Irish Emigrant Book Review, No. 38 (Sept 1998)

Keeping the Night Watch by Fred Johnston
- In Fred Johnston’s collection of short stories, “Keeping the Night Watch”, the prevailing mood appears to be one of isolation, of the loneliness of each individual and the transience of love and affection. In the first offering, “Safe Harbour”, even the self- satisfied suburban housewife, Julia, realises ultimately that she is “a well-dressed woman sitting at a bar in the middle of the day drinking gin. Alone.” Broken relationships within marriage are a preoccupation, from the violence of “The Hammer Man” to the sad and gradual distancing of “Speaking English”, in which the protagonist finds that he has adopted the racism for which he once despised his parents. In “Rising Higher” Johnston gives a vivid description of what it is like to be dependent on the dole with the recurring command, “Don’t tell me you know unless you’ve been there”.
The presence of his native Belfast hovers over many of the stories, just as the helicopters hovering over the city give him a feeling of being constantly watched, and in “Northern Star” we are given some understanding of how the violence can affect even those whom it does not maim. “Orangemen” gives us an understanding of the ambiguity of identity brought on by a marriage of mixed religion. Seen through the eyes of a young boy, the conversion of his father to Catholicism sits uneasily with his uncle’s proud participation in a march through the city, and watching the “drum-and-fife embodiment of tradition and faith.......left him with an inner emptiness, a little void he could not fill with anything else”. It is this inner emptiness which the author examines in a series of stories told with convincing passion and perception.

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Terror on the Burren by Re O Laighleis
- a familiar setting in an unfamiliar age takes the reader to the limestone pavements and fertile valleys of the Burren in north Clare. Here Relco, Alyana and their family from the north are shipwrecked, with Relco and one son, Darkon, apparently not surviving. The remaining members of the family, Alyana, her son Emlik and his two sisters Raithnika and Frayika, begin to make a new life for themselves.
It is a time of unknown dangers and a need to find allies, and Emlik forges links with a neighbouring tribe while avoiding the Barbey, known to be hostile. For a number of years the group live peacefully until treachery arrives in the form of a suitor for Emlik’s sister. His true origins are discovered by Sobharthan, Emlik’s daughter who has the gift of vision, and the tribe prepares for an attack. The suddenness and viciousness of this assault, coupled with the apparent other-worldliness of coincidental natural events, lends an aura of the supernatural to this scene which is emphasised by the survival of the apparently unscathed Sobharthan. Using familiar territory, the Corkscrew Hill, Aillwee and Poulnabrone, Re O Laighleis has spun a tale which will appeal to both adults and children.

Aisling and other Irish Tales of Terror by Peter Tremayne
- a collection of eleven stories of the supernatural, the author concentrates on rural Ireland, with the exception of “Daoine Domhain”, which begins in Massachusetts, before moving to a remote island in Cork. Almost all have as a feature a stranger arriving in a rural setting, sometimes returning to the family home after a long absence. Drawing strongly on Irish mythology, the author introduces a further common feature into many of the stories, with the main character hearing a noise which is at first identified as the wind but which becomes either threatening, mocking or chilling, as the story dictates. Some, such as “The Deathstone”, work better than others. In this a blind composer is to be the victim of his wife and his agent, but they in turn become victims of an ancient force. “Fear a’ Ghorta”, on the other hand, while giving an extraordinary account of the lengths to which the hungry will go to survive, ends on a rather abrupt and impossible note which detracts from the gradual portrayal of horror. After “The Deathstone”, the tale which held the most interest for me was “The Samhain Feis”, in which an Irish-American woman and her small son are drawn into the evil which surrounds an area in a remote part of Co. Clare. Katy’s son, Mike, becomes the conduit for the spirits who, on the night of Samhain, “spill out to take revenge on the living”. This new-found power travels with the boy back to the States where he carries out his own act of revenge, the first, it appears, of many to come.

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Waiting for Billy and Other Stories by Martin Healy
- a collection of stories by the late Martin Healy, draws on a variety of both settings and characters to give an insight into the joy and pain of human experience. The stories range from the isolation of the countryside to the unavoidable human contact of the city, from a child’s sadness when his grandmother leaves her home to the long-forgotten dreams stirred by a chance visitor. In each story Healy reaches into the heart of the characters and we experience their fear, their attempts to resist temptation, their longing for love. He seems to have a special affinity with the old; the pair in the title story vainly awaiting the arrival of a nephew for Christmas; the two elderly farmer brothers who are shaken out of their routine by a stormbound young American in “Storm Damage”; the stoical husband who seems untouched by his younger wife’s drinking and subsequent death in a car crash. With acute observation Healy captures the daily routine, the slow movement of minds, the minimal conversation of people who have lived a lifetime together.
His touch with the urban setting and character is no less sure, as we discover in the painful tale of the alcoholic who falls by the wayside in “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. The inevitability of the man taking another drink, the self-deception that accompanies his loss of resolve and the loneliness of his life are tellingly portrayed. In “Home Cooking”, the balance of the relationship between the 16-year-old girl and her biker boyfriend becomes clear through their differing reactions to the pike Johnny has caught on a fishing expedition. Healy’s characters are all searching for something or someone and it is this sense of longing, a longing we have all experienced at one time or another, which makes this collection so compelling.

