The Examiner's Top Forty Irish Sports Books

What marvellous food for thought the Examiner has given us in publishing a list of the top forty Irish sports books. It would be churlish to argue with the ordering of the list, as no two lists will ever have the same order. But there is much to be gleaned from the list about who we are, the sports we watch and how we chronicle them.

The first thing that strikes you about the list is how much it is dominated by the GAA. Eighteen of the forty books listed are GAA-themed. This is astonishing, as Paddy is not a man who has ever liked to go on the record. Paddy felt strongly this way against the Invader, but he feels no less so against the notebook and the Bic biro.

In a culture where omerta rules, how can we get eighteen books about the GAA at all, to say nothing of saying those eighteen are among the best forty of all time?

Well. Firstly, the list betrays a certain bias towards the recent – twenty of the forty books were published in the past nine years, and thirteen of the eighteen GAA books on the list were published after 2005.

This is not to say that some of the books aren’t deserving of their position; of course they are. But is fair to presume that, were the list compiled again in ten years’ time, the position of these books relative to each other will change.

For instance, Michael Foley’s The Bloodied Field, published in the past two months, is 23rd on the list, behind Eamon Sweeney’s The Road to Croker, Dónal Óg Cusack’s Come What May and others. This is the last time Foley’s book will be listed so low, while some of the others ahead of it will be folded back into the mists of time.

The other astonishing thing about the list is relative absence of horse racing and rugby. Horse-racing books can run to a specialist interest, but rugby has traditionally been a well-documented sport – it’s origins in the English public schools make that inevitable. Rugby has also undergone a popularity surge in Ireland as couldn’t have been imagined even as Brian O’Driscoll ran in his three tries in Paris in 2000.

In the light of this, it’s odd that, not only are there so few good books on rugby (as opposed to player autobiographies, say), but the rugby book that is head and shoulders above the other two is about a game that was played in 1978.

The books that top the list are also a bit odd. According to the Examiner list, the five best Irish sportsbooks ever written are Paul Kimmage’s Rough Ride, Paul McGrath’s autobiography, Eamon Dunphy’s (first) autobiography, Michael Foley’s Kings of September and Tony Cascarino’s autobiography.

Four out of those five books do not make for jolly reading (all five, if you’re from Kerry). As a matter of fact, you would wonder why anyone would either play or follow sports at all if all that awaits them is what befell Kimmage, McGrath, Dunphy and Cascarino (and Micko, again, only if you live in Kerry).

There is no reason to let sport loom large in your life if the sport itself is the be-all and end-all. We follow sports for what they represent as much, if not more than, the sport itself.

At one level the 1982 All-Ireland football final was thirty grown men chasing a ball in the rain. At another level, it was Greek tragedy brought to life, as those who would think themselves equal to the gods were cut down by Fate. You don’t get much drama like that to the dollar, and that’s one of the reasons why we follow sports as we do.

Breandán Ó hEithir’s GAA memoir, Over the Bar, languishes at number 19 in the Examiner list. On my own list, it’s Number One. Other books show were sport fits in with history. Over the Bar shows where the GAA fits in with the Irish soul. An extraordinary, inspired book and essential reading for students of sport, of Ireland and of writing.

In the print edition of the Examiner list, Over the Bar is compared to a compilation of work by PD Mehigan, published at the same time as Ó hEithir’s book, 1984. Mehigan, who wrote under the pen-name Carbery, was one of the first GAA journalists and a man with a prolific output. But to compare his writing to Ó Eithir’s is to compare water with wine.

FOCAL SCÓR: William Hamilton Maxwell’s Wild Sports of the West, first published in 1832, should be on any list of great Irish sports books. Maxwell was something of a rake, who took a holiday from smokey London to do a bit of huntin', shootin' and fishin' in the West of Ireland. The prose in the book is, like Maxwell himself, rich and exuberant. For instance, Maxwell quotes from a contemporary tourist guide as to what exactly Connaught is like:

It lieth under a dark gray cloud, which is evermore discharging itself on the earth, but, like the widow's curse, is never exhausted. It is bounded on the south and east by Christendom and part of Tipperary, on the north by Donegal, and on the west by the salt say.

Now that’s writin’.

