Treasure Island

Review: Ireland’s Pirate Trail by Des Ekin

What an eye-opener!  It should be obvious, but I never thought about it. Ireland’s geographic position between Britain and the New World make it an obvious location for rogues to set up shop and prey on shipping. And it seems we did, and caused chaos across the centuries.

Des Ekin takes us on a clockwise tour of the coast, recounting in a jocular, chatty manner the various scoundrels that plagued shipping since the 12th century. The light-hearted style belies the very serious research attested to by the copious endnotes provided.

He visits everywhere he describes and paints a picture of an Ireland that I’d want to visit if I didn’t live here already.

To cap it all, this little book from O’Brien Press is a small masterpiece, with beautiful readable typography and marvellous illustrations including hand-drawn maps.

Under the Influence

After another fruitless search for an old favourite, it occurred to me that we’ve been fooled for years by biographers, reporting on the “influences” that shaped their subjects.

When my biographer(s) get to work, they will undoubtedly visit my bookshelves to learn about me and will come away convinced that I’m the product of the rubbish to be found there. In reality, I’ve realised that none of the books I loved inhabit my shelves any more.  I suppose that’s true of most of us.  The books we loved were passed on to friends while the ones that left us indifferent were stored to gather dust.

My most recent searches have failed to recover Buzzati‘s The Tartar Steppe, Calvino‘s If on a Winter Night a Traveller …, and Böll‘s Group Portrait With Lady.  The list goes on …

It’s inevitable. I was only looking for them to lend them on anyhow!

Avoiding The C Word

Review: The Origins of the Irish by J.P. Mallory

This is, I would say, a difficult book made more palatable by the occasionally flippant tone of the writer.  Using paragraph headings such as partition and reunification, he takes us from the emergence of the country in two separate parts (north and south) billions of years ago and its slow passage across the planet via Australia to its arrival at its current position, heading onwards during the next 250 million years towards Siberia. It seems that it will already be uninhabitable in about 10,000 years as an ice-age descends on it. Global Warming be damned.

Settlers arrived around 8,000 BCE (subsequent archeology suggests 10,500 BCE) and he surveys the Bronze and Iron Ages to figure out where we are. The knowledge is, to say the least, sketchy but intriguing. it seemed to me that some of our ancient forebears were more in contact with our continental cousins than the Irish of the mid-20th century.

Really interesting was his claim that the notion of a Celtic past is a largely romantic 17th century invention of the Irish, Scots and Welsh in an effort to distinguish themselves from our English neighbours. As he said, he avoided the C word until chapter 9 but had to address it finally. I liked the following quotation he cites:

A Celt is someone who:
either speaks a Celtic language
or produces or uses Celtic art or material culture
or has been referred to as one in historical records
or has identified himself or been identified by others as such &c.

Hence the expression “… or whatever you’re having yourself”.

Conclusion, a difficult but engaging read.