Malachy McCourt
44: A DUBLIN MEMOIR by Peter Sheridan (Macmillan)
Will the Irish ever stop the churning out of novels, poetry, epics, histories, stories (short or long, individual or collected) and now a flood of memoirs? Not bloody likely, sez the man, not with the world standing with eagerness and wallets agape to pay for all things Irish and being kept awake by the roar of the Celtic Tiger.
So along comes Peter Sheridan with his memoir entitled 44: A Dublin Memoir (no, luv, it’s not about a gun and its lover, it’s the street address in Dublin). Heretofore, Peter, like myself, was known as “the brother”. Yes, he is a sibling of Jim Sheridan, noted film director. ‘Twill be said by the most gifted and talented begrudgers in Ireland, where begrudgery has been elevated to a high and rare art, that 44 would not have seen the red of an Irish dawn if it weren’t for the weighty influence of an Oscar-nominated family member.
I suppose one could go about the day’s business smugly secure in that knowledge, except that this book is a beautiful, touching, bittersweet account of inner-family life in close proximity to the inner city written by a man who has had his own inner struggles on many levels. No Irishman or boy of that pre-1970s era can escape the memories of the judgmental gargoyles of church, school, neighbours and the law following, peering and humphing at everything a young person does.
In the ineptly named Christian Brothers school, where Peter Sheridan is doomed to spend the daylight hours, he recalls the savagery of one Christian Brother of whom it was said he had been expelled from the Gestapo for cruelty but had been welcomed by the “Brothers” – Irish irony, of course!
In the home, the Da is king of the castle on the surface, but in practice the Ma is the monarch. In this engrossing memoir, the deity is in the details. In this literary journey, we are taken on a cut-rate, Joycean tour of Dublin as Peter is sent on a series of messages (that’s errands to ya, sir) for his father – anything from fetching chimneypots to having false teeth fixed.
And we meet the plethora of eccentrics that is peculiar to Dublin with the colourful slang of that city, the schoolmates mitching from school, all swimming nude in the naller (canal to ya, ma’am), afraid to face the brutality of the Gestapo expellee. Ecclesiastical terrorism was the order of the day in that Ireland, as generally speaking it was impossible to commit a sin because most of us were occasions of sin just waiting to happen.
What is extraordinary about Sheridan’s account of those years is his recall of the inner life and his ordering of the outer life so that one does not outpace the other in the narrative. After winning second place in a talent competition, Sheridan walks Catherine home to a don’t-know-where-to-put-hands-or- tongue goodnight kiss told in the very present and yearning of the horny adolescent in love.
One of the best pieces of writing in the book is the telling of the decline and death of the sibling Frankie. Here, Sheridan writes in jabbing, strobe-like flashes of cinematic imagery with a surgeon cutting, probing the brain and the tumour growing there. It’s a heart-breaking, exquisite description of that most painful of tragedies, a child dying before its parents.
44 is a lively, turbulent and huge tale painted in vivid colour on a very simple canvas. I’m glad to have read it and so will you be.
Malachy McCourt is the author of the A Monk Swimming, a memoir of an Irish childhood, and brother of Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, a memoir of an Irish childhood