Missing the Point About Textbook Rental

Soundings was a sensation of Irish publishing two years ago. The Leaving Cert poetry anthology, long gone the way of the dodo, was swept from the shelves on its return to publication by people eager to reconnect. It was never entirely clear what it was the wanted to reconnect with – the Great Tradition, their lost youth, a Christmas present list run out of control – but Soundings touched a chord deep in the Irish nation. It is a beautiful book, and it really did make a magical present.

The publication last year of the Inter Cert short story anthology, Exploring English 1, was a little too obviously a rip-off for people to take. It was branded a little too much like the re-issued Soundings, with the cod drawings on the front and all, for people not to get a strong smell of old rope.

But then there was Deirdre Madden’s All About Home Economics. It had no connection for the Western Canon, and it didn’t have a pithy introduction by Joe O’Connor. Yet still it stormed off the shelves. Yes, there was charitable donation for the royalties, but that alone can’t explain the book’s success.

Nor can it explain the success down the years of the original Strunk and White or Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, when people bound photocopies of the original lecture notes and passed them about like contraband while the original texts were out of print.

The majority of textbooks are dull and workmanlike affairs. Some are just plain bad. But there are those which are transcendent, that bring the student to a world he or she could never have dreamed off. These are the textbooks that are loved almost as if they were actual people, because these are the books that have made people what they are.

One of the things about love is that you can never rent it. It has been bought, down through the years, but it has never been rented. Which sad truth makes the current small news story, lost in the empty bellowing of the referendum campaigners, all the sadder.

The Department of Education released a report yesterday claiming “Book rental schemes in schools could reduce family bills for school books by as much as 80%.” The Department is missing the point.

If you’re a disadvantaged child, your only hope of escape is through education. There is none other. If you’re going to be good as a student, you have to love your books, and how can you love something that you have to give back at the end of the year?

By imposing a book rental scheme the Department is subtly hinting that all this is a bit of a cod, really. We’re going to go through the motions for you Johnny, because we don’t want to be shamed on Prime Time, but once the school year is over we’re taking back our books and throwing you back to your damned flats.

Colm Toibín wrote a nonsensical piece in the Guardian recently claiming that it is an insult in Ireland to say that someone’s house had no books. That has never been an insult in Ireland, but Ireland would be better if it were.

If the Department of Education wanted to do those kids a favour they’d tell them to keep the books. They’d tell those kids that these aren’t books – these are magic carpets that can fly you to another world, way out of here, where you can make something of yourself and be all that you can be.

Would it cost money? Of course it’d cost money. But there’s always money. There are lots of subventions in education as it is. You can cut one to give to another. There are always ways.

Those cocktail making courses that were part of the Springboard initiative would be no great loss. Or how about the state subvention to private schools? I’m sure a bit of belt-tightening would do no harm there in these austere times. There are always ways to turn a shilling when you need it.

And these disadvantaged kids need it, because education is their only hope. Their only hope. What the Department has to realise at a very fundamental level is that education is the only thing that can save kids on the margins, and education can only come through school and schoolbooks.

If you want kids to love education, they have to love the books. And if they love the books, they can’t give them up at the end of the school year. They have to keep them and treasure them and know that they and they alone are the key to escape.

All that forcing children to give up their schoolbooks does is tell those children is that they’ve never been part of process, that this is all for show. That the world of books is only for those who can afford them, and not for those who just want to live a better world. And that’s a poor policy for any country.

Insults, Books and Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín identifies the greatest insult in Ireland as part of the introduction to a piece in last week’s Guardian. He believes it to accuse someone of having no books in their house:

“I remembered smiling to myself when I found an attack by WB Yeats on a group of politicians in Dublin. They were the sort of people, he said, ‘who do not have books in their houses’. In an Irish context, it is hard to think of a greater insult, especially if it were directed at people who had any money at all.”

“In an Irish context, it is hard to think of a greater insult.” This comes as news to your correspondent.

To not have books in your house is not now and certainly never was an insult in Ireland. It might have been among the Celtic Dawn gang like Yeats and Lady Gregory at the end of nineteenth century, but they were touchy anyway. You could easily imagine the drawing of the shillelaghs when George Moore would insouciantly remark how little he cared for AE’s cravat. But for the vast majority of the population, not having books in the house was the very least of their concerns.

Ireland was a peasant society until very recently. It’s not easy to build bookshelves in one-room cabins, and storage is at a premium in the bedsits of Cricklewood and Camden Town.

Although they couldn’t afford books, it is true to say that the old people had huge respect for learning. The notion of learning is very large in Irish culture. Duns Scotus, the medieval philosopher, was on the old five-pound note, and the island of saints and scholars was mentioned by An Taoiseach at Harvard as recently as last week.

