bloodygranuaile

This past weekend I attended a Lá Gaeilge and, as I was having library hold fatigue, decided to take a break from my library books and read one of the books I had picked up at the last La Gaeilge in January: Darach O’Seaghdha’s Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not-So-Dead Language. Darach is perhaps best known for running the

theirishfor account on Twitter back when Twitter was still a) Twitter and b) sort of usable.

This was an odd little grab bag of a book but it did what it was supposed to do, which was be fun. Irish has a reputation in Ireland of not being fun, or at least it did until quite recently, when the Second Gaelic Revival started, of which Darach’s Twitter account and his podcast, also called Motherfoclóir, have been important parts. Kneecap is another part of it which is why this book paired so well with rewatching the Kneecap movie on Saturday. Anyway, the book has some commentary and linguistic history of the language itself, some personal essays about Darach’s relationship with it as a child with Gaelgeoir parents back during the Celtic Tiger years when the language was deeply uncool, and a lot of vocabulary lists in various degrees of utility. (They are not intended to be useful; they are intended to be interesting.) I don’t know if this book made my Irish any better (I have other books for that, which I should use more) but I certainly enjoyed reading this and it was a nice break from both Duolingo and the self-imposed tyranny of my reading schedule. It makes me want to relisten to the whole Motherfoclóir podcast back catalog.

I don’t like having series split up on my shelves and yet for some reason I read Walter Macken’s Seek the Fair Land back in 2015 and have had the two sequels sitting around separated from their fellow for nine years now. Anyway I decided that was enough of that nonsense and it was time to continue the trilogy; while I didn’t get around to it during Sad Irish Literature Month or my first foray to Maine this year, this weekend it was time! I was determined to at least start on the very depressing-looking The Silent People, and next year I will read The Scorching Wind, for reals.

The Silent People follows the life of a Connemara man named Dualta Duane, starting when he is in his late teens in the 1820s. Duane’s parents died in a famine and he has been raised by his uncle, the schoolmaster, so he can read and write and speaks English pretty well. Trouble begins when the landlord’s son hits him with a whip for not getting out of the way fast enough at a market fair, and Dualta, in the manner of strong young men who have just been physically assaulted for no reason at all, knocks the rich asshole off his horse. This obviously is the morally correct and badass thing to do, but tactically was not so smart. Both Dualta and his uncle have to flee the village, going in separate directions. The novel then follows Dualta’s adventures and misadventures as he makes his way from the Connemara hills to the valleys of Clare, where he meets up with various people who all have various opinions and theories of change about how Ireland will win its freedom–when to fight and when to endure, what sacrifices are worth it and what isn’t, what type of fighting is noble and honorable and what is cowardly and base. The conversations don’t sound at all like the “dialogue lifted from Twitter” type of conversation about politics written by modern writers who are all on Twitter, probably because Macken was writing in the 1960s; I cannot say if the conversations however are particularly authentic to the 1820s or if they are too 1960s to be good historical fiction. All I can say is that they are just as frustrating and stupid as listening to real ordinary people talk about their theories of change in politics, especially the type of ordinary people who don’t know terms like “theory of change” and are only just starting to examine their own assumptions enough to articulate them. Daniel O’Connell (here “O Connell”) makes a set of cameos as the man who basically introduced the theory of nonviolent mass pressure to Ireland singlehandedly; we see his theory, like so many others, work up until the point where it doesn’t.

Dualta crosses paths occasionally with a young lady named Una, whose mother was a McMahon who converted to Protestantism upon marriage, and whose father is a wealthy Protestant landlord. Dualta meets her when he gets hired into the man’s household as a “Trojan horse” from his previous job, which was ostensibly helping a local shopkeeper run her shop but actually using his rare bilingual literacy (the literacy was rare; the bilingualism wasn’t) to write threatening letters on behalf of the local agroterrorist organization. Una converts to Catholicism and is kicked out of the house; later, Dualta runs into her again when she sets up as a day school teacher in a random valley in Clare. Dualta manages to snag a ten-year lease on a bit of property no one else wants in the same valley, and, being both newcomers and the best-educated people in the valley, they eventually join forces, first wrangling the weans at the school and then getting married. They adopt some other misfits over the course of their time in the valley as various political happenings come and go, such as the election of Daniel O Connell to Parliament–a massive event that involves thousands of people all walking to Ennis, because apparently in the 1820s a county would only have one polling station–until the famine hits in 1845 and their painstakingly scraped-together life falls apart.

The book is sad but also dryly funny at times, which is a common enough combination in Irish literature. The writing style has something very midcentury about it that I can’t quite put my finger on, where it includes a lot of small details but they are all in very plain, unflowery language. There is a wealth of information about rural life in 19th-century Ireland woven into the story, a way of life that’s not only lost to time but also which none of us who grew up with running water would put up with for a single second. These people were poor as dirt, did backbreaking labor, owned nothing, and had no security. They rented land, but not houses; they had to build their own houses on the land they rented, and when they were evicted the houses were torn down or set on fire. This meant that what passed for a house for tenant farmers then wouldn’t pass muster as a garage now.

Overall this was, I wouldn’t say a fun time exactly, but a very immersive one.

For some reason I had been under the impression that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent was a big sprawling Gothic novel, but it is, in fact, a satirical little novella, which is also a great type of book to be. Written shortly before the Union was enacted in 1800, it chronicles four generations of the fictional house of Rackrent, a Protestant Ascendancy landowning family as ill-governed and exploitative as the rental practice they are named after. (“Rack-renting” in British Ireland was a practice by which lazy absentee landlords would rent out all their land at once to a land agent at a reasonable price, and the land agent was charged with finding tenants for the individual lots, which he could sublet out at whatever extortionate rent he could get for them.) The story is told from the point of view of the aged house steward, Thady Quirk, whose son Jason becomes a lawyer and eventually manages to scoop the entire Rackrent estate and title from its profligate fourth heir, Sir Condy.

The novella features a lot of gently humorous digs at the culture and folkways of the indigenous Irish tenantry, alongside a lot of absolutely savage humorous digs at the uselessness and destructive tendencies (self- and otherwise) of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, of which Edgeworth was a member. The book is safely set just a generation or so back so that Edgeworth’s contemporaries could laugh at their predecessors’ folly and not be insulted themselves, and if they did see themselves at all in the terrible behavior of the four generations of Rackrent lords chronicled, well, they were clearly behind the times and should get with the progressive paternalistic program that Edgeworth’s father was an advocate and practitioner of (mainly, that the Anglo-Irish lords should live on and manage their own estates and live within their means and not engage in rack-renting).

The four generations of Rackrent upper-class twits chronicled are thus:
Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who changes his name and presumably his religion to become Sir Patrick Rackrent and be a lord under the English regime. Sir Patrick was much beloved in the countryside for adhering to old Irish norms of lordly hospitality, which did not actually pair real well with the newfangled English laws and customs around keeping a property solvent.
Sir Murtagh, an extremely litigious man with a very pick-and-choose attitude around older Irish customs. Spent so much money litigating around keeping bits of the estate that he ended up selling bits of it off to pay the legal fees anyway.
Sir Kit Stopgap, a classic absentee landlord, who gambled away all the estate’s money in Bath, married a rich Jewish woman and locked her up for seven years when she wouldn’t hand over a particular diamond necklace, and was generally terrible.
Sir Condy Rackrent, who was educated in the law but very bad at it. He wasn’t absentee but continued his forebears’ traditions of running up huge bills and not paying them. He eventually runs out of people to sponge money off of, especially since he pissed off his wife’s family by marrying her so they won’t help, and runs for Parliament to avoid being put in jail, but Parliament has its own set of expenses he can’t pay. He ends up selling first one property and eventually the whole shebang over to Jason Quirk, who he had gone to school with and who had been his land agent for many years. The tale of Sir Condy takes up the biggest part of the page count, being about as long as the tales of the other three guys put together.

The story is told in first-person style that we are assured is the unvarnished, unembellished verbal account of Sir Condy’s old steward, and it is quite a feat of colorful Irish storytelling. Footnotes, a glossary, and other commentary for the benefit of the “English reader” are provided in a voice known only as the Editor, who can be hilariously judgmental about the Irish. The place-names are a mix of cartoonishly on-the-nose English terms (such as Rackrent and Stopgap) and cartoonishly long stereotypes of Anglicized Irish place names, such as “the bog of Allyballycarricko’shaughlin,” which Thady cannot for the life of him figure out what the third Lady Rackrent finds funny about.

While there is a lot of stuff about English property law and Irish country customs that may not be immediately familiar to a modern reader unless they already read a lot about those sorts of thing, it’s still overall a very fast and funny read, and a well-deserved takedown of one of the most useless and exploitative groups of dimwits to walk the earth (not necessarily to walk Ireland, though, as half of them never set foot there).

I picked up a copy of Ancient Ireland: The User’s Guide for five euro when I was visiting in 2016, although our trip wasn’t particularly focused on ancient stuff. Ireland has a lot of history and we could only get so much of it in in 10 days.

