|
Books Ireland (March 2003): Review Sue Leonard, ‘A Youth of Shame and Embarrassment’’ [interview-article with Hugo Hamilton], in Books Ireland (March 2003), p.45 [with photo-port.] Hamilton was given the Irish name Ó hUrmoltaigh by a Cork-born father who attempted to make up for his own father’s joining the Royal Navy by becoming a gaelgeóir engineer in the ESB; m. German woman who arrived as governess at Killiney in post-war times; f. a stern disciplinary who severely beat the boys for using English in the home; m. threatened to leave but confined by children and circumstances. Leonard writes: ‘Though it has its moments of rich humour, The Speckled People is essentially a sad story, of homelessness and dislocation. There is a terrible poignancy to Hamilton’s accounts of his father’s many abortive attempts to start his own [importing] business … His mother emerges as a warm and loving character, deeply devoted to her children, but also very lonely and isolated and never quite accepted in her adopted country. The Hamilton children, dressed in Aran jumpers and lederhosen - “Irish on top and German below” - endured endless taunts […/] It’s such a sad story that Hamilton couldn’t bear to tell it until now. In his fiction - five novels and a collection of short stories - his speckled past is barely alluded to.’ Quotes Hamilton: ‘It’s a story that I’ve always associated with shame and embarrassment […]so I’ve kept it hidden for a long time. Even my friends and colleagues were taken aback when they read the book. It was only when 1 began to write that 1 was able to talk about it.’ Hamilton left home at 20 (1973) and settled in Berlin for ten years, maintaining little contact with his father though writing regularly to his mother. Sent the first short story he ever wrote to his father (‘pretty much summed up how I felt about him’) and received a letter with congratulations’. Father began to acknowledge his mistakes and ask forgiveness in later life; Hamilton remarks: ‘I don’t the beginning know if 1 really forgave him until I wrote this book.’ Returned to Ireland in the mid-1980 , after his father’s death in 1978 and before his mother’s in 1989; ‘Becoming a father myself, I suppose I began to understand, or to want to understand, where my own parents were coming from. If I’d written this book any earlier, 1 think there might still have been a trace of anger in it, not just at my father but at the whole situation, and it was important for me not to accuse him or call him names. Yes, he was uncompromising but everything he did was for us and for his country, and if he was cruel it was a cruelty born of dedication, not of malice. And despite the hardships, they were proud of the family they created. it was after all a very ambitious undertaking, to start an Irish-German family in the Ireland of that time.’ Further, ‘In my writing until now I’ve been pushing away from my own story, I just wasn’t ready to deal with it. Writing this memoir felt like going back to the beginning and starting again and that’s given me a great sense of freedom.’ See also Leonard’s review of The Speckled People [same issue, pp.62-63], incls. Quotation: ‘We would have to talk Irish together as if there was no other language in the world. Everybody would look at us. They would know that we were homeless and had nowhere to go, because we lot the language war’; ‘If you wanted to have friends you had to start speaking to yourselvf in English so nobody would call you a mahogany gas-pipe.’; ‘No matter what happens, you’re free to go anywher you like inside your own head.’ (here p.62.) Interview with Una Brankin, Books Ireland (March 2003): author of Half Moon Lake (TownHouse/Simon & Schuster), containing characters inspired by childhood in Ballinderry; ed. Queens; MA on Civil Rights Movement appeared in part in Irish News; features writer and interviewer on Sunday Press; joined RTÉ Press Office in 1995; ed. Futura, after June Considine; wrote at Anam Cara, wirters’ and artists’ retreat in W. Cork; the novel arises from memory of childhood incident concerning three men caught in dinghy explosion, two of whom survive with memories of what it is like to drown; also involves a somewhat autobiographical relationship between teenage girl and menopausal mother. (p.47.) Ken Bruan, interview, in Books Ireland (March 2003): began writing stories for disaffected kids in Brixton; produced Rilke on Black, crime novel; applied noir style of American fiction to UK setting; settled in Galway; has dg. With Downs syndrome; issued The Guards (Brandon 2001); The Killing of the Tinkers (2002); republished by St. Martin’s Press, NY; film of The Guards pending; The Magdalen Martyrs, features again his ‘spectacularly flawed hero, former garda Jack Taylor, tracing the ‘angel’ who helped the laundry girls to escape their convent prison; as extra played part