One of the pities of Ireland, and one of the reasons, perhaps, why the nation was so easily conquered, was that the saints-and-scholars tradition did not last. When those saints and scholars returned the knowledge they curated back to Europe, the value of knowledge and of learning was not maintained in Ireland.

One hundred years after the Norman Invasion, Ireland was one of few countries in Europe that didn’t have its own university. By the middle of the 13th Century, universities had been founded in Bologna, Cambridge, Modena, Montpellier, Orleans, Oxford, Padua, Palencia, Paris, Salamanca, Siena and Toulouse. In the island of saints and scholars, not a dicky-bird until Trinity was founded in 1592 - the same year Red Hugh O'Donnell escaped from Dublin Castle to start the Nine Years War that ended with defeat and exile after the Battle of Kinsale.

Yet for all that, the respect for learning continued, even through the darkest days of genocide, penal laws, famine and war. The three most respected men of any community were always the priest, the schoolteacher and the doctor, where there was one.

Revisionism dictates this is because those three had power, but there were other figures with power for whom the people cared not a straw – magistrates, policemen and, God forgive them, bailiffs.

Now that we have come up in the world – and we’re not Greece yet – it is still not an insult to say to someone that he or she has no books in his or her house. You could go into any public house in Ireland, turn to the man on the high stool next to you, say you don't think he has any books in his house, and all you will be met with are blank stares and looks pity.

However, if you were to enter the same public house, turn to the man on the next high stool and call him a Tan, you will not be met with blank stares and looks of pity. You will be met with glasses, bottles, fists and boots, possibly all at once.

The sad irony is that this would be a better country if not having books in your house were an insult, and our patriotism went a bit further than booing the English soccer team. Perhaps Colm Tóibín just didn’t want to share that grim reality with the gentle readers of the Guárdián? How discrete of him.

FOCAL SCOIR: I saw a headline on the front of yesterday’s Sunday Times that left me wondering if they carried the Tóibín piece as well. I don’t know if they carried the greatest Irish insult reference in the piece, as I have stopped taking the Sunday Times since they spiked a story about Denis O’Brien for the Irish edition even though it ran in the British - or "mainland" - edition. I now have no newspaper at all to buy on Sunday. No wonder the industry is going belly-up.

Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens

There was a vogue in the second half of the twentieth century to deny that there were such things are great writers or great books. The movement was called deconstructionism – it posited that we could never truly say that any work is great as works of art are too full of the cultural baggage of the age in which they are written. The true worth of the book is buried in so many layers of meaning that it would be impossible to unwrap them.

Each to their own of course, but it’s interesting to note that while Ludwig Wittgenstein became an engineer after he wrote that philosophy had been “solved” as a discipline, none of the deconstructionists left the English departments of their universities to do something else.

No such consistency from the deconstructionists. While they said all the books of the Western canon are rubbish, one way or the other, they also continued in tenured luxury just in case anyone would be dumb enough to think they might enjoy reading Madame Bovary, or learn something about themselves and their lives from reading Great Expectations. The deconstructionists held the pass just as Leonidas held Thermopylae.

Had he been in around in their day, how Charles Dickens, whose two hundredth birthday we celebrate today, would have relished getting stuck into those jokers.

Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist of his day, arguably the greatest novelist in English and among the greatest ever in the discipline in any language, has become a little obscured since the height of his fame and respect.

The restraint of the Victorians is hard to understand in our own Tallaght-fornia-tastic culture. Seven and eight hundred page books intimidate the Xbox generation, and for their fathers, there are memories of all those determinedly worthy and spirit-sappingly grim BBC serialisations of the 1970s.

Happily, one of the features of great art is that you can’t keep a good man down and the current Dickens revival is proof that there is actually such a thing as Art and people will return to it. The novels of Dickens are long of course, but they belt along because they are so powerfully written. Some writers like to say that the process of writing is like opening a vein; Dickens was more inclined to cut off an entire limb, and let words gush out in great gouts of majestic, unmistakable prose.