One issue I keep running into with material about very ancient Ireland is that the audience is usually either academics or New Agey types. I don’t have any academic background in this stuff so the serious academic writings are all a bit over my head, but the familiarity I’m interested in developing is more academic in nature than it is New Agey, so I get put off by the stuff that’s stripped down to be accessible specifically for people who want to incorporate the Wisdom of the Ancients into their lives, especially because that stuff is then usually written by people who have their own opinions about the Wisdom of the Ancients that they’re trying to evangelize. This book, unfortunately, is no different–it’s not a really serious academic study of Ancient Ireland, which is fine, but the accessible-to-non-experts stuff in it is peppered with the author’s somewhat generically cranky Old Guy Opinions about everything wrong with the modern world. This is especially awkward given that the book itself was written in the early ‘90s so even some of the cranky old guy opinions that could have sort of held up in 1992, like that the murder rate in New York City is pretty high, have now aged poorly even by cranky old guy opinion standards.

The material that is in fact on topic is pretty easy-to-read and interesting. We get a nice grab bag of ancient monuments and places, and some of the accompanying mythology. We are introduced to the various ancient peoples of Ireland and how they ascended into mythology. There are some pictures, although they are in black and white. It definitely makes me want to go back to Ireland and do a trip with a focus on visiting ancient sites, though hopefully I could find some more historical and less New-Agey tours and materials on it.

I already can’t remember how I found this book and I am only vaguely convinced it was the LitHub newsletter, but I found myself putting in a library request for a new nonfiction release: Henry Hemming’s Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland. This book appealed to multiple of my interests, mainly Irish history and spy shit.

This book tells the story of Frank Hegarty, IRA quartermaster and British informer, and his murder, most likely by the high-ranking British secret agent codenamed Stakeknife. A double agent getting whacked by another double agent! Juicy stuff!

And it is juicy but it is also profoundly sad. Frank seemed like a nice, regular guy, not at all the sort of hardened psycho that you’d picture spending years as a double agent (Freddie Scappaticci does seem to fit that vibe a little more, though). He seems to have become vulnerable to something as taboo and dangerous as informing because he had actually lost faith in the IRA militants’ strategy of a “long war” and wanted the violence to stop, and genuinely thought that helping the British would save lives. There are strategic notes to be taken, here, about the cost of violence, and the limits on the efficacy of terror to achieve political goals, but mostly the note in question is this: the same thing that gives a terror campaign its efficacy–mainly, that it’s terrible–also means that even people on your “side” may run out of stomach for keeping it going. By the time the Troubles ended, the IRA was absolutely lousy with spies. Most notoriously, Agent Stakeknife, the Brits’ most valuable spy, was the most valuable spy because he had infiltrated the Nutting Squad, the internal enforcement unit tasked with identifying and eliminating spies.

Though most of the action in this book takes place over the course of the Troubles itself–which was certainly long enough, dragging on for about thirty years–Four Shots in the Night takes us all the way up to the present day, through the murder investigation known as Operation Kenova, an attempt by one high-minded (by police standards) faction of the British police to identify and expose Agent Stakeknife and, in essence, solve all the murders that were attributed to him. This operation in some ways succeeded, in that it gathered a lot of information, enough to put a case together against the man they’d identified. However, the other police units–mainly MI5, the infamously shadowy intelligence organization that wasn’t used to answering to anyone about anything–were less than cooperative, and after the case against Stakeknife was submitted to whatever government body decides if the state is going to prosecute the case or not (I returned the book to the library already, sorry), two things happened before a verdict could be rendered. One was that Stakeknife died, under completely non-fishy circumstances, due to just being old by this point. And the other was that the British government introduced a bill to essentially make it impossible to prosecute anyone of any faction for any crimes committed during the Troubles whatsoever. This has been highly controversial and fits within a longstanding and infuriating British tradition of doing a bunch of war crimes and then immediately getting all “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” about it and making it illegal to remember anything they did because, you know, these situations are very complicated and we’re terribly concerned about reopening old wounds and at some point we’ve all got to coexist and move on with our lives, and other sentiments that are both true and clearly being abused here.

This book follows well in the vein of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland and Rory Carroll’s There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes that Changed History. All three books are engaging narrative nonfiction that explore one notorious IRA action and trace its history throughout the entire development and resolution of the Troubles. Some familiar faces and events start cropping up once you’ve read more than one of these, but since they each focus on events that are far enough away from each other–the murder of Jean McConville in Belfast, the Brighton Bombing in England, the murder of Frank Hegarty right on the border in Derry–they don’t get too repetitive. After having read the other two, it was interesting to get a much deeper dive into the British infiltration operation and into the IRA’s Nutting Squad, both of which had been only briefly addressed in the other two books, focused as they were on people who were not spies (even the McConville story, in which she was accused of being a spy, could only get so deep into Nutting Squad lore, given that it’s almost certain she wasn’t a spy and the story was therefore not in fact about spies). Writing-wise I found this one a little bit less tight than the others–I don’t necessarily mind a book that bounces around a lot, especially when it’s detailing a complicated story–but the bits that seem to be overdoing the melodramatic stage-setting are few and far between compared to the amount of just genuinely dramatic material, and it didn’t get in the way of being able to follow the story. I think this book maybe does a little bit less hand-holding on the public parts of the Troubles than, for example, Say Nothing does, which is carefully written to be accessible to even the most geographically ignorant American who can’t find Northern Ireland on a map. Overall, I would highly recommend it to anyone who has enough of an interest in the Troubles that they already sort of know what they are, and especially to anyone who liked Keefe’s or Carroll’s books.

Sad Irish Literature Month, Part II, continues! I read Claire Keegan’s Foster last night, the novella that excellent Irish-language film An Cailín Ciúin is based on. So I already basically knew the story.

The one thing I’m not sure I was prepared for was quite how short it is. I read the whole thing in about ninety minutes, which might be less than how long the movie is (OK I just checked and the movie is… 96 minutes. So pretty much exactly how long the movie is, actually). A big (relatively) chunk of the physical book I was holding in my hands was actually a preview of the first few chapters of Small Things Like These, which I only skimmed because I had in fact read just that text yesterday. Foster itself is 92 pages.

Foster is from the point of view of an unnamed nine-year-old girl (she’s called Cait in the movie but not here) from a dysfunctional and very chaotic household–shiftless dad, continually pregnant harried mom, several siblings and another one the way–who is unceremoniously dumped with her mother’s childless cousin and her husband for a summer, essentially for the family to have one less person to look after while her mother is dealing with having the latest baby. The story is basically about her learning to be less stressed out and to trust that she is in fact being taken care of. There is not a whole lot of plot per se; things happen, but they are all small and domestic things. The girl runs down the drive to the post box and back, and learns to help out around the house. They go shopping in town. A neighbor die and has a wake; another, very nosy and unpleasant neighbor interrogates the girl and gossips about the Kinsella’s (the couple the girl is staying with–they’re Edna and John here, though they’re Eibhlín and Séan in the film version); the girl falls in the well and catches a cold. It’s all drawn in very observant, understated details; none of these characters are expressive people.

I did find myself once again struggling with wanting to know what happens next but I think that is on me as a reader being fundamentally a big-fat-novel type of person. This is a little character-driven novella and it’s good at being that.

It’s April, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still Sad Irish Literature Month! March is only so long, after all.

After watching An Cailín Ciúin I decided I should check out some Claire Keegan. She is apparently a favorite of recent Oscar winner and celebrated Corkman Cillian Murphy, who is also the star of an adaptation of her novella Small Things Like These, which premiered at Berlinale a few weeks ago and has not hit theatrical release yet. I am grumpy that I cannot watch this movie, but I can read the novella, so I did.

This story is about the Magdalene laundries and it starts off very pointedly with an excerpt from the Proclamation of 1916, specifically quoting the bit about guaranteeing religious and civil liberties and cherishing all the children of the nation equally. I knew going into it that this was a story about how monstrously Ireland failed at upholding that ideal in the first eight decades or so of its existence (or arguably, all of it up until 2018, depending on whether you want to mark the abortion referendum or the closing of the last Magdalene laundry as the date upon which it entered modern morality), and also I have this exact text hanging on my wall, but I still found it emotionally effective.

Small Things Like These is more or less of the non-genre genre people call “general fiction,” where it isn’t a mystery or a western or a romance or sci-fi or anything like that, just a story about more or less contemporary people doing basically believable things. This is, to be frank, not a type of book I read much of! You could maybe call this historical fiction a little if you want to count 1985 as historical, which I feel a bit weird about doing. But at any rate it is sort of a slice-of-life novella except life in 1980’s Ireland meant living right on top of some very nasty institutions that everybody pretended were basically fine and surely all the things you heard about them were just gossip.

Our protagonist here is a forty-year-old man named Bill Furlong, the illegitimate son of a single mother who had had the good fortune to be employed by an independently well-off (or at least self-sufficient) Protestant woman of kind character and less judgmental sexual morals than the prevailing Catholic ethos of the times. This meant that instead of being adopted out to Americans or Australians or somebody, Bill was allowed to be raised by his mother, who retained her live-in employment as a domestic at Mrs. Wilson’s. Thus, Bill had more or less three parental figures–his mother; the paternal farmhand, Ned; and the grandmotherly Mrs. Wilson, who encouraged him to read and study and look up words in the dictionary and generally be of quiet Protestant work ethic type habits, and who gave him some money to get started up with when he got married. As a result, Bill survived the taunts of his schoolmates about as unscathed as anybody in mid-century Ireland managed to be and worked his way up in a coalyard from wage laborer to coal merchant, securing a reasonably safe and modern lifestyle for himself, his wife Eileen, and eventually their five daughters.

