son’s choice of a wife, Tom’s father had hoped his son would take over the family building business, and both Marcella and Cathy are striving to be taken seriously in their respective careers. On the periphery, James Byrne and Shona Burke resolve a longstanding and painful estrangement. Only Cathy’s parents, the wonderfully drawn Muttie and Lizzie, appear to be grounded in common sense and provide some stability for the twins, who are saddled with an absent father, an alcoholic mother and a brother with criminal tendencies. The great thing about picking up a Maeve Binchy book is that you can be certain that you’re in for an enjoyable read. “Scarlet Feather” is no exception and it’s hard to accept that we can no longer look forward to the next Binchy novel.

[ top ]

The Pale Gold of Alaska by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne
- From Alaska to Siena, from New England to the red light district of between-the-wars Dublin, in this collection of short stories Eilis Ni Dhuibne uses language which gives the reader an indelible impression of each place. The young 19th century Irish woman marooned in the snows of Montana is deprived of her forbidden love, just as is the middle-aged television producer, Brenda, the one violently and the other from self-imposed restrictions. Each of the nine stories in this collection is concerned with love, both in passion and in tenderness, and each is a carefully observed vignette of a marriage, a clandestine love affair, the power of parental love. “The Makers” portrays a daughter’s love for her father, a quiet man who used his ability to make things as a means of communicating with his children. Only in old age and approaching death does he begin to talk to his daughter Marie, who discovers in her own son, David, the beginnings of the same creative talent that was the hallmark of her father.
Each of the situations is closely observed by the author from the woman’s perspective, the falsity of describing a dying man as “comfortable”, the betrayal of Kathleen by her husband and her sister in “At Sally Gap”, the ability of a mother to recognize her distant son just from “the way he carried his body” in “The Banana Boat”. Here Ms Ni Dhuibhne’s skill is well-illustrated in the reflection of the mother when her son appears to be missing, “Normal life. And I am part of it still, but only just. I am on the edge of a cliff. In a minute I could tumble off and fall into another kind of life altogether”. Anyone who has ever had a child missing, for however short a time, will be able to identify with this. The author includes a number of references to other writers, notably E.M. Forster, but also slips in to her own narrative words and phrases echoing the poems of Yeats. Each one of the stories, without exception, proves thought provoking and from each it is possible to extract some parallel with one’s own experience.

[ top ]

Wherever Green is Worn by Tim Pat Coogan
- Tim Pat Coogan’s tour de force considers the fate of the emigrant from Ireland since the time of the monks in Europe’s Dark Ages to the voluntary emigration of today’s young people. Having carried out his research during the course of a world tour, Coogan covers his subject continent by continent and in each case gives a fairly detailed historical background for the reasons prompting the emigrantion. This approach is complemented by stories of individuals in both their triumphs and failures, and the whole is enlivened by anecdotes which introduce both a human and a humorous note into the narrative. Emigration from Ireland into Europe was often related to military defeats or victories, while Italy obviously has a long history of Irish religious. The United Kingdom section is particularly interesting since it was not only a preferred destination for so many years, but was also, in Famine times, the destination for so many by default. In poor health and penniless, many Irish people were unable to complete their journeys to the US and formed the nucleus of the huge Irish population of Liverpool and other British cities.
Given equal attention is the story of emigration to the US, though much of this material is more familiar to the general reader. However here, as in the case of Canada and Australia, the author demonstrates the way in which the Green/Orange divide survived the crossing of the Atlantic and often became more virulent the further it travelled from Ireland. The sufferings of those fleeing the conditions at home are described, the thousands of deaths on such work projects as the New Orleans Canal as well as the successes of such families as the Carrolls and the Kennedys. The Irish communities in the Caribbean and in South America have been less well chronicled in the past and the chapters on Montserrat, St Lucia and Argentina reveal the extent to which the Irish connection is maintained when for years there may have been no direct contact with the home country.
This story of the Irish diaspora will capture the imagination of all those whom emigration has touched either directly or indirectly, and a number of minor inaccuracies can be overlooked in such a vast canvas. Tim Pat Coogan concludes by making the point that a race which has scattered its destitute and its gifted people worldwide, where they have for the most part been well received, and whose representatives are working to help those living in Third World countries, should not now be shunning the refugees and asylum-seekers who have arrived on our own shores.

