Ireland's Eye: Travels

A brisk overview of a changing Ireland from a perspective of a Canadian son of an English father and Irish mother. Under the guise of finding out how his grandfather died in a Dublin canal the same August day that Michael Collins was buried, Jarman combines a search for the juxtaposition with his own meditation on how strong and how weak family ties can bind sons of emigrants. Jarman combines "creative nonfiction" perhaps less sucessfully here as he intersperses dramatizations of his own experiences in the North into his relatively more linear recollections of encounters with his relatives and others he meets in both Dublin and Killarney--the latter's particularly well-evoked in his description of his old family house now ruined. Jarman contrasts his two uncles, gay Padraig and policeman Sharkey, effectively, and sees how disorienting relations can be when one is put back in the "motherland" only to find that he feels estranged as often as welcomed by distant cousins and the like. He contemplates how, if one's parents have chosen as his did to emigrate in the post-WWII period, those like himself can never be accepted upon their return, having been by the Irish "written out of their will," and therefore disinherited. Although sections on climbing the "Reek," Croagh Patrick, and venturing into the North on a previous trip in 1981 perhaps, his summing up of an Ireland suddenly cash-rich and spending it all makes for sobering and thoughtful reading. I especially liked his interspersed, often deadpan, jingles, snippets of punk and new-wave and Beatles lyrics, and asides to Shakespeare and high culture and low all blended into his own unpredictable prose style, deceptively simple and casual but belying careful construction and arrangement of incident. Not perfect, but a cut above the usual misty-eyed or morally stern travelogue.