Bill mostly keeps his head down and works and has only the occasional bouts of existential philosophizing and restlessness, usually thinking about what he has to do tomorrow so he doesn’t have to dwell on his childhood and such, although around Christmastime he does find himself thinking about things that happened to him when he was younger, like the time he asked Santa for either his daddy or a jigsaw puzzle and the fictional old man provided neither. But overall Bill is just doing his coal merchant thing when he has a series of unsettling encounters at the big convent that sits perched over the town of New Ross, separated from the girls’ school his two oldest go to only by a suspiciously broken-glass-topped wall.

The unsettling encounters–one with a girl who asks him to let her out the back door so she can drown herself, the second with an unwed young mother who had been locked in the coal-shed overnight–put Bill into a bit of a moral crisis. Crossing any Church order was, practically speaking, deeply unwise, and he has a family to look after and a hard-won respectability in the community to maintain, especially in the economic slump that was going on in 1985. What will Bill do, and what will be the cost? Will the consequences of the public shame of crossing the Church on behalf of a girl of “low” character outweigh the private shame of looking away, doing nothing, and continuing to go to church like a big hypocrite?

Being a novella, this book doesn’t dig in real deep either to the specifics of what went on in the laundries (there are, you know, nonfiction books and government reports for that), nor to what happens to Bill after he makes a decision. Being a completist-minded sort I would definitely be down to find out what happens to Bill and Sarah and Eileen and the girls and the town of New Ross; I am used to a story structure where making a decision to take an action out in public is basically the inciting incident for a story, not the end of it. But as a psychological novella it works very well as a story about one man’s path toward making a decision.

One thing I liked about this book is that it’s very detailed, giving a very textured account of the material aspects of Bill’s life. I spent a good deal of the book Googling various brand-name products that were apparently common in lower-middle-class households in Ireland in the 1980s, many of which apparently still exist although they’re not exactly popular in the US or I wouldn’t have had to Google them. (I’m wondering if Pamplemousse carries Ribena now; they have a lot of British and Irish imports.) I also had to look up the word “stotious” (which means drunk) so I definitely feel like this book packed a lot of enlarging my understanding into a very small number of pages.

Another thing I liked about this book was the dialogue; as a hideous American millennial I found the speech patterns and word choices of these folks in the old country to be very charming and linguistically interesting, and I was trying to imagine the accents in my head except my mental geography of Irish accents is a bit weak. At any rate I will never not be a sucker for Hiberno-English even when people are using it to say small-minded things, which happens a lot in sad Irish literature.

I am excited to next read Foster, which is the book An Cailín Ciúin is based off of and which is apparently the specific favorite of recent Oscar winner and celebrated Corkman Cillian Murphy. I already know the storyline but also the storyline isn’t really the point, I think. It’ll be interesting to see how it works in writing and in English instead of on film and in Irish.

Several years ago at a Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale I picked up a book on the Irish revolutionary decade, A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923, by Dearmaid Ferriter. I cannot truthfully say I remember anything particularly specific about this book that caught my eye other than “Hey, look, a book on the Irish Revolution,” but that was quite enough for me to spend the seven dollars it was going for at the sale. It then sat on my shelf for as many years until I decided it needed to be part of this March’s sad Irish reading, in part due to a request from a friend for book recommendations that gave a good overview of the Irish revolution.

This book, it must be said, is not exactly an overview of the Irish revolution, so I will still be on the lookout for one of those. What this book is is more of a history of the history of the Irish revolution, which I did mostly have enough existing knowledge to follow, even if a good amount of it is dramatized edutainment like The Wind that Shakes the Barley (fantastic movie, not a substitute for actual history reading).

That said, this book, from my layperson’s perspective, is very good at what it does, which is bring together like a bajillion different sources and viewpoints and archival materials to lay out a much more multifaceted, nuanced, and detailed picture of both the revolutionary decade itself and the historical memory of that time in Irish (and sometimes Irish diaspora) society than you would find from, say, half a lifetime of half-remembered songs (hi). There’s a big focus in the beginning of the book on the Irish school system, and the changes in focus on what history study was for, what should be included, how it was taught, when something stopped being the last batch of current events and started becoming history that you had to actually teach people about, etc., and a big focus at the end of the book about state commemorations, both formal and informal. The chunk in the middle is more focused on slowly going through different aspects of the revolutionary decade itself and sifting through claims by various historians and what sources do and do not support their claims. There’s a lot of primary source stuff from regular people that I found particularly fascinating, especially regarding what happened after the revolution–the section on just the pensions claims for service in various British and Irish militaries and police forces really expanded my mental image of “what overthrowing a government and installing a new one looks like.” The book also contains a few choice selections of bad poetry, which I suppose is of important historical value in pointing out that just because Ireland has produced a lot of great poets that doesn’t mean that everyone in Ireland is a great poet. Also it’s entertaining, which is nice in a book this dense and whose subject matter is so generally heavy.

I don’t know that I would recommend this book to someone with no background on the Irish revolution but I would for sure recommend it very, very strongly to anyone with a nice pat narrative grasp of the Irish revolution and is using that to inform their views on basically anything at all. Ferriter does a very good job of gently poking at the assumptions at play in a variety of narratives used by various parties and it’s good to be critical of when those narratives are being used for particular ends.

Continued my Irish History Month reading with one of the few remaining volumes out of the Katrine Fitzgerald Memorial Collection, i.e. the books I picked out of some big storage bins full of my aunt’s literary possessions. I have very distinct memories of sitting on my dad’s back deck picking out all the most interesting-looking Irish literature from the bins. Despite the name of this collection of books in my head, my aunt was still alive at the time; we were going through the possessions that were being offloaded as she had to downsize to move from her house into an assisted living facility, which was 2015 or earlier because I brought some of the books from this collection with me when we went to Ireland for Easter 2016, and my aunt did not pass away until the following November, ten days before my thirtieth birthday. All this is to say I tend to have some big feelings around actually reading the books I inherited from my aunt because I will feel bad if I don’t like them.

To that end, now that I had found myself assured by multiple parties that Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds was a justified classic and a very funny satire, and also because it was short enough that I figured I could read it in less than a week, I was after nearly ten years of it taking up a whole quarter-inch of precious shelf space finally ready to read it. So I did.

At Swim-Two-Birds is about, and from the point of view of, an insufferably pretentious and lazy college student who writes a novel in part to keep himself mentally occupied and also in part to avoid having to either do work at college or interact with his uncle, whose house he lives in. The students’ other main pastime for avoiding his responsibilities and family is to go out with one or another of his college buddies and drink entirely too much porter, as has been the custom of college boys since colleges were invented, or thereabouts.

The college student’s novel is about a weird old guy who lives in a hotel and is writing a novel. All the characters in his novel come to life for the purposes of being in the novel, and have to live in the hotel with him. A few of the characters are original but most are hired out from other works of literature. They are in general displeased with their assigned roles in the novel, especially the guy who is supposed to be the villain, a Mr. Furriskey. The characters discover that their author can only control the while he’s awake, so they begin drugging him so that he’s asleep most of the time, and they have plenty of time to plot their revenge, and also to sit around in the hotel telling each other stories and reciting poetry and generally being chatty old guys. At some point there is a pooka whose wife is probably not a kangaroo. There is also a good fairy whose name is Good Fairy, and he is an arsehole.

I’m not very good at reviewing modernist experimental stuff and this is definitely that. The book has three different beginnings and several layers of metafiction going on. It’s the sort of book that doesn’t use any quotation marks, which is something I tend to find too self-consciously literary, but when done well does give everything an extra layer of disorientation, and here it’s done well. The voices of the different characters writing or speaking at different times are usually pretty distinct; the shifts in style when the author or speaker or, sometimes, subject of a scene changes are very effective. There is no even remotely rational “straight man” to be the readers’ cipher; the college student seems to believe he is reasonably normal (if somewhat better than everyone else), but his prose style feels like injecting high-octane autism directly into your eyeballs. Every character appears to be under the delusion that they are perfectly normal except occasionally Mad King Sweeny. The actual sanest character is probably the pooka MacPhellimey, who is literally a devil, but takes on the role of occasionally trying to keep the other characters somewhat on track with what they are supposed to be doing.

The book is extremely funny and I am sure I do not get all the jokes just as much as I know I do not get all the literary references. It for sure contains one of the funniest portrayals of Learned Discourse as written by an idiot that I have ever seen, consisting essentially of random facts culled from a series of out-of-date, moralizing encyclopedias that the unnamed frame-story student has in his bedroom. It also contains the line “My name is the Good Fairy, said the Good Fairy. I am a good fairy” which I found inordinately funny. There is some very goofy poetry that I am sure someone has since set to music. The looping, long-winded, daft-old-man dialogue of various stripes was often funny in the way that Uncle Colm in Derry Girls is funny, where the characters are being insufferable and boring but the reader is far from bored. The book made me really want to dig into much of the older Irish poetry and folklore that O’Brien is satirizing, although it did not particularly inspire any desire to read any of the Westerns parodied that have American-West-style cow-punchers plying their trade in urban Dublin, guns bouncing.