[ top ]

Five O’Clock Shadow and Other Shories ed. Clem Cairns
- Fifteen of these stories were shortlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize, one is the editor’s choice and the final entry is the winner of the Fish Short Short Story prize. What unifies them, apart from the obvious quality of the writing, is a pervasive air of death and diminution. The winning story, “Five O’Clock Shadow” by Kathryn Hughes, demonstrates both these attributes with the rejection of a daughter by her father in favour of her four brothers, a rejection compounded by her father’s early death. A similar kind of rejection, which is both received and given by the schoolboy in Ian Baker’s story, “All the Good Times Too”, takes a disjointed journey through the childhood and adolescence of a boy who receives his first and most hurtful rejection from his own parents. It is surprising how often death, particularly of children and often by drowning, forms the theme of this collection of stories. In “Swift Water”, the sympathy felt by Delia Mason for the family whose young son drowns reflects her own sense of loss; both loss and denial are features of Kevin Parry’s “Drowned Boy”, a tale told from the perspective of the three people affected; and there is the unresolved mystery of Bernadette in Sylvia Baker’s “History of a Vagrant”. The confusion in the minds of children is examined in “Skate Blades” by Celia Bryce, with its chilling final scene, and in “Ahmad’s Teeth”, by Sami Moukaddem, with its memorable closing scene: “Ahmad’s two front teeth are 4 cm apart.....they are 4 cm apart and about a meter away from his head.” The editor’s choice, “Cloud Shadows” by Frank Cossa, also reveals the confusion of a child, but a confusion that has continued into adulthood. Such a preoccupation with death in no way diminishes the enjoyment of this selection, but it was with some relief that I came to Rebecca Lisle’s “Toppling Lorna”, which actually made me laugh out loud.

Richard Blake Martin by Bernard O’Grady
- Bernard O’Grady, a Galway man now resident in Brazil, has written a book in which the main character is not so much the eponymous Richard Blake Martin as the town of Galway itself. Set in 1936 against the background of the emerging State, the narrative is filled with the sights, sounds and people of Galway, some of them fictional though a number of Galway citizens are interwoven into the story. The author gathers together a disparate group of young people who, under the guidance of Richard Martin’s mentor, Mr Semple Blake-Forrester, give their differing views on the issues of the day. Here we learn of the educational opportunities available to the various strata of Galway society, the debate on the revival of the Irish language, and the Civil War. However O’Grady’s canvas is not confined to Ireland, and we are also introduced to an American student, a Russian living in Galway under the name of Flanagan, and an admixture of Germans and Jews both in Galway and London. Thus the story ends with the rise of Hitler and the clouds of war hanging over Europe. This book comes complete with a warning about the difficulty of finding proofreaders in Brazil, but I have to admit that I found the typographical errors a little distracting.

[ top ]

Broken Biscuits Don’t Count by Anne Schulman
- What marks this novel as different from the usual Dublin-based blockbusters is the form adopted by the author to relay the story, that of the email. Emma gives a blow by blow account of her life in her frequent emails to her friend Jo in England, and through this device we learn of the break-up of her long-running romance with Peter, the change in her lifestyle wrought by her widowed father’s accident, and her running battle with “witch face”, her sister-in-law Una. This is Celtic Tiger success in reverse order, Emma has to leave her high-powered position with company car thrown in and, through the inimitable Irish network system, manages to build up her own business with a moderate degree of success. While doing so she deals with the problems of her family and friends while managing to retain her sense of humour, resulting in an entertaining if lightweight read.

Mary’s House by Donald Carroll
- This is an entertaining and well-illustrated account of a Marian shrine which I confess I had never heard of until I picked up Donald Carroll’s book. The author relates the story of the discovery in the last century of a house near Ephesus in Turkey which is believed to have been the final dwelling place of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The visions of a German nun, Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, in the early years of the 19th century were published by a French abbot by the name of Fr Julien Gouyet, who made the journey to Turkey and found what he believed to be the house. However the church authorities were less than enthusiastic, the subject faded into obscurity until a copy of Fr Gouyet’s book fell into the hands of a classical scholar, Fr Eugene Poulin, while he was visiting Smyrna. A series of events led to an expedition being mounted to test the truth of the visions, and no one was more surprised than the sceptical Fr Poulin when the house as described was discovered. A second expedition which linked local legend and folk memory to the building served to reinforce the certainty that Sr Emmerich’s description had been accurate, but it was some years before the house of “Meryemana” was recognised by the Church.