The chief characteristic of Dickens is the hyperbole. Dickens delighted in a grotesque, skewed sort of exaggeration that is often quite funny but also contains the hard tang of truth. As an example, consult your volume of Nicholas Nickleby and meet Mr Wackford Squeers (Dickens was not one of those authors who picks his character names of out of the phone book), headmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire:

Mr Squeers was standing in a box by one of the coffee-room fire-places, fitted with one such table as is usually seen in coffee-rooms, and two of extraordinary shapes and dimensions made to suit the angles of the partition. In a corner of the seat, was a very small deal trunk, tied round with a scanty piece of cord; and on the trunk was perched — his lace-up half-boots and corduroy trousers dangling in the air — a diminutive boy, with his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and his hands planted on his knees, who glanced timidly at the schoolmaster, from time to time, with evident dread and apprehension.

‘Half-past three,’ muttered Mr Squeers, turning from the window, and looking sulkily at the coffee-room clock. ‘There will be nobody here today.’

Much vexed by this reflection, Mr Squeers looked at the little boy to see whether he was doing anything he could beat him for. As he happened not to be doing anything at all, he merely boxed his ears, and told him not to do it again.

Dickens in a nutshell. The depth of detail, the clarity of the picture, the precise delineation of the nasty piece of work that is Mr Squeers, and that marvellous line at the end that is both funny and appalling at the same time. Astonishing talent.

Dickens had lapses of course. Oscar Wilde was correct in his remarks about Little Dorrit – when Dickens wanted to get sentimental he laid it on with a trowel – but what a powerful writer Dickens was when the force moved in him.

Dickens himself fell on hard times as a child when his father was sent to debtors’ prison, and he never forgot that. Dickens is a celebrant of life and of humanity in its many different forms, but as well as this celebration of the world Dickens’ books seethe with a barely suppressed fury at the injustice that man visits to man, either through workhouses, courts of chancery, Utilitarianism and, most common of all, snobbery.

The passionate beliefs, the powerful prose style, the rich characterization and the fascination with and celebration of the world all make Charles Dickens the greatest of novelists. David Copperfield was Dickens own favourite and it’s marvellous of course (with a pertinent lesson for our current austere times) but your correspondent’s own favourite is Great Expectations, a book about what it is to come up in the world and what you learn about yourself, for good or ill, during that rise. Enjoy.

Two Rock Star Autobiographies - John McGuinness and Keith Richards

Two of the greatest rock stars of all time have published books in recent weeks, just in time for the Christmas market.

John McGuinness, TD for Carlow-Kilkenny, needs no introduction of course. Rebel. Rockstar. Maverick. Outsider. A piper at the gates of dawn, a moonlight shadow, a zephyr howling through the Curlew Mountains and on into the members’ bar of Dáil Éireann.

While the lesser known Keith Richards is an Englishman with the face of a prune and who is said to have more of different people’s blood sluicing through his system than Count Dracula.

Both men laugh in the face of doom, and spit in the eye of terror. Both walk with hellhounds on their trail. McGuinness calls his book The House Always Wins, thus showing that he dreams the impossible dream, and fights the ungovernable sea. Keith Richards – well, you only have to look at the head on him.

Funnily enough, in calling his book “The House Always Wins,” the reader would be forgiven for thinking that maybe McGuinness is anti-establishment or something. You’d think that maybe he wants to tear down the house.

The fact that McGuinness remains very firmly ensconced in Fianna Fáil despite have roasted the Government on several occasions would indicate that our hero is happy as a tick with the way things are, actually. He likes to blow off a little every now and again, like some great whale somewhere between Greenland and Tarwathie.

In rock and roll terms, John McGuinness is very much like the former American president: he smokes, but he does not, under any circumstances, inhale.

McGuinness’ credibility as providing an alternative is lessened also by the first photograph in his book which is, unless I’m mistaken, a picture of his dear old Da and his dear old Da before him, both dressed in chains. Not because they were on the prison ship to Van Diemen’s Land now; it’s that they were both politicians before John himself, and thus got to dress up like Knights of the Garter. After all, what has been more important throughout the history of the Republic than royal blood? McGuinness is an unusual revolutionary if he’s leading the charge from inside the castle, aiming out.

Poor Dessie O’Malley was on Marian Finucane’s radio show a few Sundays ago, talking about how difficult it is to set up a new political party now. But at least Dessie tried. We have to say that much for him.

As for the guitar-picker: there’s an interesting quote from the manager of The Grateful Dead, Rock Scully, in Nick Kent’s recently published autobiography Apathy for the Devil, about the Stones, the ‘sixties and peace and love: “Woodstock and Altamount are seen as polar opposites in a mass-media generated parable of light and darkness, but they were just two ends of the same mucky stick, the net result of the same disease: the bloating of mass bohemia in the late ‘sixties.”