I think this book was good for my brain because afterward I had the brain equivalent of sore hamstrings. It definitely makes me more excited about possibly reading more difficult Irish literature, like Joyce or weird ancient poetry, which tends to be stuff that I feel I ought to read more than stuff I am excited about reading. We shall see if that feeling wears off after a bit or not.

I decided to get a jump on March reading (Irish History Month, no longer short-book February) by picking up a book I’d borrowed from my father: Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

O’Toole was born around the same time as my father, which provided a certain reading experience for my dad, an Irish-American Catholic growing up in postwar suburban Connecticut. I am thirty years younger than both of them so the reading experience was quite different for me; I only started having that “oh yes, I remember what was going on over here during that time” and “I think I heard about that while it was happening” kind of comparative experience right toward the end, when he was talking about things like the gay marriage referendum and the repeal of the constitutional abortion ban. For the rest of it I was pretty squarely Reading About History Times, which suited me just fine as I enjoy reading about history times.

O’Toole is a very engaging writer. Most of the chapters start off with an attention-grabbing anecdote–sometimes personal, like the time he accidentally let the pigs out on a summer trip to the Gaeltacht and the pigs had to be rescued by Sean O Riada, but other times more traditional newspaper-article type teases–which he then ties into the larger analysis of whatever aspect of Irish life and politics in whatever year or years the chapter covers. He’s also got a good handle on that sort of dry, respectable humor that really good reporters ought to have, where they are funny without doing anything as overt as making jokes.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is largely a chronicle of the various hypocrisies, self-delusions, bits of wishful thinking, and self-defeating romanticism of post-Independence Ireland, including his own journeys of disillusionment with such pillars of Irish society as the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fail party, and militant nationalism (more specifically, the tradition of venerating doomed blood sacrifice to make songs about over figuring out how to actually win material political victories). In the hands of a less skilled and thoughtful writer it could be possible to conclude that independence was a mistake, or that the Irish really are as ungovernable and uncivilized as their critics say, with their slavish devotion to a backward, medieval faith and their affinity for doing terrorism. O’Toole is, fortunately, not that writer. He writes insightfully and sympathetically of the shame and insecurities that gave rise to the bad psychological habits of the Irish–the colonial survival mechanism of knowing things without acknowledging them, an increasingly maladaptive habit that festered until the country broke open–while being unsparing about the human toll of the various things Ireland looked away from for decades, from the physical and sexual violence of the Church institutions that ran so much of Ireland’s social infrastructure to tax evasion. (The tax evasion was a really big problem.)

The nuance, the attention to detail, and the determination to look through rhetoric and sentiment and justification to find the human element in every story, was really thrown into sharp relief when I was fortunate enough to have tickets to the Wolfe Tones’ farewell concert in Boston fall into my lap immediately upon finishing this book. The show was enjoyable but did not exactly showcase a coherent political analysis, being a celebration of Irish militant nationalist history without regard to its contradictions and carefully calculated to avoid offending the political sensibilities of current Irish-Americans essentially regardless of what they were, or at least to keep everyone so hyped that they don’t notice that they sort of offended everyone’s political sensibilities regardless of what they were. The show started off with a (regrettably very good) Boston police pipe-and-drum parade band that barely fit on the stage and then, following a reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in its entirety, went into a slideshow about the Easter Rising that began off with a photograph of an Irish Volunteers recruitment poster railing against the excesses of the “Peelers” (i.e., the cops). A very kumbaya-esque let’s-all-hold-hands-and-pray-for-peace-and-brotherhood type ditty (“Give Me Your Hand,” maybe?) segued seamlessly into “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a nationalist classic about getting into street fights with either the actual Tans or maybe your racist neighbors, depending on how you want to read it; it’s a bit ambiguous. “The Streets of New York” was dedicated to an NYPD police officer and was followed up almost immediately with a rendition of “Joe McDonnell,” a song about one of the hunger strikers, whose chorus begins “And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun.” Pro-peace, pro-cop, and pro-terrorism all at the same time! Erin go bragh!

It’s undeniable that the Tones are a forcefully good time; O’Toole has a hilarious anecdote about himself as a teenager watching a Wolfe Tones concert and finding himself unexpectedly yelling “Up the IRA!” at the Taoiseach immediately afterwards. But being surrounded by the whitest crowd I’ve ever seen in Dorchester clapping for the BPD and yelling “ooh ah up the ‘ra” while a very 1990s-looking PowerPoint of grainy old photos of the patriot dead played behind the band was for sure a bit over-the-top, and I could feel a critical little ghost Fintan O’Toole sitting in the back of my mind, possibly having a nosebleed. (We left after a very drunk woman in a Free Palestine shirt–featuring a keffiyeh-masked militant with a rocket standing back-to-back with a balaclava-masked Provo with an Armalite–was gently removed by the mostly-Black theater staff–the only Black people on the property–after they asked her to stop putting her handbag on the stage about twelve times, and we decided we’d had enough of a politically weird experience to keep busy analyzing it for the rest of our lives.)

Where was I? Right, actual history.

This book clocks in at about 500 pages and I feel like if I got going I could probably write 500 pages about it, but I’d end up carefully rereading the whole thing in the process, and that might be a project better put off a bit, at least if I want to get through other books this year. I found this book unputdownable enough that I stayed up too late reading it more nights than one; at the same time, because it touches on so many different things, I also spent a lot of time looking stuff up on my phone (starting with aerial photographs of Crumlin and going through a bunch of music on Spotify and the artwork of Jim Fitzpatrick), and staring off into the middle distance while my brain struggled to tie in the things I was reading about here to all the others scattered bits and pieces that make up Irish history in my brain–here’s what O’Toole says, and here’s what Rory Carroll said in There Will Be Fire, and didn't Patrick Radden Keefe also talk about that in Say Nothing, and sure there was just an episode about film censorship on The Irish History Podcast, and hey look it’s Michael D. Michael D. Up On His Bikeldy Higgins!

At any rate, I understand why my dad’s been talking my ear off about this book for months and why he insisted I read it, and I may find myself becoming completely insufferable about it too!

I don’t remember exactly how this book first came into my view but sometime in the last two months, when I’ve been thinking a lot about political violence and strategies for change and intractable conflicts that are popularly miscast as solely sectarian violence, I became aware that there was a recently released new book about the Troubles, titled There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and the Two Minutes that Changed History, by Guardian columnist Rory Carroll.

This book is structured similarly to Say Nothing in that it focuses on one event of the Troubles, and tries to build the fullest possible picture of that event–before, during, after, context, interviews with the major players (except Gerry Adams, who refuses to ever be interviewed for these things because he still maintains he was never in the IRA), the occasional photo. This one is weighted a bit less on the “history of the entire Troubles” end, probably because the actual operation of the Brighton bombing and the subsequent manhunt for Patrick Magee was somewhat more complex than the murder of Jean McConville. It situates the England Department within the rest of the IRA and the discussions about strategy and resource allocation that were going on in the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein.

After having just finished Let This Radicalize You and If We Burn, I found the strategy talk to be some of the most interesting stuff in the book–despite pearl-clutching from the respectable media there’s actually an enormous difference between organizing strategies that don’t involve armed struggle (known in the official literature as “nonviolent resistance,” although in popular parlance the designation of nonviolence can be revoked for any reason whatsoever) and organizing strategies in which shootings, bombings, and arson are the main tools one’s repertoire of resistance. But at the same time, it would appear that questions about burnout, opsec, training, not talking to cops, PR, public sympathy, the limits and contradictions of any given strategy, internal diplomacy, and resource allocation are fairly constant across any organization that is trying to effect political change. I find myself once again impressed by the IRA’s creative strategic thinking–combining the hunger strikes, which had gotten easy to ignore, with election campaigns, which necessarily force attention upon the candidate as an individual, was a stroke of genius that saved what seems like would have been an otherwise ineffective act of self-destruction; I also think Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism is the only way I’ve ever seen of disrupting or signaling illegitimacy in an elected government that isn’t self-defeating at worst or irrelevant at best. (Not contesting elections is a perfectly fine strategy for groups that aren’t interested in the electoral sphere or don’t have the resources to stand elections, but it certainly doesn’t exert any power within the electoral sphere, no matter what goofy shit you tell yourself about “not legitimizing” or “boycotting” or whatever. Standing an election, winning it, and then refusing to take the oath of fealty to the Crown or haul your ass to Westminster at least keeps the seat out of the hands of your political enemies, and allows you to do constituent services.)