[ top ]

The Woman Who Swallowed the Book of Kells by Ian Wild
- The author lives up to his name in this delightfully weird collection of short stories with echoes of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and Tom Sharpe in their subject matter and treatment. The title story does actually concern a young Cork woman who has developed a taste for biblical texts through the influence of her scripture obsessed parents. After consuming the gourmet fare her world becomes peopled with miniature monks, marauding Vikings and two-dimensional parents. “Confessions of a Deck Chair” is pure Monty Python, with deckchairs consuming their occupants and reproducing “a little stack of kids”. Finally, I’ll never again be able to listen to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” without remembering the personality behind the name, as created by Wild in “Revolver”.

The Cold that Burns by Siobhan Campbell
- In her second collection of poetry, Siobhan Campbell reflects on the conditions of our life and what comes after it, moving from the birth of her daughter in “March 3rd” to her father’s death and his legacy to her, an inability to grieve which evolved from his having
“...planned to make me let you leave, How you ensured, for you, I would not grieve.”
The poems are peopled with other members of the poet’s family, her mother and sister, her aunt and grandaunt, the one thinking “she might take up darts” and the other, from the dregs of the tea, “could say the sun would shine for a trip to the sea”. The guilt of survival is startlingly captured in “Recall”, in which Siobhan Campbell aligns herself with “those who bullied, stole and beat”, and the concluding thought,
“we have been merciless and thrived.”
emphasises her own perceived involvement in the communal guilt.

[ top ]

Blessed Columba Marmion by Mark Tierney OSB
- This biography of the recently beatified Irish Benedictine focuses not only on the details of his life but also addresses the question of his spiritual writings and in particular his three works, “Christ the Life of the Soul”, “Christ in His Mysteries” and “Christ the Ideal of the Monk”. Blessed Columba Marmion was Abbot of Maredsous in Belgium and from there he conducted a group of twenty junior monks to the safety of Edermine House near Enniscorthy during the First World War. His involvement with the monks of Caldey Island is detailed, as is his part in the handing over by the Germans of the Dormition Benedictine Abbey in Jerusalem. The Dublin-born priest has a number of places in his native city named after him, including a housing estate near Arran Quay, where he was born in 1858.

Famine, Land and Culture in Ireland ed. Carla King
- Derived from a series of eleven lectures given at last year’s Parnell Summer School in Co. Wicklow, this collection deals with relationship between the Irish people and the land, with particular emphasis on the Famine, Landlordism and the Land League. Among the contributors are Professor Liam Kennedy of Queen’s University, history teacher Padraig G. Lane, UCD’s Professor Emeritus of Modern Irish History Donal McCartney and Patrick Commins of Teagasc.

[ top ]

Take 2 by Marian Murphy
- I decided to save Marian Murphy’s first novel for my week away from the office, as it looked to be perfect holiday reading, and this it proved. The subtitle is “A Chance to Start Again”, a title which covers a number of the relationships portrayed in this tale of love lost and found in Dublin, Galway and New York. Clare escapes from the dashing but unreliable Tony to an old cottage in Connemara; recently-widowed Donal escapes to his aunt’s house, in the same village; and his Aunt Kate escapes from a difficult decision by busying herself with helping others and avoiding the person who will be most affected by the outcome. Clare develops a series of holiday homes on land at her cottage, and has the work completed in a remarkably short time. These homes provide the setting for the introduction of a number of characters who are interwoven into a story that embraces all the generations and eventually brings happiness to them all, though a happiness often tempered by sorrow and regret. A boating accident in the past is mirrored by a similar, though less serious, incident; a lost love remains lost but the New Yorker, Rick, discovers a daughter he never knew. Aunt Kate’s secret is finally revealed and brings fulfilment and understanding to the three men in her life.
“Take 2” is a good long yarn which is both entertaining and undemanding, making it an ideal choice for train, boat or ’plane as well as those days when you can just relax and enjoy a good story.

[ top ]