William Leith
A MONK SWIMMING by Malachy McCourt (HarperCollins)
In Angela’s Ashes, the bestselling autobiography by Frank McCourt, Frank’s younger brother Malachy appears first as a grimy urchin, and then as an older version of one. In A Monk Swimming, the younger brother’s memoir, Frank flits through the action in a correspondingly sensible, buttoned-up fashion. Malachy does not.
Malachy McCourt was born in New York, but spent most of his childhood in Ireland, which he hated, remembering his compatriots as “rotten fucking arsehole counter-jumping stuck-up jumped-up whore’s melts nose-holding tuppence- ha’penny-looking-down-on-tuppence snobs”. His ambition was to “go back to America where I was born and I’ll fart in yer faces”. This book, which begins with McCourt trying to find work as a longshoreman in New York, is the fart.
The story is uncomplicated. It’s about the difficulties of the immigrant, and the pleasures of drinking, with the emphasis on the latter. (“A monk swimming” is how you might pronounce “amongst women” from the Hail Mary, after a few whiskeys.) It is “lyrical”. McCourt drinks partly to hide the fact that he is “a guttersnipe from the lanes of Limerick”, and partly because he’s a wild man anyway. The author, it turns out, is a bit more than a character in Angela’s Ashes.