Anyway, back to the bombing. This was a meticulously planned operation, and Carroll gets us inside the heads of both the IRA operatives involved with carrying it out, several of the Conservative Party targets and victims (not always quite the same thing–Thatcher was really the target, although I don’t think the republicans would have been upset if the execrable Norman Tebbit had got got), and a whole slew of police detectives, bomb disposal technicians, fingerprint experts, and other law enforcement and anti-terrorism personnel across at least a dozen different jurisdictions and departments, with working relationships to each other in varying degrees of functionality. The investigative work on display in this book is both riveting to read and an interesting look into what solving public safety threats can look like when the cops don’t have endless guns and free reign to just bust anyone’s heads that they feel like. A key quality on display was patience, in this case necessitated by political realities rather than any personal virtues of the cops in question: Magee spent quite a while on the lam at Ballymun Towers outside of Dublin, in the Republic where the English police didn’t have jurisdiction. England, for various reasons, wasn’t in a hurry to start another full-blown war with the Republic, and as such, simply airstriking Ballymun Towers to rubble wasn’t on the table. So instead they waited. This, as a quick look at the news will tell you, is not the only possible response of governments to terrorism; the political conditions have to make it not just the sensible and humane thing to do, but the only course of action that’s not suicidally costly.

Anyway, political analysis aside (it’s so hard for me to set it aside right now though!), this is a ripping good read. We get cameos from well-known shady characters in the IRA weapons pipeline, like Whitey Bulger and Muammar Gaddafi; we learn about bomb technology, Victorian engineering, and the art of fingerprint analysis; no detail is spared in the grisly account of the explosion and its aftermath. Carroll manages to mostly keep his own opinions out of the picture, but does a very good job with both dry, understated humor and in humanizing–not necessarily sympathizing with, but definitely humanizing–all parties involved. The actual historical events do more or less follow a conventional story structure–the plot is hatched, planned, and carried out, then the investigation is conducted and the perpetrators are caught and imprisoned. In the epilogue, to the degree that real life has epilogues, they are let out early as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. As we leave off, the Conservative Party’s paranoia and meanness had led to Brexit, opening up the tantalizing possibility that Ireland might, at some point in the near future, actually be reunited–democratically, by referendum. This is not to say that the Brighton bombing didn’t accomplish anything or that Violence Doesn’t Work or anything that simplistic–indeed, the psychological damage it inflicted upon Thatcher’s party may well have been part of what got Britain to this point. History is a funny old thing like that.

Every year when I visit Maine I like to read something nice and nautical, usually about pirates, and this past weekend was no exception. I’d run out of regular pirate history books, though, so I figured it was finally time to indulge in a find I’d made in my Aunt Birdie’s book box when my dad was cleaning out her storage unit: a weeded library copy of a 1986 historical novel titled Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas, by one Morgan Llywelyn.

I expected this book to be very ‘80s and frankly I also expected it to be very bad, and I’m pleased to report that I was quite correct on the first front but not as much on the second. There’s something in the particular cadence of pseudo-old-timey writing and the particular brand of essentialist-but-thinks-its-doing-a-feminism gender politics that reminds me a lot of The Mists of Avalon, but I really can’t figure out a way to describe it other than “it’s what women who were interested in medieval shit wrote like in the ‘80s,” and if you know what I’m talking about then you know what I’m talking about.

For all that it is full of hilarious overwriting and cheesy sex scenes, I ended up getting very sucked into the book! It seems pretty well-researched, though obviously much license is taken for the sake of writing a narratively and thematically coherent swashbuckler. I am also not at all bored by things that apparently bore a lot of other readers, like all the complicated webs of relationships and rivalries that characterize old Gaelic clan life. It’s got exciting naval battles and petty internecine power struggles and a couple of really hateable villains (there’s a terrible priest, who is probably fictional, and Sir Richard Bingham, who sadly is not). The characterization of this version of Grace O’Malley is pretty well-done; she does some character growth over her long life but is a recognizably strong personality throughout. It’s not a fantasy book but there’s some mysticism around the old religion that peeps through. Overall, it was an effective mix of things to mightily entertain me specifically.

I was in the mood for some weird Irish folk stories so I picked up my copy of William Butler Yeats’ Mythologies, and it certainly did not disappoint in the “weird” department.

This book is actually several works jammed together into one volume, and they have precious little to do with each other. The first work, “The Celtic Twilight,” is a series of short anecdotes of odd stories Yeats has heard from various rustic persons around Ireland. “The Secret Rose” gets into tales that in form are a bit more recognizable as fairy-stories. “Stories of Red Hanrahan” is a series of short fairy-tales concerning the life of the titular poet, which is full of odd and magically inflected misfortunes. After that things get bizarre, with a batch of stories about alchemy and mysticism and religion, followed by some of Yeat’s philosophizing on the same subjects and also art.

Overall this was a dreamy, interesting read, if a bit hard to follow at times. I feel like I don’t have the background in weird mysticism stuff required to follow the stories at the end of it, although I could probably fix that. The fairy-tales were fun in a rustic, sometimes nonsensical way.

I do not usually read serious important books in anything remotely resembling a timely manner, but I managed to eke out an exception. Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland has been making the press rounds, and the author -- a writer for the New Yorker who also wrote the excellent article "The Family that Built an Empire of Pain" -- went on Chris Hayes' Why Is This Happening? podcast twice, once to talk about the Sacklers and the other to talk about this book and political violence.

So when I had an awkward amount of time to kill before a meeting and I found myself in Porter Square Books, and came upon a stack of Say Nothing copies on the floor underneath the politics table, Dolours Price's eyes looking up at me from above her mask, I had to get it. I devoured it that weekend.

Say Nothing tells the story of one of the most notorious war crimes of the Troubles, the disappearance of Jean McConville. But it also tells the story of basically the entire Troubles, mostly from the perspective of some of the key IRA men and women who are implicated in McConville's disappearance. At 400 pages, it can cover a lot more ground than just one murder, and so we get a lot more than just one murder -- we get the full sociological context of Jean McConville's life, her death, and the lives of her ten children; we also get nearly the full life stories of two notorious IRA guerrillas, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes.

Another strain of the story is the Boston College Belfast Project, which I had known a little bit about from an episode of the Irish History Podcast. This project mostly features in the second half of the book, as the project wasn't conceived until 2001 or so. But it was a pleasant surprise to me when, sitting by the dedication plaque in bustling Boston Common on a gorgeous sunny Saturday, to open up this book about something that happened thousands of miles away and be greeted by the opening sentence "The John J. Burns library occupies a grand neo-Gothic building on the leafy campus of Boston College" and be like, hey, that's right here! I think I applied to a job at that library once; didn't hear back, though.

But that was just the prologue. From then we go back to the '70s and then the '60s, chronicling the outbreak of the Troubles largely from the point of view of Dolours Price, starting with her ill-fated short stint in the nonviolent Catholic civil rights movement in 1968.

I found this period just before the Troubles proper broke out to be both fascinating and terrifying. It is the part where the lines between good and bad are the most clearly drawn, very deliberately; the march from Belfast to Derry was consciously modeled after the Selma march, and the Orangemen reliably behaved just as atrociously as the now-infamous screaming white mobs of the American South. The violent, semi-fascistic siege mentality of settler colonialism was on full display; the protestors' peaceful requests for an end to housing discrimination were met with beatings, stonings, and even attempts to drown the marchers in the river. The time-honored tradition of Kops and Klan going hand in hand was observed in a pattern that should be recognizable to anyone even a little bit versed in American anti-police-brutality activism. It is this moment, deliberately modeled off a (now absurdly whitewashed) moment in American history, a moment that seems to have come around again in the last couple years, that scares me the most, because it hits the closest to home. And if this was the moment before the Troubles broke out, what is right now the moment before?

One thing about Irish republicanism as a tradition that is not necessarily shared by every other liberatory movement is that it is, at every turn, escalatory. This becomes more clear later on when hunger striking becomes a high-profile tactic; hunger striking is, in essence, an escalatory measure -- Keefe uses the word "brinksmanship" more than once -- and the Irish hunger strikers were willing to employ this measure and stick to it over very modest demands: things like getting transferred to a different prison. A different prison! Not even to be let out of prison! But blowing it up into a whole big thing, featuring half-dead twentysomethings and the torture of force-feeding, is fairly par for the course for a tradition whose most celebrated historical moment involved a single tiny militia taking over a post office and a biscuit factory for a single weekend in a single city -- objectively an insane thing to do, but one which set in motion a series of events that did, somehow, wind up freeing most of Ireland.

Anyway, the hunger striking comes later. After the protesters maintain their commitment to nonviolence in the face of the Orangemen colluding with the cops to literally try to beat a bunch of college kids to death in the river, the loyalist gangs grew more fascistic, scouring the streets of Ulster and targeting Catholic families for beatings, forced evacuations, and all sorts of general Brownshirt behavior, egged on by U.S.-trained Protestant fundamentalist Ian Paisley. The Irish did the only thing it made sense to do, and counterorganized, reviving a long-dead IRA (and, in another time-honored tradition, immediately splitting into two rival IRAs), arming the populace, and generally fighting back.

For all the critiques one can make of the IRA's actions, especially as concerns the war crime at the heart of this book, I admit I find it impossible to imagine how anyone could fail to sympathize with the circumstances that led them to re-forming. I know that I'm biased due to my own ethnicity and upbringing, and while I can sort of understand the fear of change, economic considerations, and general inertia of identity that could animate a sort of general default Unionism, I can in no way get myself into the head of anyone who thinks the Loyalist paramilitaries are anything but fascists, and their sense of victimization anything other than whiny settler colonialist bullshit. Wah, wah, the natives whose land we stole tried to stop us stealing their land! Woe is us, the people we've displace and ghettoized aren't happy about being constantly discriminated against! All we did was march right into their destitute neighborhood and throw things at them while openly gloating about stealing their land, and they were so mean about it, we're the real victims here! Seriously, I would have joined the IRA too; I have no patience for this "You hit my fist with your face" sort of bullshit.

