Read Ireland Book Reviews, July 2000

James Joyce: A Passionate Exile by John McCourt
This large-format gift book is a revealing account of the life, times and writings on the twentieth-century’s most distinguished novelist. Combining words with an extraordinary collection of contemporary photographs and other images, it depicts his family’s fall from riches to rags and his experience of growing up in late nineteenth-century Dublin. The author also examines Joyce’s relationship with his life-long partner, Nora Barnacle, and casts new light on their 40-year voluntary exile in Europe, first in the cosmopolitan Adriatic port of Trieste, then in lively wartime Zurich and finally in Paris, the artistic centre of the world in the 1920s and 30s.

Gander at the Gate by Rory O’Connor
Knocknagoshel, north Kerry, in the 1930s. Autumn mornings with mist rolling over a ‘kindly and fertile land’; the pungent smoke of turf fires; open-air wrestling contests; convoys of tinkers with their piebald ponies; farm boys and servant girls aching with desire; and a cast of remarkable men and even more remarkable women, fiery and forthright, their lives ‘teeming with the emotions of love and jealousy, and human conflict, common among all the simple people of the world.’ Through the lyrical prose of this author, this book tells of an Irish farmhouse, the family who lived there, and the community of which they were part. The reader discovers the imaginings and adventures of the local ‘goboys’; the widow Delia and her sons lost to America; and the eccentric Uncle Jack, full of ‘riddles and recitations and the latest rhymes and small poems’. As the gander of the title begins to intrude on his consciousness, the author describes his youthful wonders and apprehensions and! t! he d arker shadows cast by his father’s experience of Ireland’s civil war.

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Complete Guide to Celtic Music: From the Highland Bagpipe and Riverdance to U2 and Enya by June Skinner Sawyers
This book is a comprehensive guide to the traditional and contemporary music of the Celtic lands an examination of its past, an assessment of the present, a glimpse into its future. The hundreds of artists profiled in these pages range from The Corrs to The Pogues, Planxty to Christy Moore, Andy M. Stewart to Seamus Egan and Van Morrison, Dolores Keane to Sinead O’Connor, and the Hothouse Flowers to The Cranberries. The book includes ‘Recommended Listening’ guides for all categories, a list of ‘100 Essential Recordings’ and notes on Celtic festivals, publications and Arts and Music Centres world-wide. Details of record outlets, record labels and music schools are also included to make this the most comprehensive and informative guide possible.

Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 by Conor McCarthy
In this book, the author offers a series of readings in Irish culture in the light of the set of crises that beset the project of modernisation in Ireland from the late 1960s onward. These crises economic and political in Northern Ireland, economic in the Republic of Ireland are argued to have contributed to a crisis of representation that can be seen to have afflicted a variety of intellectuals novelists such as John Banville and Dermot Bolger, the playwright Brian Friel, the film-makers Bob Quinn, Pat Murphy and Neil Jordan, and the literary critics Edna Longley and Seamus Deane. McCarthy locates the source of this problem in the overly narrow conceptualisation of modernisation and modernity that has held sway in Irish intellectual life since the 1960s, and in a lack of attention paid to the negative aspects of the processes of modernisation.

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Contemporary Irish Social Policy edited by Suzanne Quin et. al.
This book provides a comprehensive review of the range of social policy provision in Ireland education, income maintenance, employment, housing and health together with chapters relating to different categories of consumers of services including children, people with disabilities, older people, travellers and the growing population of refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland. Key areas of policy development concerning youth, drugs and the criminal justice system are also examined.

Irish Social Policy in Context edited by Gabriel Kiely et. al.
This book traces the historical development of Irish social policy and discusses major influences such as the European Union on policy formation. Ireland is presented in a comparative context and as an example of the mixed economy of welfare. The policy-making process in analysed, and the financing and evaluation of social policy measures are clearly explained. Separate chapters are devoted to the treatment of women, the concept of citizenship, the rise in the significance of partnerships, the place of the family, the understanding and measurement of poverty and the role of consumer participation.

