Irish Emigrant Book Review, No. 13 (Aug 1996)

Larry Delaney: Lonesome Genius by Frank O’Connor
- A new collection of short stories by Frank O’Connor has been compiled to give it a novel-like format. “Larry Delaney: Lonesome Genius” leads us through the growing years of young Larry and his dreams of being part of the school world he reads about in comics and of coming to the aid of a damsel in distress. We are also given an insight into the world of poverty, both physical and spiritual, in which the author himself grew up. He longed to be different, to escape from the penny-pinching, the rows and the squalor of the Cork he knew as a boy. Though we see the darker side of life in stories such as The Duke’s Children, Frank O’Connor has always managed to bring laughter to his readers and in his belief of himself as a genius he understands his father’s misgivings: “He had never expected to be the father of a genius and it filled him with forebodings. He looked round him at all his contemporaries who had normal, bloodthirsty, illiterate children, and shuddered at the thought that I would never be good for anything but being a genius.” Including such favourites as “Christmas Morning” and “My Oedipus Complex”, this is a welcome publication for all O’Connor fans.

Over The Mountain by Maryanne Kerr
- An autobiography with a difference would aptly describe Maryanne Kerr’s “Over The Mountain”. Used as we have become to nostalgic and comforting memoirs of life in Ireland during various decades of this century, it comes as something of a shock to find Ms Kerr’s memories are startlingly honest and largely devoid of rose-tinted nostalgia. After a beating from her mother at the age of six, she recalls, “A fierce hatred began to well up in me, taking hold like a canker. I vowed that one day, one day dear God, I would kill that woman”. Of course she doesn’t, but she admits that the two never forgave each other. Maryanne’s life hardly conformed to what was expected of the only daughter of a Co. Derry schoolmaster and his wife. She was at various times a pharmacist, teacher and band singer, postmistress and hotel receptionist. Her parents weathered the storm of her giving birth to an illegitimate child by such efficient organisation that family and friends were unaware of the event. It was her haemorrhaging after a subsequent contrived abortion that put the final nail in the coffin of parental love. Despite an amount of joy and laughter, the book left me with a sense of sadness summed up perhaps by Ms Kerr’s realisation at this point in her life that, in her relationship with her mother, “any feelings of love .. any maternal tenderness that still lingered, were gone. She was never to look on me with love again.”

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To Make the Stone Sing by Paddy Rushe
- A delightful book of poetry and paintings, winner of the Writers’ Week Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in 1995, is the work of poet Paddy Rushe and artist Catriona O’Connor. “To Make the Stone Sing” combines poetry, art and archaeology in an evocation of the monuments of the Iveragh peninsula in South Kerry, an area with which I am particularly familiar. We feel and see the antiquity and the mystery of the stones, as in “Staigue”
“Massive lintels still hold open the entrance but the interior yields no names, no stories.
On a structure not quite so old, “Coastguard Fort”, the poet muses on the change that has come about since the coastguards pined for the home counties of England while watching for the Napoleonic menace from France.
“He might have laughed if his telescope had seen England, France, the bloody lot congealed in a new empire,
the headland almost cleared of peasants and their cabins and they their own masters, going begging to Brussels.

A Short History of Cork by W. G. Mac Carthy and Pat Cotter
- “A Short History of Cork” is an interesting amalgamation of a 19th century work by W. G. Mac Carthy and a much shorter final chapter by Pat Cotter. Mac Carthy covers thirteen hundred years from the sixth to the nineteenth century, during which he dwells at some length on his own ancestors and is so vehemently opposed to Cromwell that he pens his name in block capitals. For anyone with a knowledge of the geography of the city, the occasional updating of its development is extremely interesting, as is his final exhortation to the citizens for peace. It could equally be written in exhortation to the citizens of the North today, in its plea to the Catholics and Protestants of 19th century Cork to “cease forever the silly strife of race”. Pat Cotter brings the history into the 20th century up to the time of the Treaty and gives a graphic description of the burning of Cork in December 1920.

The Sand Clocker by Jack Scoltock
This tale of a young Spanish boy, Tomas, is based on the discovery in Kinnagoe Bay, Co. Donegal, of the Armada ship La Trinidad Valencera. Written by Jack Scoltock, one of the divers who retrieved the artefacts, the story was inspired by the discovery of a boy’s leather boot.

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The Silver Chalice by Shelagh Jones
a delightful journey through time with the action switching from the present day to the Viking era in Ireland. It is Paul Sheean’s mission to rescue both the Kilcarrigan chalice and the monk, Pacifus from the invaders.

Suicide and the Irish by Michael J. Kelleher
- It is a well-established fact that the rate of suicide is on the increase in this country, particularly among young males. In the mid seventies there were eight times as many road traffic deaths as suicides among 15-24 year old males. By the early nineties this figure had decreased to the extent that road traffic deaths are only twice as common as suicides. In his study “Suicide and the Irish” Michael J. Kelleher of the Suicide Research Foundation, deals both with the statistical data of those who commit suicide and the help available to the bereaved. He also touches on the subjects of assisted suicide and euthanasia and addresses the role of the media, devoting a chapter to the very public suicide of Pat Tierney.

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Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara & Other Writings by Tim Robinson
Anyone familiar with the writings of Tim Robinson will need no recommendation from me for his latest publication, “Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara & Other Writings”. This is a collection of essays and talks from the last twenty years which include an extended essay on J. M. Synge and his association with Aran, a wonderful amalgam of botany and geology in “The View from Errisbeg” and an essay focusing on his interest in Irish place-names, “Listening To The Landscape”. For those who have yet to encounter Robinson’s work I quote a short extract to illustrate the beauty of the language. From “The View From Errisbeg”: “In my face, the Atlantic wind, bringing walls of rain, low ceiling of cloud, dazzling windows of sunshine, the endless transformation scenes of the far west. Underfoot, dark crystalline stone..spread below, to the north, a bewildering topography of lakes lost in bog..eastwards, a wrinkled golden spread half unravelled by the sea, dotted with the tiny white rectangles of human habitation; off this, to the south, islands, the nearer ones gold too, those on the horizon grey-blue; finally, closing the south east, another land, of hills the colour of distance itself.”

Short Circuit
- Strengthening Local Economics for Security in an Unstable World by Richard Douthwaite - Since the early 1970s the world economy has become somewhat “out of control”, according to Richard Douthwaite in his most recent publication entitled “Short Circuit - Strengthening Local Economics for Security in an Unstable World”. A new paradigm has to be established with community action at its centre. To arrive at the new economic order and become more self-sufficient in the process, Mr Douthwaite proposes the establishment of local currencies; surely the very antitheses of what the EMU is all about? Generating and conserving energy locally is another key strategy in this overall plan. Collaboration, empowerment and taking charge by local communities is no doubt the way forward but “letting go” of power by the present stakeholders is the key to a process difficult to get underway in the short-term.
This publication is most interesting and rightly challenges the many economic “sacred cows” well established in our society. We need creative thinking of this nature to move forward but we need many more answers and, most of all, we need to engage the hearts and minds of people everywhere. Review by Denis O’Brien

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