Settling with a good book
Our reviewers recommend some Christmas reading
Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War
By Robert Fisk
Asking the obvious, is what Robert Fisk does best. ``There was a
question I had to ask him and I told him that he might feel he
did not want to talk about it.
But how could Israel, the nation which of all others understood
the horror of mass murder, have allowed the Palestinians of Sabra
and Chatila camps in Beirut to have been murdered?''
The questions he poses for himself and the people he interviews
may be straightforward but the answers are rarely so.
Szymon Datner is a Polish survivor of the Holocaust. Fisk travels
to Warsaw to interview Datner.
To understand the tragedy of Lebanon, Fisk tasks himself first to
understand the tragedy of the Holocaust. ``I explained that I was
writing a book about Lebanon, about the events I had witnessed
and reported in Lebanon for more than a decade, about why these
events happened as they did. I said that I suspected some of the
answers lay in the Holocaust.''
As with the interview with Szymon Datner, sometimes the simplest
questions are the most difficult to ask. Datner denies any
involvement of Jewish soldiers in the Palestinian camp massacres.
As a survivor of the Holocaust, for Datner, Jewish complicity in
such an atrocity is unthinkable.
``Szymon Datner sat back in his chair. He would say no more about
the Palestinians, about those people who also regard the land of
Palestine, in which his parents sought safety, as their home.''
Datner, whose extended family died in Auschwitz, did not seek a
new life in a new country but remained in Poland ``to live among
the ghosts'' and to write and document the Nazi annihilation of
the Poles
Pity the Nation is a complex study An on-the-spot journalist,
Fisk's account is often first hand. The reader might not always
agree with Fisk's approach or emphasis, but his work remains an
honourable contribution to the understanding of the
Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
By Laura Friel
Reading in the Dark
by Seamus Deane
Why is it that Irish male writers are so good at writing about
childhood? Three recent novels will go down as classics. They are
Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, ??'s The Butcher Boy and
Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane. Each is full of the humour
and tragic sadness in children's lives and I would strongly
recommend all three.
I have just finished Reading in the Dark. Deane is a poet and it
shows. He lovingly crafts each sentence in a novel whose
narrative slowly unwinds, laying bare all the terrible tensions
in the family. It is the story of a Derry family haunted by a
terrible secret involving the death of a suspected IRA informer
in the 1920s. It is funny, sad, perceptive and simply beautifully
written.
By Brian Campbell
In the Heat of the Hurry
By Marcas Mac Ruairi
WHEN asked to recommend a book for Christmas I jumped at the
opportunity to plug my own, In the Heat of the Hurry, published
this year.
Relating the story of republicanism in County Down from the
1790's until the 1950's, the book traces the lives of republicans
from the County and how they struggle impacted on their lives. A
local history, In the Heat of the Hurry is narrated in the
context of the wider republican history and events placed in the
context of the bigger picture.
Of particular interest are the chapters dealing with the 1920's,
much of which is recorded here in the public domain for the first
time. Based on interviews with both veterans of the period and
those close to them. A tribute to their sacrifices, In the Heat
of the Hurry is a valuable source from which to glean an
understanding of how the republican struggle was carried out in
north east Ulster, where conditions were less favorable than
further south.
Priced at £5.00, it is available in Sinn Féin book shops in
Belfast, Dublin and Newry. There are only a small number of
copies left.
By Marcas Mac Ruairi
A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles
Edited by Frank Ormsby.
Little island whispered over his shoulder
To Big island who was reflecting on
The fact that there was no island more
Beautiful than himself, `I'm' here, and someone,
Probably one of my aboriginals,
Has set out in a low boat beating proof
Of this. You may boot him in the genitals,
Work him over, lock him up, but his love
For me is such he believes I exist
d wishes to remind you of that truth.'
A bomb mashed Big island in the side...
I know there are many perfectly sane and intelligent people who
would sooner walk barefoot over hot coals whilst listening to
William McCrea sing than read poetry, but nevertheless, I urge
you to get hold of a copy of this outstanding anthology of poetry
from across the cultural and political divide, ranging from the
brilliant, sly wit of Brendan Kennelly's Cromwell (above) to the
moving humility of John Hewitt's The Colony, a powerful account
of fear and underlying guilt which, we can but hope, represents a
more authentic voice of Irish protestanism than that more usually
expressed in cruelty and bigotry.
...There was once
a terrible year when, huddled in our towns,
my people trembled as the beacons ran
from hill to hill across the countryside,
calling the dispossessed to lift their standards.
There was great slaughter then, man, woman, child,
with fire and pillage of our timbered houses;
we had to build in stone for ever after.
The late Pat McGeown was once reported as pleading with his
intractable Unionist opponents across the Belfast Council
chamber, ``Please tell me what you are afraid of. Make me
understand''. Perhaps Hewitt, along with other poets in the
collection, can help make us understand.