The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum edited by T.G. Fraser
Written by specialists on the topic, this book explores the Irish parading tradition from the 17th century to the present. With serious confrontations over parades recurring since 1995, the subject is a vital, but imperfectly understood dimension of the Irish situation. Parades are examined from historical and anthropological perspectives, showing their long-standing importance to both traditions in Ireland, and for the Irish in Scotland and England. Both unionist and nationalist parades are analysed, as well as the peace marches of 1976. There is a particular focus on recent events, especially the disputes over the Relief of Derry parades and the Drumcree church parade at Portadown. Parades are shown to be complex events, with their own traditions which are constantly evolving.

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More Celebrated Letters of John B. Keane
This book comprises 3 books originally published in the 1970s: Letters of a Civic Guard, Letters of an Irish Publican, and Letters of a Country Postman, with one published in the early 1990s: Letters to the Brain.

A History of St. Margaret’s, St. Canice’s and Finglas by Peter Sexton
This book is a local history of these areas of North county Dublin based on Ecclesiastical records, local census, G.A.A. histories and local oral folklore.

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin
This book is set in Ireland in the early 1990s. Three women Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen have arrived, after years of strife, at an uneasy peace. For Helen’s adored brother Declan is dying, and the three of them join in the grandmother’s crumbling old house by the sea with two of his friends. These six, from difference generations and with different beliefs, are forced to listen to each other and to come to terms with each other. This novel was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. (We also have one rare first edition of the novel in stock priced at A350 Irish pounds.)

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Northern Ireland: An Unsettled People by Susan McKay
Largely regarded by the outside world in a negative light, many Protestants in Northern Ireland feel beleaguered, misunderstood and out-manoeuvred. But to what extent are Protestants undermined by a sectarianism that few of them acknowledge including perhaps an ambivalence to loyalist violence? Within the overall Protestant community there is a wide diversity of views, from hard-line defenders of the Union to a surprisingly large number who would welcome the end to the notion of a Protestant State for a Protestant people. With the current peace process founded on awareness that there can be no resolution to the conflict without the consent of both communities, a deeper understanding of the range and complexity of Protestant attitudes has never been more essential. This important book by a distinguished journalist breaks new ground in the search for that understanding. Presenting and analysing over sixty in-depth interviews with a wide range of northern Protestants, the author gives the clearest picture yet of these perplexing and perplexed people.

Flash Frames: Twelve Years Reporting Belfast by Mark Devenport
The author of this book arrived in Northern Ireland in 1986 as a trainee BBC journalist and twelve years later he left as the BBC’s Ireland Correspondent, having covered bombings, shootings and all the momentous events of the peace process two IRA cease-fires, the loyalist paramilitary response, visits by the American President, and the Good Friday Agreement. In this book he recalls the events, people and images of his time in Northern Ireland. A candid and frequently funny memoir, he summons images and anecdotes too off-beat or too personal to make it into his reports at the time, but which, in retrospect, appear both telling and compelling. The result is a refreshingly new perspective on Northern Ireland through the eyes of an English ‘blow-in’.

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Writing Irish: Selected Interviews with Irish Writers from the Irish Literary Supplement edited by James P. Myers, Jr.
This collection comprises sixteen interviews originally published in the Irish Literary Supplement between 1984 and 1994. The editor introduces the collection with a critical essay exploring some of the aesthetics and conventions of the interview form itself. The conversations record the authors’ perceptions of their own works, the process by which those writings came into being, and commentary on other writers’ work. From the lively give-and-take of the dialogue, the interviews reveal that passion with which the authors regard literature and their own writing. The interviewees are: John McGahern, Jennifer Johnston, John Montague, William Trevor, Brendan Kennelly, Michael Longley, John Banville, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Tom Paulin, Hugh Leonard, Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Benedict Kiely.