I am not kidding about the marching into their neighborhoods and throwing things. These were yearly events; in Derry, every summer, an Orange order had a march to commemorate shutting the Catholics out of the city, which ended at the city walls, where the marchers threw things down into the Catholic ghetto from the top of the walls. The Orangemen apparently genuinely think that this is an important part of their culture and it would be sad and cultural genocide if they knocked it off, since apparently they have no shame about having a "culture" that consists entirely of brutalizing other people? I guess they don't have art or a language or anything? Anyway, most other shitty imperial cultures that I'm familiar with tend to try and pretend they never did that stuff so they can front like they're civilized people, but apparently Orangemen don't. I'm trying to think of a U.S. equivalent to this sort of activity and all I can think of is that, like, if the Columbus Day march in Boston didn't have the decency to stay in the North End and pretend to be about Italian heritage, but instead marched from the North End to the North American Indian Center of Boston and egged it. Every year.

Once Ulster became an undeclared war zone, however, things start to get a little murkier, and objectively more interesting, even if they perhaps don't scare me personally quite the same way. The IRA, explicitly a left-wing organization but historically of a somewhat authoritarian brocialist bent, inducted its first two female members as full combatants (in the past, women had joined Cumann na mBan, an extremely cool and important but nonetheless separate organization): Dolours and Marian Price, two young sisters from a legendarily militant republican family. Due to the illegitimate nature of radical political violence (as opposed to the legitimized nature of mainstream political violence), pretty young ladies becoming terrorists caused much consternation and weird rebel-chic fetishization and the raising of awkward questions about feminism in mainstream society in a way that, say, women becoming cops or Prime Ministers or the head of the CIA doesn't (except sometimes among those weirdo leftists). Personally, as one of those weirdo leftists, I have cheerfully and even proudly voted for too many women for positions of power within the United States federal government to wring my hands about the Price sisters joining a liberation army, even if they did end up committing war crimes. At least they started somewhere defensible.

Somewhat more broadly, the moral murkiness of the IRA's campaign, especially as it dragged on and escalated, is the usual dilemma for the revolutionary left: revolution might be justified, or even the only option, but an armed rebellion is still, broadly speaking, a war, and war, no matter how justified, is terrible, and the people in it tend to do terrible things. Urban guerrilla wars especially take place entirely within places where people live, and civilian casualties in the Troubles were very, very high. Since the two main sides were both "paramilitaries" rather than regular militaries, and when the British Army got involved it was also starting to really get into the whole counterintelligence/anti-terrorism thing, it took huge amount of intel work to figure out who the enemy combatants even were -- and all the relevant entities, including the IRA, got it wrong with some frequency. Even if you figured out who was a legitimate target and who was some poor schmuck desperately attempting to live their life in a concrete wasteland like Divis Flats, carrying out operations to take out the former but not the latter was also a difficult task, and one alarmingly prone to errors -- sometimes big errors. And in war, even justified war, "big errors" means lots of people die.

The IRA was essentially a civilian army, a bunch of private citizens trying to skill-share stuff like bomb-making knowledge. I'm a big supporter of non-professional skill-sharing among comrades, but stuff tends to go imperfectly, and the consequences of a Robert's Rules debate going slightly awry are much less severe than those of a bomb-making operation going slightly awry. As the war dragged on, the casualties mounted, and the IRA responded to every setback by looking for ways to mount larger and larger campaigns, popular support predictably began to erode. For a group that depended on community solidarity for safety, this was a problem. For a group that depended on community solidarity for safety and had previously gotten it because it was supposed to be community defense, its penchant for blowing up civilians and its own members was also a problem -- one which they always managed to blame the British for. When they set bombs, they would warn the cops so they could clear civilians out; if any civilians weren't cleared out, it was the cops' fault. The logic is tortured but psychologically fascinating to watch -- I kind of wanted to reach back in time and shake these folks and tell them "Comrades, if you're going for a bloodless demonstration of power, don't use a fucking car bomb; this is extremely poor direct action planning." It's not that I have any answers for how to pull off an armed revolution without hurting regular people, but man, people pull themselves into some embarrassing mental contortions to pretend they do.

Attempting to turn off my Paranoid About Activism brain (it's hard; it's been quite a bad news week), there's also a lot of spycraft stuff, with double agents and triple agents and all that jazz, so if you like reading about intelligence shenanigans (and who doesn't?), this is certainly the book for you. It's really disturbing to see how a lot of the precursors to the Bush administration torture scandals were being worked out by the British in the decades prior, and also a bit disturbing to see how successful the flipping operations were considering that the penalty for informing was death. In addition to McConville, who was suspected of being an informant but almost certainly wasn't, some of the most difficult, harrowing killings the IRA carried out were against fellow IRA members who had double or triple agented. There is a twist in the IRA's mole problem that made me want to throw popcorn at the screen of reality and go "really?" but which also has some very serious implications for how incapable the British state will ever be of fully investigating what happened.

One of my favorite moments in the book, although also perhaps a major sign that the IRA had sort of gone off the rails, is when Brendan Hughes, one of the legendary blanketmen and part of the IRA top brass throughout most of the conflict, came to the U.S. to raise money for NORAID (much of the IRAs fundraising was done via bank robberies, but it's always useful to work their U.S. connections as well) and was disturbed to run into a lot of right-wing support from conservative Irish-Americans who apparently a) had no idea the IRA was full of revolutionary socialists or b) were just really, really bloodthirsty? Given my experience with said demographic I'm going to go with "both." There's a brilliant bit where some neocon suit with a head full of romantic visions of warmongering tells Hughes that the IRA should widen its target range and start shooting all U.K. state employees, including mail carriers. Hughes invites the guy to come to Belfast and shoot postmen himself if he thinks that's such a great idea; the American, like all chickenhawks, is offended -- he was there to donate money and tell other people what to do, not to do things himself. (I may be editorializing a bit.)

While Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes are the most-covered IRA members in this book, it is impossible to talk about them and about the Troubles in general without talking about Gerry Adams. Much of the discussion around Adams revolves around attempting to figure out whether he is a political genius or a sociopath or both, with many of his former comrades leaning toward "both." I found it really interesting to read the perspectives of the people who felt he threw them under the bus during the peace process, and their case is pretty convincing. I came away with the impression that Adams is both a strategic mastermind and probably a fairly damaged person; more recent scandals about his family make it sound to me like he's developed the sort of impeccably opportunistic survival instincts and ability to compartmentalize that most people don't ever have to develop. Anyway, Irish culture is infamous for consisting entirely of papered-over dysfunction, so it's not like he's much of an outlier except for being better at it than anyone else. But the real sticking point with Adams for a lot of people is his ridiculous claim that he was never in the IRA, an absolutely ingenious bit of political kayfabe that he's kept up for just about my entire lifetime. This outrageous act of stonewalling -- cleverly foreshadowed by an anecdote about a time when he waited out an entire three-day interrogation by the British Army by refusing to admit that he was Gerry Adams -- has pissed his former IRA comrades off right good, but also probably allowed for entities like the U.S. to set aside their We Don't Negotiate With Terrists posturing and work toward actually ending the conflict. It also seems necessary for people to be able to vote for him while pretending they're not voting for a war criminal, which, again, as a U.S. leftist, I find kind of unnecessary -- there's a line that's like "even a lot of Sinn Fein voters think he was a terrorist and they vote for him anyway" and I'm like, yes, and? Electoral politics is like that? Do you know how many U.S. politicians turn out to be, like, child molesters and shit? Did you know the airport in my nation's capital is named after the guy who illegally funded right-wing death squads in South America while he was in office? But apparently Irish voters are supposed to not be willing to vote for Gerry Adams if he was in the IRA. Anyway, I'm impressed at the brazenness of the lie, and that it apparently worked.

(I saw Gerry Adams give a speech at Arbour Hill Cemetery in Dublin on Easter Weekend 2016; it was great.)

I'm not quite sure how to wrap up this review since I think it was pretty all over the place; I just had a lot of thoughts and feelings (and paranoid fantasies). I do think anyone interested in political change should read it if only as a case study in how badly things can go, how little progress can be made at how much human cost, and how deep the human capacity for denial and forgetting is.

P.S. Margaret Thatcher was terrible, fuck her.

Current Mood: contemplative

For the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising, a lot of new books on the subject are being published. One major set of new releases I saw pretty much all over Ireland when I was there was a series of biographies called 16 Lives, the lives in question being the sixteen leaders of the Easter Rising who were executed in its aftermath. I was tempted to buy all sixteen, but a) that would have been expensive and b) trying to get them all home on the plane would have been awful, especially considering how much other stuff I bought. So I settled for just getting the one on Padraic Pearse -- simply titled 16 Lives: Patrick Pearse, because for some reason they thought the English name was better -- by Ruan O'Donnell.