Sold into Marriage by Sean Boyne
- Twenty years after first hearing about the case, journalist Sean Boyne received a phone call from a woman who wanted to tell her life story, a not unusual occurrence in a journalist’s life, but this one was different. The story the woman unfolded, which is published under the title, “Sold into Marriage”, seemed to belong to an age long gone, but all the events took place in Ireland in the 1970s. In essence, a father sold his daughter in marriage to a man four times her age, for the sake of money and land. While still at school, “Nuala” was told by her father that she was to be married to a local widower farmer, with the hope that on his death the farmhouse and land would become hers, and so become her father’s property. She was assured that a pre-nuptial agreement had been drawn up guaranteeing that the relationship would not be physical, but it was not long before her husband decided to claim his marital rights. Thus began for Nuala a life of misery and abuse, both from her husband and her father, which only came to an end when her father died and she managed to escape from her husband’s house.
Sean Boyne has succeeded in conveying the helplessness both of Nuala and of her family in the face of her father’s domineering behaviour, going some way to explaining why her mother and her siblings did little to help her. He vividly describes her attempt to escape the wedding ceremony, and her inability to bond with the son who was the result of the union, a son born of marital rape, though such a category was not legally recognised in Ireland at the time. Nuala today is battling with alcoholism but is beginning to rebuild her life. Her son, Ronan, was brought up by his grandmother and is in touch with his mother, who is busy rearing her children from a subsequent relationship. But the facts still defy belief, that only 20 years ago a 16-year-old girl in a rural part of Ireland was so frightened of her father that she married a man in his mid-sixties whom she found repellent. Her father’s reward, since he died before his son-in-law, totalled IR2,500 and a new Morris Minor.

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Irish Popular Culture, 1650-1850 edited by J.S. Donnelly Jr and Kerby A. Miller
- editors J.S. Donnelly Jr and Kerby A. Miller have endeavoured to give to the popular culture of this country the same prominence given to that of Britain and Europe in similar studies. With an introductory essay by Prof. Sean Donnelly of Queen’s, the collection of nine essays explores such diverse aspects of culture as the “monster meetings” of the 1840s, discussed by Gary Owens, Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario, and the differing customs and traditions at wakes, interesting details of which are given by Gearoid O Crualaoich of UCC. Elizabeth Malcolm, Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, traces the rise of the public house as a major influence on the development of Irish culture, though believing that its importance has been declining over the last 40 years. With essays on religion, education and the evolving class system of the period, the editors have compiled a volume which will add much to our perception of the pre-Famine years.

Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison by Kevin Bowen
- Kevin Bowen’s second collection and the poems range over the three geographical areas important in his life, Vietnam, Ireland and the US. “Fort Dix, New Jersey, February, 1968” reveals the parallel lives of young soldiers and those for whom their skills are being honed. The young boys “fire rifles from frozen holes” while on the other side of the world:
“In Asian villages women wake to mourning. Monks of Thien Mu flee to the forests.”
The sense of loss, of both life and place, experienced by both sides in the Vietnam war is evoked in such poems as “Guard Duty, Bien Hoa, 1968” and “The Poetry Garden at Song Be”; the final lines of “Casualties II”, sum up the pervasive feeling of this section:
“Some things so far beyond pain there is no language.”
Bowen’s poems centred on Ireland are no less evocative of loss and a sense of waste, the discovery of a burned body in “Francis”, the image of the last islanders in “A Picture from the Island”. But the poet has an eye also for the small detail, as he ponders on the meaning of a plane flying overhead to a small baby, whether it is a small bird he wants to call down to land on his hand, or “a memory of the womb....a last recollection.....of that first great mystery of flight”.

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Studies in Irish Cistercian History by Fr Colmcille O Conbhidhe
- To coincide with the 900th anniversary of the coming of the Cistercian Order to Ireland, a number of articles by Fr Colmcille O Conbhidhe, which had heretofore appeared only in Cistercian publications, have been brought together under the title, “Studies in Irish Cistercian History”. Edited by Finbarr O’Donovan, the seven articles cover a period from the middle of the 15th century to the year 1752 when the Cistercian association with Holy Cross Abbey in Tipperary came to an end. Fr O Conbhidhe, a native of Clonmel, is best known for his “Story of Mellifont”, which was published in 1958.

Pictures from a Reservation by Gerard Reidy
- Mayoman Gerard Reidy has produced his first collection of poetry, “Pictures from a Reservation”. Imbued with the sights and sounds of his native county, Reidy’s poems look back to his childhood and student days, reflecting on the people who inhabit his different worlds. While acknowledging that the modern world is making itself apparent in even the most remote of areas, still there is a timelessness about the men and women of Mayo:
“They uncovered a gladiator at Pompeii; in Woodquay they found the Vikings. In Mayo they’ll discover a bachelor Saving hay.”
In “The Reservation” Reidy paints a depressing picture of a western town where
“Our kids have bought one-way tickets, determined to find bright colours.”
While those that are left
“...wait to be chosen as extras like the Sioux in a cowboy film.”
Joy is also to be found, however, particularly in “Deirdre”, where the poet describes a precious moment in time with a small daughter.

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The Mercier Companion to Irish Literature by Sean McMahon and Jo O’Donoghue
- Sean McMahon and Jo O’Donoghue, freely admit that the book will be out of date by the time it hits the bookshops, and that they will be unable to please everybody with their selection, but claim that the production of the book was fun. Opening it at random we find the 9th century monk Dicuil and his work, “The Book of the Measurement of the Earth”, and Sam Hanna Bell’s “December Bride”; Lough Derg is included for its occurrence in works by Carleton, Yeats, Sir Shane Leslie and Seamus Heaney among others; Declan Kiberd’s “Inventing Ireland” and Brian Inglis, author of “Downstart” and “West Briton” share a page. Less well known literary names are also included, for example The Blind Poetess of Donegal” Frances Browne, who attended school in Donegal with Isaac Butt before embarking on a career as a prolific author. Her collection of fairy tales, “Granny’s Wonderful Chair”, were last reissued in 1995. The entries, giving in alphabetical order a diverse selection of Irish literary figures and associated places, provides a useful tool of reference.

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