White Knights, Dark Earls: The Rise and Fall of an Anglo-Irish Dynasty by Bill Power
The White Knights took possession of huge estates around Mitchelstown, County Cork, in the fourteenth century. In the 1650s, Sir John King married Catherine Fenton, sole heir of the last White Knight. For the next 250 years Mitchelstown was home to the Kings barons and earls of Kingston. The family built great houses and towns, and included scholars, soldiers and lunatics among its ranks. Their wealth made them one of the most influential dynasties in Ireland. IN 1823, the 3rd earl, a medieval lord out of his time, built Mitchelstown Castle, the largest neo-Gothic mansion in Ireland. It survived through famine, bankruptcy and the land war of the 1880s, until an August night in 1922 when the castle was burned by Republican Civil War forces. Priceless paintings, tapestries, furniture and silver had been looted in the weeks before the fire. In 1925 the castle was demolished, its cut-limestone blocks sold to the Cistercians to build the new abbey at Mount Mellary, Country Waterford. This book traces these events and records visits of modern members of the King family to the site of the ancestral home. The remains of many of the family lie in the vault beneath the chapel at Kingston College, Mitchelstown.

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Travellers: Citizens of Ireland edited by Erica Sheehan
This book is a comprehensive overview of Traveller life, culture and faith, which also extensively addresses the burning contemporary issues of accommodation, discrimination, education and health which adversely affect the quality of life of a community whose infant mortality rate is three times the national average. The book helps to promote an awareness of the widely misunderstood concept of nomadism which is a vibrant reality that shapes, pervades and lies at the heart of Traveller life and identity. It is mainly written by Travellers and presents the reader with a challenge to create an intercultural Irish society in the 21st century.

A Burren Journal by Sarah Poyntz
The author’s diaries give a striking picture of life in the unique landscape of the Burren. She describes the changing seasons, the birds and animals, the wild flowers for which the Burren is famous and the lives of the people of the village of Ballyvaughan. The illustrations by Anne Korff and Gordon D’Arcy bring her words to life.

The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall
The Devil himself has launched a determined offensive on the sanctified precincts of tenth-century Clonmacnoise and the unfortunate Brother Fursey becomes his own unwilling ally. Expelled from the monastery, Fursey is propelled into a wider world of evil and intrigue, where he must come to terms with his new life as an unwitting, ineffectual and persecuted sorcerer. Mervyn Wall has created an irresistible blend of satire, comedy and fantasy in this novel. The gentle, self-effacing Fursey is one of the great anti-heroes of fiction.

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Wild Ireland: A Traveller’s Guide by Brendan Lehane
This guide takes the reader on a tour of some of the remotest and most beautiful spots in Ireland. It contains evocative descriptions of more than 70 wild places with entertaining personal anecdotes. It explains how to get to each place, where to stay and what to do, with relevant telephone numbers, email and website addresses. It includes the activities of walking, climbing, bird-watching, cycling, fishing, riding, caving and sailing. There are maps for each region, in colour, and major exploration zones in black-and-white. There are colour photographs of landscapes and line drawings of plants and animals.

Ten-Thirty-Three by Nicholas Davies
Subtitle: The Inside Story of Britain’s Secret Killing Machine in Northern Ireland. This book explores the conspiracy between the British Military Intelligence and the gunmen of the UDA who targeted and killed both Republican terrorists and ordinary Catholics. The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde by Joseph Pearce, This powerful and controversial new study of Wilde’s brilliant and tragic life is published on the Centenary of his death. Rather than lingering on the mistakes which brought him notoriety, it explores the emotional and spiritual search of this fascinating and complex literary figure. It uncovers how his ‘heart of stone’ was broken by the two-year prison sentence and probes the deeper thinking behind the masterpieces of his novel, plays, short stories and poetry. It includes discussion of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and the posthumously published ‘De Profundis’ and also traces his love affair with the church.

