Irish writers have Yeats expectations
TIME FOR A GREAT BOOK
WHOEVER said it first has been lost in the mists of time, and he’s lucky because he deserves to be hammered.
“Everyone has a book in them.”
That line is responsible for thousands of awful tomes that sacrificed poor trees for nothing.
Some have 10 or more books in them, many don’t even have a chapter.
But it’s remarkable how many have notions, especially in this country.
Many love the idea of being an author, even though they have nothing worthwhile to say.
Books and writers — preferably dead ones — are big business in Ireland.
There’s the ubiquitous poster with James Joyce, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett and the lads, and it’s always lads, that hang on the walls of countless pubs.
Festivals
All over the country, from Listowel to Gort to Strokestown, there are literary festivals year after year.
And then there’s the fuss about June 16 in Dublin...
Nothing has done more to put people off reading James Joyce than Bloomsday.
A posers’ paradise which is all about notions.
They can stick their straw boaters and grilled mutton kidneys where the sun don’t shine.
At school, we all wrestled with the late greats.
There were particular favourites. That Patrick Kavanagh was able to rhyme catharsis with arses told us much about the Monaghan psyche. Brian Friel’s short stories and plays always struck a chord.
Friel, a Tyrone man, was once given the Donegal Person of the Year award.
That takes some doing.
They can be annoying on the football field but you’d forgive Tyrone a lot for having given us Flann O’Brien, Paul Brady, and Friel.
Consider O’Brien’s appraisal of Fionn Mac Cumhaill in his greatest novel ‘At Swim Two Birds’.
Backside
“Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside.”
How do you even think of the germ of a line like that?
If you haven’t read O’Brien — or his doppleganger Myles na gCopaleen — do yourself a favour.
Read every line he ever wrote. You won’t regret it.
But we can’t help but think of the books we’d love to see written.
Look at what David Peace did with Brian Clough’s time at Leeds in ‘The Damned United’. Where is the great Saipan novel?
In a 2009 essay, the academic Declan Kiberd addressed Celtic Tiger affluence.
“The end of things is the moment we start to understand them: and only when they are understood do we begin to realise what might be lost.”
We’re still waiting for the great Celtic Tiger book. Who will step up?