Not only did Joan Didion say more or less the same thing, but she called it at the time in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The sooner history swallows Keith Richards and his hopelessly narcissistic and utterly hypocritical generation the better. They’ll be no loss.

Have Ye No Pomes to Go To? The Return of Soundings

The republishing of Soundings, the Leaving Cert poetry anthology that was discontinued at the end of the last century, tells us many things about our current culture. Not all of them are good, but there is a definite light of hope.

The general welcome that the re-publication has received has been fuelled more than somewhat by nostalgia. The already-doodled cover is redolent of schoolroom ennui, and the new introduction by Joe O’Connor assures us that it’s socially acceptable to be seen with the book. The O’Connor imprimatur means there is no need to sandwich your copy shamefully between volumes of Pynchion and Vargos Llosa when approaching the till in Hodges Figgis.

However. The fact remains that Soundings is a schoolbook, and bears all the fell taint of that. Every poem is accompanied by questions to increase understanding of the work, but reading those questions again is too redolent of wet winter evenings, copybooks, pencil cases, Barry Lang’s Hotline on 2FM and general misery.

“Would you agree that the poem has some striking combinations of sound, vision and sense?” Yes, yes, yes, I’ll sign anything you want – just get me away from this damned desk and somewhere within a hundred mile radius of Belinda Carlisle.

The fact that Gill and Macmillan saw fit to mail freebie copies of the book to many media outlets and left out everybody’s favourite Irish blogger does little to endear it also. Bastards.

Those cavils aside, the republishing of Soundings, the initial demand that made its republishing worthwhile in the first place, and the general warmth with which a secondary school textbook has been welcomed tells us something that’s been lost in recent years. That there is such a thing as a poetry, and there is such a thing as the Western Canon. And if there wasn’t, there ought to be.

People like pomes. They don’t always know what they are, because the goalposts shift from day to day. People are told Séamus Heaney is a great poet, but are at a loss to recite any of his poems. You could recite a line, certainly, but you could recite a line from the Simpsons too and that doesn’t make Homer ... er, never mind.

Soundings means certainty. Soundings was written before the Marxist critiques of the Western Canon and the general scorn of a Dead While Male establishment had taken hold. The Canon is based on the idea that, as Gus Martin puts it in his original introduction, there are such things as great poems written by great poets.

That a baton has been passed down the ages from Chaucer to Shakespeare and Johnson, Donne and Marvell, Pope and Dryden, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Hopkins, Eliot, Yeats and Dylan Thomas. That there is a shared culture that allows one generation to connect to the generation that preceded it and to pass something on to the generation that follows.

Because it’s so very difficult to define what poetry is, perhaps An Spailpín can suggest taking a leaf out of the American academic and critic and say that poetry is that which is fun to recite out loud? When he wrote How to Read and Why, Bloom remarked in passing that he had to declaim verse in private, on deserted beaches or in empty fields, lest the PC police that roamed US university campuses at that time caught him and send him to the gulag.

But those days are old now and poetry declaimers may safely return to the light, holding their pints close to their hearts as they tell of country pleasures, travellers from antique lands, the ten years’ war in Troy, the Sunday in every week, and all those other dead loves that were born for me.

Soundings is not a complete collection, of course, but no collection can ever be. A thousand year tradition is lot to cram into one book. But as a statement of value and worth and a jumping off point for lifetime's delight, Soundings is sheer solid gold. Hurrah for its return.

The Triumphant Return of Mr Sherlock Holmes

It was hard not to grin like an idiot watching the updated Sherlock Holmes on the BBC on Sunday night. Updating an icon is a little like defusing a bomb – cut the wrong wire and it’s curtains.

Instead, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss successfully remained true to the spirit of the original while updating Holmes and Watson from Queen Victoria’s London to Boris Johnson’s.

It’s not the first time Sherlock Holmes has been updated, of course. The marvellous Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies were updated to the 1940s for reasons of patriotism and they worked, because the character stayed the same. There was nothing eminently Victorian about Holmes – he is the timeless archetype of the man who can figure anything out. He transcends eras in that sense.

How, then, to make Sherlock Holmes work in 21st Century London? The great city herself is a start. London looked wonderful in the first episode of Sherlock, and certain iconic London landmarks are used with great skill, not least the house at 221B Baker Street itself.