The book is both well sourced and written in a straightforward, accessible style, but I still bounced off it a bit more than I was expecting to, which was disappointing. I pretty much only have one gripe with the book, but it's a pretty significant one, in that it's "the structure of the entire book." I wanted more material on the development of Pearse's life and career before all the Rising stuff that has been so amply covered elsewhere. My favorite sections of the book were the first two chapters, one on "The Young Pearse" and one on "Republican Politics" that covered the establishment of his career, but after that it slowed down for me a lot -- there are three chapters on the planning and the events leading up to Easter Monday, then a chapter on Easter Week and a chapter on its aftermath, then it ends. The aftermath chapter is gruesomely interesting, but I definitely felt like the story that was being told had far too much middle and not enough setup.

That said, the picture of Pearse that develops in the book is fascinating and human -- committedly idealistic but with a strong pragmatic streak; progressive but devoutly Catholic; a future-oriented man with a strong (if hilariously romanticized) sense of Ireland's history. Buried under the shmaltzy Edwardian dramatics of his writing, there even lurks an occasional sense of humor. He also managed the trick of being highly accomplished in a number of different fields, all of which manage to come together into seeming like one big project. He must have been a very, very interesting person to actually meet.

Soooo the most recent book I read is probably more properly a pamphlet, but it has an ISBN so it's a book for my book-counting purposes, especially since I am running behind. This is not cheating.

The book is called Dublin After the Six Days' Insurrection and it was originally published in 1916. It is a collection of photos taken in and around central Dublin by a chap called T.W. Murphy, who was apparently a fairly in-demand newspaper photographer back in the day (and whose nickname/pen name/something was apparently "The O'Tatur"? I don't know, but it's on the front cover). The photos are in black and white, but are pretty crisp for photos of that era.

The photo selection seems to be organized by least bombed-out buildings to most bombed-out buildings, and then a chunk of photos of people at the back. While I am sure this was not the point when the book was first put together, it has the effect of aiding any modern reader who has been to Dublin, by situating them among the still-existing buildings before introducing the areas that have since been rebuilt.

The booklet also contains a mostly-illegible handwritten note in the inside front cover, which serves as a useful reminder that people in history were, in fact, at least as bad at doing most things as people are now.

While the booklet's price has been the victim of severe inflation over the past century, costing five euro ninety-five instead of its initial price of sevenpence, it was still a good, cheap souvenir for being in Dublin during the centenary commemorations and is a very worthwhile set of pictures to have on hand for anyone interested in the Rising.

Last summer I began studying Irish, and when I went looking for study materials in addition to what was given to us in class, I bought a tiny little pocket dictionary and phrasebook titled simply Irish Dictionary and Phrasebook. The book is about the size of a large index card, and the dictionary portion and the phrasebook portion are each about 70 pages. (The dictionary includes both an Irish-English and English-Irish section, so it is functionally more like two 35-page dictionaries.) I would read this a few pages at a time when I arrived to class early, just to learn and reinforce my basic vocabulary and practice pronouncing things. Because of its brevity, it is not entirely useful for looking up words when reading very often, but it still provides a decent chunk of solid 101-level information in a familiar and easy-to-understand format.

I could quibble a bit with the pronunciation guides provided, but quite frankly, since sounds in Irish are often different sounds entirely from the sounds in English, I can't really be mad that they didn't use the same written approximations that I tend to. I'm also finding that as I try to be more accurate in my pronunciation notes for myself, I am finding it increasingly difficult to figure out how to write down what sounds I should be making. And if I want to write the broad "dh" sound as "rh" because it sounds like a French "r" to me, that doesn't mean the dictionary is wrong for not catering specifically to people who know French sounds.

I think it's a bit cute that the phrasebook adheres so closely to the usual travel phrasebook standards, with phrases for how to book a hotel room and go through customs and all that, when everywhere you go in Ireland you can do basic travel stuff in English. But that's not really the point, is it?

For my vacation reading while I was in Ireland, I wanted to stay with the Irish theme (since I was in Ireland) but perhaps deviate slightly from the history books (since I would be going to a million museums, and also I was running short on Irish history books), so I instead packed — among other volumes — the copy of Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You that I rescued from my aunt's Irish lit collection over the summer. It turned out to be a perfect choice for reading on the plane, and sometimes in the car while driving around the picturesque sheep pastures of Western Ireland, and at breakfast in cute little B&Bs while eating porridge with honey and cream, and (possibly best of all) in the lounge at the Hotel Aisling in Dublin on a sunny Good Friday afternoon while drinking tea. It's not an especially long book — by my standards at least, clocking in at 544 pages — but most of these reading sessions were fairly short, as we had a pretty busy vacation schedule.

My Dream of You is not the sort of book I tend to read too much of, in that it's a contemporary realism/litfic piece that's mostly about middle-aged people and sex, but if I'm going to read a depressing litfic book about middle-aged people and sex, I think this was a good pick for me in that it also has a lot of stuff about writing and history and travel and feminism (sort of) and being perpetually single, all of which actually are relevant to my everyday interests. And barring some unexpected tragedy, I will be middle-aged someday (I hope!).

Our narrator and protagonist is Kathleen de Burca, a 49-year-old Irishwoman living in London where she has a successful career as a travel writer for a small company that is part of a larger company. When she is not traveling to glamorous locations for work, she lives alone in a basement apartment in London. Kathleen has been single since she broke up with her J-school boyfriend almost thirty years ago, but has a dedicated habit of having unfulfilling sexual encounters with every boring-ass traveling businessman or married douchebag who makes a pass at her in the course of her travels. O'Faolain's writing is engaging enough that I actually felt sympathy for Kathleen's transparently useless quest to find human connection via hooking up with randos in suits, instead of doing what I'd normally do, which is stick my nose into the air and harrumph that a fully independent, nomadic lifestyle is CLEARLY WASTED ON SOME PEOPLE. Part of this is because Kathleen's character is well-developed enough to make it clear that this lifestyle isn't actually totally wasted on Kathleen; she actually very much values her independence, especially having been raised in the stagnation and conservatism of mid-century Ireland by an authoritarian father and a chronically depressed mother. The tension between her desire to love and be loved and her desire to stay way the hell far away from the trap that was Irish domestic life when she was growing up provides a lot of the internal conflict for the book.

When Kathleen's colleague and best friend dies unexpectedly, it precipitates a midlife crisis. For Kathleen, a midlife crisis looks like retiring early and returning to the Irish countryside to do research on an 1840s divorce case that she'd been interested in since J-school, known as "the Talbot affair," in which the young wife of an Anglo-Irish landlord was accused of adultery with a groom. While she is here, she has a brief affair with a married Irish man who also lives in England, named Shay (short for Seamus), and does a lot of musing over her life — both her unhappy childhood in Ireland and the various dramas she's gotten into in England and around the world — and visits what family she has remaining in Ireland (a brother, a sister-in-law, and a niece). But the most fun bits are her interactions with the people of Ballygall (the little town she's doing research in) and the historical stuff she finds and the general low-grade absurdity of her time in the country. The hotel she checks into, the Talbot Arms, is a family-owned affair, and Kathleen quickly befriends the little clan that runs it. They keep putting her up into other accommodations for the weekend due to hosting various larger events: in a little thatched cottage during a teacher's convention, and in a very modern lakeside house belonging to some guy named Felix for a wedding. Kathleen meets Nan Leech, the ferociously judgmental and ancient local librarian, and interviews a couple other elderly locals about what they remember being told about the Talbot affair by their own elders. She pokes around the library and the old grounds of the estate, and writes a draft of what appears to be a historical romance novella about the case, the chapters of which are included within the book as she writes them. (The novella, in my opinion, is pretty good.)

Some people might find the ending of the book not particularly satisfying, since it's a bit anticlimactic from what I think a traditional sort of ending would be, but I liked it. So much of the book is dedicated to Kathleen's mental rehashing of her terrible decision-making throughout her life, and I think she makes a non-terrible decision at the end, so I think it represents her growing up more (there is still growing up to do at fifty) and moving into the next phase of her life where hopefully she will continue to make better decisions.

There are a lot of things in this book that I feel like I ordinarily would complain about, but in this case I think all work for the O'Faolain is telling (see above re: Kathleen's terrible decision-making skills). However, there are two main complaints I actually have. One is that the printing that I have has a big chunk of pages missing and replaced with a duplicate of the next chunk of pages instead — so the book goes from pages 1 to 277, then page 300-something to 330-something, then page 300-something again to the end. Obviously this is not the author's fault, as I am entirely certain she did not write it this way. My other complaint is that the novel eschews the use of quotation marks (although, interestingly, Kathleen does not in the excerpts from her novella). I'm decently used to reading things without quotation marks — French writing conventions universally use the em-dash to introduce dialogue, and My Dream of You is hardly the only English novel to forgo traditional quotation marks — but I still think it's unnecessary and a bit pretentious.