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Hannie Bennet’s Winter Marriage by Kerry Hardie
Hannie Bennett is a survivor of uncertain origins who has spent her life in Africa and the Far East. There aren’t a lot of things she wouldn’t do or hasn’t done. By the time she meets Ned Renvyle, however, her assets are running distinctly low and she needs a home for herself and her son. Ned Renvyle is an explorer, a writer, a returned Anglo-Irishman now become a farmer. He is also nearly twenty years older than Hannie and on the look-out for a wife. A deal is done, and a marriage made against both their sobered judgements. For Ned the widower, this is a second marriage; for Hannie the inexperienced divorcee and now, by luck, a widow, this is a fifth. It seems a port in a storm, a chance worth taking, but Ned lives on a modest farm deep in West Waterford and the price she has to pay for his name and his home soon seem to high. The novel is set in an apparently uncorrupted rural Ireland which is in fact being changed by forces as explosive as those which Hannie discovers in herself. This move from certainty to uncertainty has consequences and casualties, not least for the young painter, daughter of a local farmer, who is Hannie’s nearest neighbour and her son’s only confidant.

Cry For the Hot Belly by Kerry Hardie
Kerry Hardie’s second collection of poems extends the wonder, the ‘small deep awa’ of its precursor, ‘A Furious Place.’ To the calm reflection of ‘Monaghan Solstice’ and other landscapes ‘lit from elsewhere’, she introduces a narrative sweep embracing generations and questions of nationality. This collection also recognises the appearance of death in the author’s life as a familiar visitor. Her reconciliation with mortality fosters a new freedom in which she discovers a point of arrival.

Plus Ultra by Sean Monaghan
Ashling goes to Thailand with a hazy agenda for cultural dabbling, sexual intrigue and a tan. There she becomes involved with Pieter, a Dutch Satanist, while ex-war cameraman and struggling author Wayne Steiner becomes fixated on her. On an overland trip to the infamous Full Moon party the three are pursued by Stefan, a man with a mission, and David, a young Irishman who’s rapidly becoming trapped in a world where homespun conformity is asphyxiated by perversion and jeopardy.

Playing the Field: Irish Writers on Sport edited by George O’Brien
If you’ve ever lifted a stick, booted a ball, roared the favourite home, or questioned an opponent’s parentage, you are bound to enjoy this book. It is a collection of highly individual views on sport by a select XI of novelists, poets and other literary types. If you want to know why soccer is better than sex, Joseph O’Connor explains it all. Elsewhere Ulick O’Connor encounters Muhammad Ali, Conor O’Callaghan reports on cricketing in Dundalk, Colum McCann profiles the hard men of Manhattan’s handball courts, while Mary O’Malley dreams of being a hurler. Plus there’s horses, dogs, and a colourful variety of oddballs.

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On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr
In this last instalment of the monstrous hatreds of people who ‘had no summer in their lives’, people cursed in a world of distrust and lies. Marina Carr’s unique gift betrays the weakness of their needs and aspirations in the face of fate. Though she punctuates the play with moments of hilarious invention, the tragedy of this tale is Classical in scale. As another generation struggles to escape the cycle of depravity visited on one family in the rancid atmosphere of Raftery’s Hill, the author’s unflinching vision unmasks a world ‘so horrible ud it has to be true.’

Oar by Moya Cannon
Originally published in 1991, this collection won the Brendan Behan Memorial Award for the best first collection published in Ireland the previous year.

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George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W.B. Yeats by Brenda Maddox
Many know the public Yeats but few have managed to penetrate to the inner man, or to explore his relationship with his much younger wife, George. Here Brenda Maddox brings all her talents to bear on one of the most written about but least understood literary giants of the twentieth century.