An Spailpín made it his business to pay it a visit on a trip to London once, being a fan of long-standing, and it was just wonderful to see Holmes and Watson fly out the door into the recognisable 21st Century night on Sunday.

Stephen Moffat has a gift for casting. After the triumph of Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor Who, Moffat has hit the jackpot again with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson. The tense, coiled spring presence of Cumberbatch is reminiscent of Jeremy Brett, and no greater praise exists.

Watson is a triumph. Watson represents the plodding mortal against the Sherlockian superman, viewing Holmes with our eyes and ears. Martin Freeman’s glum, stoic and impossibly, glorious British Doctor Watson is a triumph. He is the mustn’t-grumble Britisher that took Quebec and held Rourke’s Drift. And he gets some terribly droll lines too.

The writing is another triumph. The dialogue crackles and, while the plotting was a little weak in the first episode, the primary goal was to establish the characters and these are now already carved in stone as a truly great Holmes and Watson.

The sublime nature of Mycroft Holmes’ entrance leaves little room for doubt that the next two episodes will be of sufficiently fiendish cunning that even the Sunday Game itself will have to take a back seat to the rejuvenated bloodhounds of Baker Street. The game is very much afoot.

Book of the Decade

The fifty best Irish books of the decade have been announced, and they are to go before a public vote to decide on a winner. An Spailpín Fánach has been going through the shortlist and it makes for interesting analysis.

Of the fifty books, thirty-three are fiction. This further breaks down as twenty-one literary fiction, nine popular fiction and two mysteries with one book, With My Lazy Eye by Julia Kelly, that seems to defy easy classification. An Spailpín hasn’t read the book and sees no good reason to do so; therefore, Ms Kelly will have to settle for an asterisk I’m afraid. Better than nothing.

Of the seventeen books remaining there are five memoirs, three children’s books, two sports books (both soccer; more of that anon), five history/sociology and two volumes of short stories. There are no books in Irish, not even for the sake of tokenism, and poetry is also absent from the list. (Tuilleadh faoi leabhair Ghaeilge níos déanaí, nuair atá an You Tube faoi smacht ceart agam).

Of those fifty books there are thirty-three in which your correspondent has no interest whatsoever, six that I respect but either haven’t read or have no plans to read, five I never even heard of (all of which I’ve categorised at literary fiction, which may be a tale in itself), two I bought but haven’t yet got around to reading yet, Miss Kelly’s whom nobody seems to know is either fish or fowl, two I have grave doubts about and only one which I’ve actually read and liked.

I can understand why The Builders, by Kathy Sheridan and Frank McDonald is on the list, considering the influence the same demographic has had on the country in the past number of years. But a little like the “angry men” of O’Toole, Cooper, Ross and Pat Leahy, I’m not at all sure this book will tell me anything I don’t already know.

I don’t remember anything from The Builders causing a ripple on its publication (the way Andrew Rawsley’s book on the British Labour Party caused a ripple across the way, for instance), and this would suggest that it may be what no book on a list of Best Books of a Decade should be: boring.

The sports books are very disappointing. Paul McGrath’s book is fair enough, but it’s as much a personal memoir of one man’s battle with the bottle as it is a sports book proper. The inclusion of Eamon Dunphy’s Roy Keane book, however, is very hard to justify.

The Irish Book Awards website is correct in assessing Roy Keane as a significant figure of contemporary Irish but that does not mean that the book is worthy of the man, any more than either of Brian O’Driscoll’s two autobiographies are worthy of him.

Ghost-writing is often derided as a skill but it is very much a skill, especially when ghosting for so multi-faceted a personality as Roy Keane. Paul Kimmage and Tom Humphries are the two best sports ghosts we have, and either would have written a better book.

Eamon Dunphy failed to sublimate his own ego – which does not sublimate easily, of course – in writing Keane. Read the passages about Saipan or Alf Inge Haaland aloud and after a few sentences you find yourself doing your best Eamon Dunphy impression. That makes the book a failure, and that should disqualify it from this list.

On the broader sports front, I posted here some weeks ago that this has been the best decade for GAA books ever, with some outstanding work in what is by no means a full field. For not one of these books to have made this list tells us a lot about ourselves, who we are and who we pretend to be. It’s a pity.

The books I respect but don’t plan on reading in the immediate – or ever – future are Paul McGrath’s autobiography, Judging Dev, