Noel Crowe, called Noe, looks back over 60 years to a summer when he was 17 and staying with his grandparents in the village of Faha in West Clare. He arrives in March, Easter time, a time of rebirth and renewal; and for the first time that anyone can remember the rain has stopped and the sun shines.
‘Rain there on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet, as a damp day, a drop, a dreeping, and an out-and-out downpour.’
It’s Reading Ireland month with Cathy at 746 Books and this year is A year with Iris Murdoch hosted by Cathy and Kim at Reading Matters so it seemed like the right time to get back to Iris Murdoch who I last read in a huge rash in the 90’s. The Red and the Green is one that I didn’t read then and I’m surprised I didn’t because it felt much less dense than some of her other novels. Set in Dublin in the week leading to the Easter Rising of 1916, the historical setting gives the plot a clear focus, energy and tension that I wasn’t expecting.
The novel begins on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April with Second-Lieutenant Andrew Chase-White in the garden of Finglas, the home of his fiancée in Sandycove, ‘in one of those bright little roads of multicoloured villas which run down to the sea‘, at the start of 10 days leave from his regiment of King Edward’s Horse. His mother is with him as she intends to give up the London flat and settle in Dublin, surrounded by her large, extended family. Andrew possesses an irritated rivalry for all these Irish cousins, feeling a superiority to their uncultivated outlook and yet jealous of their noisy, athletic gang. In particular he has an uncomfortable admiration for Pat Dumay, older than him by a year, he’s a natural, casual rider, known to his family as ‘the iron man’ and the reason Andrew joined a cavalry regiment in spite of his fear of horses. Pat is as Catholic as Andrew is Protestant and with Andrew fighting in the Great War and Pat an Irish Patriot, the two cousins are set on opposite sides and against each other as plans for the rebellion take shape and tension mounts, in the struggle for Home Rule.
Dervla Murphy was given a bike and an atlas for her 10th birthday; and within days had started planning her journey to India from her home in the West of Ireland. Her discovery of cycling is covered (and much more) in her fabulous book Wheels within Wheels; but things get in the way and it’s not until the 14th January, 1963, and she’s 31, that she sets off on her bicycle Roz from Dunkirk towards Delhi; undaunted, and with a pistol to keep under her pillow.
Practicalities, like visa’s and a packing list are covered in the introduction along with the trials of travelling across a frozen and snow bound Europe; before her diary and the real adventure begins on the 26th March in Teheren. The pages of the diary were sent home every few months and circulated, before the last friend on the circuit stored them away for future reference, as Dervla says ‘this book is the “Future Reference”‘
The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd and Greengates by R.C.Sheriff have always amazed me that they’re written by men, they seem to write about women with a level of insight that I wouldn’t think possible, and now I have to add Colm Tóibín to my list, with this study of bereavement.
The novel opens in medias res as Nora is seeing out yet another well meaning visitor, calling because her beloved husband Maurice has died. Only 40 and facing a future that was never meant to be.we follow her over three years from 1969 to 1972 as she finds a way to build a life with her 4 children; the 2 girls in Dublin and the younger 2 boys still at home with her in Wexford.
Tóibín gets right under her skin to the point that she could be accused of being self centred in her grief, we seem to be thinking about the boys, more than she is. But this close observation means that it isn’t a depressing read because its focus is on her living.
“So this was what being alone was like, she thought. It was not the solitude she had been going through, nor the moments when she felt his death like a shock to her system, as though she had been in a car accident, it was this wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted, and all of it oddly pointless and confusing.”
Set in a small Irish town during the run up to Christmas in 1985, everybody gathers to light the tree and sing carols. But the convent on the edge of town, has always been a source of rumours. It has a training school and laundry attached to it but no one is quite sure who’s living there with The Good Shepherd nuns.
Bill Furlong, the local coal and timber merchant counts his blessings. Married to Eileen and with five daughters doing well at school, he’s happy with his lot and has ‘a deep, private joy that these children were his own.‘ He knows that it could have been very different. His own mother was 16 when she had him and could easily have ended up in the laundry had the wealthy widow she worked for not taken them in. When he delivers some coal to the convent he comes face to face with life inside and with one child in particular.
Bill was given a copy of A Christmas Carol as a boy and this year he’s asked for David Copperfield and I thought there was a touch of Dickensian sentimentality running through this tale. I found Bill a really believable character, he doesn’t have much but he has enough, he sees the value in the small things around him but he also sees the child in the convent. Can he make a difference and confront the complicit silence of the town or will he too turn away and pretend not to have seen?