By Fern Lane
Dilbert and Dogbert
By Scott Adams
Are your days filled with managers, meetings and mind numbing
morons? Well then Scott Adams's Dilbert and Dogbert book series
is the perfect antidote. Apart from being the funniest cartoonist
since Gary Larson, he also has the best titles. So prepare
yourself for The Dilbert Principle, Shave the Whales, Clues for
the Clueless, Casual Day Has Gone Too Far and Avoid Meetings with
Time Wasting Morons.
By Neil Forde
Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Ireland
By John Waters
`An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Ireland' is John Waters'
superbly funny analysis of Modern Ireland, the revisionist
fantasy, the precursor to the Celtic Tiger. The Celtic Tiger
being the only miracle allowed into the canon's Modern Ireland.
Waters analyses how self-loathing is essential to the revisionist
belief of modern Ireland, how the debate on colonisation has been
virtually outlawed by them. He recounts how at public meetings
he's used the C word and been corrected by people, who declared
that Ireland was never a colony of Great Britain but a province.
Of course what Waters is analysing is the post-colonial disease -
``the urge to destroy everything that the coloniser thought was
`shameful' and the development of an indigenous ascendancy to
carry out the cultural, political and economic project of
colonisation after the colonisers departed.''
Waters explores the native ascendancy's policy in relation to
Republicanism, rural Ireland, the Six Counties, the Catholic
Church and the creation and sustaining of a new urban poverty.
How in fact that everything that is unacceptable in this ``dynamic
modern European state'' has been censored and repressed with a
savagery that at times Britain could have envied. Waters sustains
a wonderfully vicious wit and passion throughout the book and
anyone who cheered when the Bruton/Harris gang came unstuck over
their attack on McAleese will love it.
It's the best kind of a book that confirms one's own beliefs
whilst constantly stimulating with a whole original series of
insights. And thankfully, it never is less than it's rather
pompous declaration of being thoroughly intelligent. But as John
Waters says ``let's hope history has caught the whole mob
off-side.''
By Pam Brighton
The Scorching Wind
By Walter Macken
Stories of personal, national and family loyalties have become
well known to many of our comrades over the past 30 years. This
book is a testament to the fact that it is nothing new.
The time is Ireland from 1914 to 1922 and the twists and shocks
experienced by a family at war is the topic. Macken crafts the
story of Dominic and Dualta, brothers, as well as brothers in
arms whose strong Republican lineage destined them to glory and
heartache. The turbulence emanating from their father's arrest in
the wake of the Easter Rising and its aftermath forms the crux of
the novel, leading eventually to the traumatic split at the
signing of the Treaty which leaves a family in ruins.
The third book in Macken's excellent, and at time heartbreaking
Irish Trilogy, it reads in places like Tom Barry's Guerrilla Days
in Ireland, with the sickening brutality of the Tans, and their
Irish cohorts almost palpable.
There is also a real sense of achievement which permeates the
novel, with Seosamh O Bioggs breaking the might of an Empire, a
sense which should be as real today as it was way back then. This
is a book which is definitely worth a revisit. The recently
published edition would be the perfect filler for any
revolutionary stocking this Christmas.
By Mairtin Og O Floinn
Boston! Boston!
by Michael Smith
Boston! Boston! by Michael Smith is a novel about The Great
Famine and is geared at the teenage market. It moves at a
rattling pace and gives an accurate and moving picture of the
hardships, cruelties, and injustices of that desperate period in
Ireland's history. It will leave the reader fuming at the tragic
disintegration of a once proud and loving family through hunger
and despair.
The story centres on three young people from the same district,
Kate and Liam O'Malley and Tom Lynch. Kate and Tom are childhood
sweethearts but are separated because Tom dares to stand up to
the evicting bailiffs and kills the landlord's agent.
The reality of the coffin ships are also depicted with Kate
bartering sex for food to save her brother's life. Sadly, America
is not `An t-Oilean Oir' for the unhappy Kate. The relentless
scrabble of the poor and desperate to stay alive is horribly
realised.
Thankfully the book does end happily with the young lovers
reunited.
Boston! Boston! is guaranteed to keep any teenager turning the
pages.
By Gráinne Campbell
The Decade of the United Irishmen -
Contemporary Accounts 1791-1801.
John Killen, editor
Belfast Blackstaff Press, 1997. 220pp
£12.99 paperback.
John Killen is something of a dab hand at compilations of this
kind, on the Irish and drink, on the Irish and Christmas and,
more seriously, with his Famine Decade. In offering us The Decade
of the United Irishmen he understates his case as he covers the
twelve years from 1791, the year of the formation of the United
Irishmen, through to 1803 and Emmet's rebellion, starting with a
May 1791 letter from William Drennan proposing a secret
`Brotherhood' and concluding with Mrs Mofier's description in
October 1793 of Thomas Russell's trial - `Few, few have I known
like him'.
Both starting and closing items come from the well known Drennan
Letters, and Killen's sources are generally familiar ones, on the
United Irish side in addition to Drennan we find, as always, the
matchless Tone, and also Russell, now more accessible since the
publication of his Journals, in 1991. On the government side h
offers the correspondence of those such as General Lake, Lord
Castlereagh and Lord Conwallis. All his is interspersed with
numerous extracts form contemporary newspapers, and from debates
and Act of both the Irish and Westminster Parliaments. A wide
range of illustrations is also provided.