Temptation by Dermot Bolger
For Alison Gill, mother of three young children, this year’s much-needed family holiday at Fitzgerald’s Hotel on the south-east coast of Ireland should be, as ever, absolute paradise. So when a work crisis forces her husband to return to Dublin, she is left angry, disappointed and susceptible to the confusing emotions surrounding a chance poolside encounter with Chris, an old flame from nearly twenty years ago. In seeing him again, Alison cannot help but reflect on the passing of time, and sit in judgement on the life she has made for herself. Is this going to be a turning point, an opportunity to revive the passion and optimism of her youth? A final chance? Will she let herself be tempted? Rarely does a male writer enter into the mind of a woman as assuredly as Bolger does in this vivid, skilful meditation on family life, the end of youth and the road less travelled. His portrait of Allison, a woman brought alive by his warmth and understanding, is simply stunning. Told with characteristic insight, verve and humour, this novel weaves a wonderful web of conflicting emotions behind the simple story of five eventful nights in an idyllic Irish hotel.

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Inishowen by Joseph O’Connor
Inspector Martin Aitken’s life is in chaos. The Assistant Commissioner wants him out of his job, terrible things are growing inside his house, and his ex-wife likes talking to famous dead people. Forty-three years old, he still can’t knot a tie. But when a strange woman collapses on a Christmas Eve Dublin street, Aitken’s world is about to be turned on its head. Milton Amery is a New York plastic surgeon. Wealthy, successful, he is nevertheless plagued by anxiety, the kind of man who feels nervous buying trousers. His marriage is in turmoil, his teenage son communicates only in vowel sounds, a guitar-strumming anarchist with a Mao Tse Tung tattoo is having sex with his only daughter. Ellen Donnelly is a woman with a mission, to come to Ireland and find her birth mother, to put together pieces of her past. Time is running out fast for Ellen. A small town in beautiful Inishowen contains the secrets that can unlock her past. This wildly comic and deeply moving new novel from one of Ireland’s most talented writers is a story of love found late, of hidden connections, of a journey that changes three lives forever.

McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy
Despite the many exotic places Pete McCarthy has visited, he finds that nowhere can match the particular magic of Ireland, his mother’s homeland. In this book, he travels from Cork to Donegal. Travelling through spectacular landscapes, but at all times obeying the rule: ‘Never Pass a Bar That Has Your Name On It’, he encounters McCarthy’s Bars up and down the land, meeting fascinating, friendly and funny people before pleading to be let out at four o’clock in the morning. Through adventures with English crusties who have colonised a desolate mountain; roots-seeking, buffet-devouring Americans; priests for whom the word ‘father’ has a loaded meaning; enthusiastic Germans who ‘here since many years holidays are making’; and his fellow barefoot pilgrims on an island called Purgatory, the author pursues the secrets of Ireland’s global popularity and his own confused Anglo-Irish identity. Written by someone who is at once both insider and outsider, this book is a wonderfully funny, affectionate portrait of a rapidly-changing country

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The Construction of Dublin by Frank McDonald
Frank McDonald has been Environment Correspondent of The Irish Times since 1986. Prior to that, he worked as a senior reporter for the newspaper, covering diverse stories ranging from the exploding of the Betelgeuse oil tanker in Bantry Bay to the civil war in Lebanon. In 1979, he won the Award for Outstanding Work in Irish Journalism for a series of articles entitled: ‘Dublin What Went Wrong?’ which exposed the failures of planning in the city. He is also the author of ‘The Destruction of Dublin’ (1985) and ‘Saving the City’ (1989), two books which dealt with Dublin’s environmental crisis and helped change public policy on urban renewal. (Both books are currently Out of Print.) In 1988, he won a Lord Mayor’s Millennium Medal for his work in highlighting the architecture of the city. He is a regular contributor to radio and television programmes and has given numerous illustrated lectures on environmental issues in Dublin and throughout Ireland. This is a book about the future of Dublin at a very critical turning point in its history. In a sense, it is a sequel to the two books mentioned above. It was written in the midst of a maelstrom of activity generated by Ireland’s booming economy and represents something of a snapshot of the city at a particular moment in time. Some of the cases it deals with were not fully resolved at the time of writing. In recounting the principal sagas, the book gives readers some idea of the forces that are shaping 21st century Dublin, for good or ill.

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