I probably won't dip back into the world of depressing realistic fiction for another several months since I do have an extremely limited tolerance for reading about people who aren't enjoying their sex lives but keep goddamn having sex anyway (JUST GO DO SOMETHING ELSE WITH YOUR TIME, THE WORLD IS LARGE AND FULL OF INTERESTING THINGS), but if all Irish women's fiction comes with such a big dose of tragic history stuff — which I suspect it might — then when I do, that's probably where I'll go. Alternately, I might read O'Faolain's memoir, a copy of which I also stole from my auntie.

In preparation for my imminent trip to Ireland for the centenary of the Easter Rising, I finally picked up a freakin' book about the Easter Rising. Tim Pat Coogan's simply titled 1916: The Easter Rising promised an accessible and decently comprehensive overview of this critical event in Irish history. What I didn't immediately realize was that it was so accessible and overview-y because it is actually a coffee table book, but whatever. I've learned quite a lot of Irish history from coffee table books in my day. And this one was certainly more recent than the last Irish coffee table book I read, Jill and Leon Uris' Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, which was published in 1978. Coogan's book was published in 2001, which is still 15 years ago, although it doesn't seem dated until we get to the epilogue, which talks about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

I think the book has a good balance for the sort of history book that covers one major event: the first quarter or so is runup to the conflict, providing the "backstory" to the main action and situating it within Irish history generally and the context of its time period more specifically. The middle 50% or so of the book goes into the events of Easter Weekend in enough detail to be compelling, with a lot of pictures and primary documents from the period, eyewitness accounts, excerpts from letters and legal testimonies, etc. The last quarter or so of the book deals with the aftermath, including the infamous executions, and the way in which public opinion turned against the British government and led to the war for independence.

One thing this book does not do is pretend to be neutral in viewpoint. While the editorializing is limited and confined largely to the beginning and end of the book, and while I have no particular reason to doubt Coogan's scholarship, Coogan is clearly 100% on the side of the various factions of Irish nationalists, and has some pretty harsh words for the Orangemen. The parallels between the political rhetoric and behaviors of the Orangemen in the 1910s and the current American Tea Party movement are pretty striking, especially considering the large Scottish and northern English constituencies in both demographics. Apparently, clannishness and the "banding" notion of loyalty are all well and good, but when they combine with settler paranoia in British or formerly British colonies, it morphs into a mind-bendingly Orwellian strain of anti-native, self-absorbed viciousness in which treason is loyalty, authoritarianism is freedom, violent revolution is required to maintain the status quo, and governments listening to their subjects is an abdication of leadership. (Basically, listening to any of those OTHER people who live here besides US is perceived as an act of betrayal. Fuck you, Tea Partiers and Orangemen. You want to be the only people in a country, move to the fucking moon.) (Also, sadly, in the US, the Irish contributed largely to the same sorts of cultural douchebaggery, even though they were the victims of it at home.) Anyway.

I only had one real complaint about the book: the copy editing. More specifically, the commas, although there were a handful of straight-up typos that had apparently been missed during the editing process. But the ways this book uses commas were obsolete by 1916, let alone by 2001. Parenthetical clauses would be set off by commas on only one side. Commas were inserted between subject and verb. The book might as well have been copy edited by the ghost of Charles Dickens. This was enormously distracting to me as a copy editor.

Considering my previous knowledge of the 1916 rising had come in bits and pieces through family, cultural osmosis, mini-lessons from various Irish cultural groups, etc., I'm glad I read this book--it gave me a good deal of new information and helped me organize the information I already did have much better. I do think I would like to track down a lengthier, more scholarly, less coffee-table-ish book on the subject someday soon, though. I'm sure I'll find a bunch of books to buy when I get to Ireland next week...

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "An Cailin Ailinn"

Occasionally, I pick up books in odd places.

It's not necessarily odd that I got a book from my Dad--he's not a huge reader (we think he's dyslexic) but he does read--but it's a bit odd that I got this book from my dad, since he rarely reads fiction. In fact, the last time my Dad really bothered to read fiction, he tells me, is when he was working in London shortly before I was born, and for a while had to work the graveyard shift so he could be on the same time frame as his colleagues on the U.S. eastern seaboard. This is how, when Dad was cleaning his house out last year, I ended up with his rather yellowed mass market paperbacks of Walter Macken's historical fiction trilogy about "the dark periods in Irish history," which isn't very specific if you know much about Irish history. The three dark periods covered in the trilogy are the Cromwellian conquest, the Famine, and the War of Independence/Civil War (in Irish history, those two wars happened right on top of each other). One famous dark period not represented in this trilogy is the Troubles, because these books are older than I am, and the Troubles were still going on around the time my Dad was working in the U.K., at least according to the stories he tells of being Randomly Selected for extra scrutiny every time he got on a plane out of there, being a young 6'4'' ginger man with a name like "Fitzgerald." (I think being Randomly Selected back then was not as invasive as getting Randomly Selected is now though.)

Anyway, I digress. So far I've only read the first book in the trilogy, the Cromwellian one, titled Seek the Fair Land, a reference to the main characters' quest to flee the ever-encroaching Puritan English and eke out a more-or-less independent existence in the mountains of Connacht.

Our protagonist is Dominick McMahon, a merchant in the city of Drogheda, a bit north of Dublin. (If I recall correctly, he was originally from Ulster and displaced sometime during the Plantation or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Dominick really can't catch a break.) When Drogheda is razed and his wife dies in the attack, Dominick takes his daughter Mary Anne, his son Peter--now mute as the result of a head injury sustained in the invasion--and the kindly priest Sebastian and flees west, on the advice of a big Gaelic warrior named Murdoc who he'd saved and befriended in another invasion of Drogheda a few years earlier, when the Gaelic Irish took the city from an earlier wave of English.

The book takes place over several years, during which a specific antagonist appears: Coote, who is made Governor of Galway City. Coote is fanatically supportive of Cromwell's goals of either converting or exterminating the Irish, using a combination of political promises, economic pressure, and sheer brutality to subdue all resistance from a people he sees as being heathens and therefore basically not human. His job is to be Cromwell's arm in Galway, and his characterization is basically that he is, indeed, Cromwell's arm in Connacht, which is more characterization than you'd expect. The Cromwellian invasion was pretty fucked up. Coote was a real person who eventually died of smallpox in Dublin, but this version of him is better because Murdoc stabs him in Galway City, which is quite satisfying for the reader, after spending 200 pages reading about people being starved and tortured and hanged and imprisoned and sold to the sugar plantations in Barbados (something like 40% of the Irish population was killed or displaced during the Eleven Years' War, so there was quite an ugly variety of things that could happen to them).

Murdoc and Sebastian essentially represent two different and often conflicting ideals of native Irish manhood, with Murdoc being the paganistic, man-of-the-land brehon warrior sort and Sebastian embodying the importance of Catholic identity as a basis for Irish identity. Dominick spends much of his emotional and mental energy navigating between the two and their equally strong, if often opposing, convictions, wrestling with despair, self-doubt, self-interest, compassion, hatred, and all the other emotions that those of us whose sense of self is somehow damaged or underdeveloped have to deal with. (Most of his physical energy, obviously, goes into fighting, hiding, tracking, hunting, digging graves, and rescuing people).

This book was written in the mid-twentieth century and bears some of the stylistic flaws of genre fiction in the time before word processors, namely, clunky sentences that really could have used a few more rounds of line editing; relatively flat female characters with limited roles who could have used a few more rounds of beta-reading by a female beta reader; and an annoying affinity for using the word "rape" when discussing ravages of towns, cities, the land, and other things that are places rather than people.

As far as my limited research will allow, the historical aspects of this book seem pretty accurate, at least in terms of places and dates and people and things that happened in the war. Culturally, I dunno! One thing that I noticed that I am now really intrigued about is that this book still portrays a fairly sharp distinction between Gaelic Irish (Os and Macs) and the Anglo-Normal families as late as 1650, whereas I had thought they had pretty well assimilated by then ("more Irish than the Irish themselves and all that.) But it turns out that may have been exaggerated later for nationalism reasons (although as a Fitz I want to be like NO DEFINITELY THEY'RE IRISH!) (Note: Wikipedia calls the Fitzgeralds a "notable Hiberno-Norman family" and lists Hiberno-Normans as distinct from both Normans and Gaelic Irish) and it was really the Protestant suppression the beginning of which this book chronicles that led to the "Old English" becoming considered actually regular Irish people.

Um, anyway. If you like lots of history nerdery and you want some Game of Thrones-level violent fuckery but only 200 pages of it instead of 2 million, you could do worse than following Dominick on his starving-in-the-mountains adventures.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Lexington, MA
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Entries tagged with ireland

The tongue of my father's father's fathers

They can't kill a million of us... or can they?

the bog of Allyballycarricko'shaughlin

Old rocks, old stories, and a side of old man opinions

Informers, infiltrators, and an infamous murder

The quiet story of the quiet girl

A sad Irish Christmas story

Rabble rousing

Of novels and pomes and porter

I sure hope this Ireland we're fighting for is worth it

Brisfimid Maggie Thatcher

Ta Grainne Mhaol ag teacht thar saile

Sidhe and alchemy

Today we were unlucky

A great man and a second-rate poet

Thirty-one pictures are worth 31,000 words

Nil Gaeilge agam, but I'm trying

Sex, love, and the Potato Famine

Changed, changed utterly

In the hills of Connemara