For all the familiarity of the sources, how convenient to find
them juxtaposed in one book, without having to seek out the many
weighty homes form which they originate. Fro those wanting a
ready starting point to the material of the period the book is an
obvious choice. There is more to this scissors and paste
technique than mere convenience; here one gets extensive
quotation, rather than the often frustraintly brief references
form in a more comprehensive narrative. Without apparent
authorial intervention, the documents speak for themselves, and a
heightened colour is given to the acute crisis of the 1790's to
the vigour of the Irish radical and revolutionary movement, and
to the vigour of the resistance to it. Nor does one escape the
harsh realities of defeat.
There are technical quibbles while there is a workmanlike
introduction, documents appears in the main body of the text with
only a brief, and not always illuminating headline, and no
immediate editorial explanation of surrounding detail. Thus is
would have been helpful to inform the reader that `The Wake of
William Orr', which is quoted in full, was written by William
Drennan. Sometimes contemporary maps are used for authentic
effect rather than to inform with any useful detail illegible.
Nor can the absence of the author form the main body of the text,
or the sundied impartiarly of his introduction, render him immune
from the frailties of judgement in selection. By title, and
sensibly Kilten aims to offer a compilation on the period, and
not on the Untied Irishmen alone, and yet he covers other forces
and arguments in the situation poorly.
Yes, Tom Paine's, Rights of Man, a ? revolutionary text is there,
but why not Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution,
and his equally influential dismissal of ``the sinish multitude',
an influence acknowledged by the United Irishmen in their song.
`The Swinish Multitude', and sung by them as they marched to the
Battle of Antrim Killen passed by the finest contest between the
two positions, the great Belfast town debates of 1792 when
Painite principal won the day for immediate Catholic
Emancipation, as against the `little by little' offered by the
Burkean pragmatists, the United Irish Northern Star published the
debate which were reprinted in the first ever compilation of the
times, Belfast Politics, which appeared as early as 1794.
True the moderate or Whig positions progressively collapsed into
conservatism and support for the government. It has also been
increasingly argued that the Roman Catholic Defenders effectively
merged with the United Irishmen from 1796 outwards, and yet given
the importance of Defenderism in the hilly banterlands, it is
surely hardly adequate to cover them with a single newspaper
report from a pro-government newspaper Orangeism which is equally
important gets rather better coverage.
What then of the United Irishmen. A difficulty here is that
Killen's United Irish witnesses are all removed from the centre
of affairs by 1796 - Drennan withdrew form the movement. Russell
was in jail, and Tone was abroad. Nor can newspapers fill the
gap; even United Irish newspapers while still able to publish
could never be explicit, and with the suppression of the Northern
Star in May 1797 (not February as stated in the introduction) and
all other opposition newspapers well before the rebellion one is
left with all the inadequacies of a virulently pro-government
press. The old adage that `you should never believe what you rea
din the newspapers' certainly applied then; did the French really
issue a manifesto in 1798, as quoted here form The Times,
promising the free Mayo from the fetters of religion and the
frauds of priestcraft. I doubt it!
It could be argued that inaccurate reports provide a crucial
flavour of the time, but if so it was one disintegrated by the
United Irishmen themselves, who rose despite what was said of
them. As to the rebellion itself, there is little enough on key
battles and nothing on Ballynahinch, and rather more on mopping
up from The Times. General Lake, Lord Castlereagh and Lord
Cornwallis. While the distinction between Castlereagh's religious
war perspective and Cornwalli's far more broad minded outlook is
interesting - the latter was scornful of `the violence of our
friends, and their folly in endeavouring to maske it a religious
war, added to the ferocity of our troops who delight in murder in
hardly compensates for the missing players. For Ulster alone, I
find the maps and documentary appendices in Charles Dickson's,
Revolt in the North although published as long ago as 1960 more
useful (now republished by Constable at £15.95 in hardback).
What would I propose. For the North, Mary Anne McCracken's
correspondence with Henry Joy which established Presbyterians
revolutionary determination in 1797, and includes Joy's own
explanation of defeat, namely treachery, inadequate though we can
now perceive that to be. For Wexford some of the proclamations\
of the embryo Wexford government, reflecting as they did the
broad based nature and perspective of the Wexford United Irish
organisation, albeit one overwhelmed by a bloody and sectarian
government counter-offensive.
Killen is careful not to ascribe responsibility in concluding
that at the end of the period and following the Act of Union.
Irish society was permanently politicised and polarised, distrust
and hated proving more enduring that the idea of a union of
Irishmen'. Indeed so, but was it the fault of the Untied
Irishmen, the government or both? Without some sort of judgement,
one is left with fatalism and nothing more. History, and the
Untied Irishmen for all their faults and weakness, can provide a
more positive illumination than that.
By John Russell
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