of dead Viking in Alfred the Great; secured place at RADA but took degree in English at TCD instead; taught English in Africa, S.E. Asia, S. America; imprisoned for 4 months for part in bar-brawl in Rio de Janeiro; raped and brutalised by prison-guards; recalled brutality of police in Guardian interview. Brian Power, review of Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists [reiss.] (Lawrence & Wishart 2003), 634pp, in Books Ireland (March 2003): `[…] the novel highlights the hypocrisy of Christians as much as others who expoitled their fellows for personal gain. Surprisingly, however, it is not bitter, nor is it anti-religious. This is because the narrator is a character of sincere and passionate believs whose concern for others is as great as that for his own wife and family. After describing lay-offs, evictions, a culpabley avoidable fatal accident at work, a grotesque funeral, a hilarious “beano”, family illness and break-up, and some kind and charitable acts, the books on a determinedly optimistic note. In a sentimental and touching crescendo, the narrator and author succeed in transcending [imminent] personal tragedy in order to point towards the prospect of a brighter social future for everyone’. Alexis Guildbridge, review of Eugene O’Brien, Seamus Heaney: Creating Ireland of the Mind (Liffey Press 2003), 206pp., in Books Ireland (March 2003), p.57f. Quotes author as remarking on the whole narrative of Irish republicanism, which has been ‘hardwired in Heaney’s system and which his ongoing poetic project has attempted to disconnect, to some degree’; and further: ‘The ability to reimagine the past, to make present that which was absent, and to make real that which does not exists, has become hugely important to Heaney in terms of how and why he writes’. Also, reviewing Colin Graham, Deconstructing Irland: Identity, Theory and Culture (Edinburgh UP): emphasis on Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern; finds the book written in mandarin academic-speak, quite inaccessible to the reader; quotes specimen sentence: ‘This chapter begins an examination of the play between a haunting aporetic Ireland and an excessive, replicating plenitude of Ireland off the fundamental linearity of what Ireland is.’ Chapter contents include detailed analysis of a short-story by Gerry Adams; chapter. On Ignatius Donnelly, author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). Also reviewing Clare Carroll, Circe’s
Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork UP), 216pp.
Anthony Scott, author of Is That Me? My Life with Schizophrenia (Farmar 2003), is son of the architect Michael Scott; his mother Nancy Dixon travelled to London to have a child and, on returning to Dublin, was met by Michael who, seeing the resemblance to himself in the child in the pram, married her. Narrates that Michael decided that his son’s partner Nancy was unsuitable and arranged for her to be taken to Kenmare Station and thence to Dublin and the mailboat, but that Anthony married her, finding her pregnant. John R. Walsh & Thomas Bradley, A History of the Irish Church 400-700AD (Columba Press), 192pp. Catherine Dunne, Another Kind of Life (Picador), 492pp. Deals with the lives of Ealeanor and Hannah, upper-class girls in Dublin and those of Mary and Cecilia, poor orphans in Belfast. Kevin Kiely, review of Ciaran Carson, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (Granta), 318pp.; notes clear echo of Belfast as Dante and his guide Virgil discuss the troubles in Florence in Canto VI: ‘what holds the future for the citizens / of my divided city? Is there one just man/in it? Or are they all sectarians?’; remarks on ‘the odd colloquialism’ in place of Belfastese; also notes awkward inversions; avers that Carson ‘does not spoil’ the ‘potency’ [sic] of the Ugolino episode of Canto XXXIII. Also review of Robert Greacen, Lunch with Ivy (Belfast: Lagan Press), 52pp., poems chiefly dealing with the literary milieu of London from 1936 incl. Clifford Dyment and Alex Comfort, poet and later author of The Joy of Sex and with whom Greacen edited an anthology supervised by Eliot; remarks: ‘The whole collection bristles with a kind of tongue-in-cheek obituary or notes towards such.’ Also review of Dennis O’Driscoll, Exemplary Damages (Anvil), 86pp. The review is facetious: ‘God is dead, life is dead and O’Driscoll sounds as if he is not feeling very well himself either - “Our one true God has died [and we] are rewarded with chainstore loyalty points.’ Also review of Derek Mahon, Saint-John Perse: Birds - A Version (Gallery), 34pp. Jooste Augesteijn, The Irish Revolution
1913-1923 (London: Palgrave), 250pp. [Symposium at QUB, 1998]. Kathy Rodgers, Misbehaving (Poolbeg),
352pp., story of a young Mum’s affair with and former lover and consequences.
Eamon Cooke, Berry Time (Dublin:
Dedalus Press), 48pp.
|
|||||