An Irishman goes into a bar …
Counting his blessings, an old man examines his life and thoughtfully takes final stock.
Aman near the end of his life sits in a bar and remembers his great loves. For a while it seems we’re in for a meandering, melancholic kind of story. But somehow, between pints of Guinness and tumblers of whiskey (three guesses where it’s set), this novel morphs into something else. Something gripping and urgent, something you’ll want to get to the end of, fast.
Sadness weighs heavy on Maurice Hannigan. He has lost a baby daughter – “I had to take her from her mother’s arms. May you never, son, never have to do that” – and a brother, an extraordinary sister-in-law. His wife. In a series of toasts, he pays tribute to them, and to his surviving son, a journalist in the US.
Toast the ones you love: it would be a nifty way to structure an autobiography, and it works equally well here. Relationships are centred and everything else – childhood bullies, mistakes and triumphs, the building of a small empire – spins out from there.
There’s a strong narrative keeping things cohesive. A spur-of-the-moment decision made in childhood has repercussions that echo through generations; the old man must now figure out how to make it right.
Hannigan has failings and he sets these out with the honesty of a man taking final stock. He turns the same insight on his relationships and finds enough
Hannigan pours a lifetime of pragmatism and regret into tidying his affairs.
nuance there, enough telling detail, to make a reader feel they’re a part of each one. Author Anne Griffin writes as if she is Hannigan, as if she’s stepped into his skin. His voice never falters.
Here’s what I’m left with: what a privilege to be able to thoughtfully wrap up one’s life. To control the telling of it and to make sure that those left behind know they are loved. Hannigan pours a lifetime
of pragmatism and regret into tidying his affairs and the kindness in these final decisions is heartbreaking.
Maybe it’s because I read it over Christmas, but gently, quietly, this book set about shifting my perspective. Counting my blessings and all that. Here’s Hannigan, missing his wife: “I could almost feel it as I walked through the door, the armour slipping away as she took my coat or kissed me on the cheek … Jesus, son, I should have told her every feckin’ day what a marvel she was.”