When I saw there was a buddy read included in Novellas in November hosted by Cathy and Rebecca I was delighted, surely I could manage one novella in a month? Well, not only did I read it, I lapped it up in one sitting. Claire Keegan was a new author for me and Foster was the most beautiful introduction to her writing.
At first glance it’s a simple story of a young girl in rural Ireland who goes to stay with some relations, the Kinsella’s, while her mother is getting ready for the arrival of a new baby.
Their busy days full of household chores, animals and the farm, are described in language as measured as their actions, but underneath questions are bubbling and it’s soon apparent that there’s a mutual need for comfort. Time and space, a feeling of belonging and being needed are captured perfectly in 88 unsentimental pages.
Beginning on her birth day November 28th, 1931 this wonderful memoir covers the first 30 years of Dervla Murphy’s unusual life. Her parents Fergus and Kathleen Murphy had arrived in Lismore, County Waterford on their wedding day with all their possessions and a golden haired collie called Kevin in the cab of a lorry. They rented half a decaying mini-mansion and Fergus became the county librarian. As Dubliners the locals were already suspicious, that they were penniless and displayed eccentric bourgeois tastes the reception was hostile and resentful. But that doesn’t seem to have mattered a jot, Fergus and Kathleen travelled together around the county setting up branch libraries, sleeping in the small mobile library van to save money needed to buy more books. When the Doctor arrives at the library to tell Fergus he has a baby daughter, Fergus wraps up the 9 records of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and walks 4 miles to the hospital in Cappoquin, where with a borrowed gramophone they start family life.
The essence of this memoir is answering the question ‘who makes us what we are?’ what is the series of intricately connected events, plots and circumstances that influence each other and decide who we become? The countryside around her, her insatiable love of books, her richly unconventional home and her republican relations, all gather in her determined, strong-willed self.
‘For my tenth birthday my parents gave me a second-hand bicycle and Pappa sent me a second-hand atlas. Already I was an enthusiastic cyclist, though I had never before owned a bicycle, and soon after my birthday I resolved to cycle to India one day. I have never forgotten the exact spot, on a steep hill near Lismore, where this decision was made. Half-way up I rather proudly looked at my legs, slowly pushing the pedals round, and the thought came -If I went on doing this for long enough I could get to India.’ The simplicity of the idea enchanted me. I had been pouring over my new atlas every evening travelling in fancy. Now I saw how I could travel in reality – alone, independent and needing very little money.‘
I’m sorry I’ve been missing for so long. A lovely family holiday in Italy led to pure laziness in the sunshine when I got home, and then a dose of Covid turned the laziness into lethargy and an absolute phobia towards my computer which only got worse as the stack of books next to it got taller!
So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been telling myself to just jump in and start writing, however short, however clumsy, make a start, so I’m going to begin with a book I hardly remember anything about. Except that I absolutely loved it, and read it in one satisfied gulp.
Katherine Proctor, an artist, has arrived in Barcelona on October 24th, 1950 having left her husband and child and their home in Ireland. She isn’t a brave women, it takes her enormous courage to sit in a cafe alone for her meals, but gradually and tentatively she starts to explore the city and meets Miguel, another artist, with whom she makes a new life and eventually moves with him to the mountains of northern Spain.
I love the idea of taking part in the challenges that crop up but never seem to get my timing right. I read this for the Reading Ireland challenge in March but as usual find myself a few weeks behind, still, it got me to pick this up from the pile on the box at the end of my bed and I’m glad I did because it was really good!
In 1945 16 year old Catherine Goggin is thrown out of her village in West Cork one Sunday morning during mass while her family watch from the second pew. She takes the late afternoon bus to Dublin, and meets Seán MacIntyre and Jack Smoot. The three share a dingy flat together while Catherine makes plans for her future. She entrusts the baby to ‘a little hunchbacked Redemptorist nun’ to find a family with whom he’ll have a better life, and so begins Cyril’s story as he tries to negotiate life and find out who he is. Continue reading “The Heart’s Invisible Furies”→
Constance and Hannah, Dan and Emmet and their mother Rosaleen are the family from County Clare at the centre of The Green Road.
Split into two parts, the first part concentrates on the characters as individuals, each one given their own episode to tell their story at a particular time, starting with Hannah aged 12 in 1980; until in part two, back in Ireland for Christmas, we see the family together in 2005. Continue reading “The Green Road”→
I love the idea of taking part in the challenges that crop up but never seem to get my timing right. I read this for the Reading Ireland challenge in March but as usual find myself a few weeks behind, still, it got me to pick this up from the pile on the box at the end of my bed and I’m glad I did because it was really good!
Just Reading A Book 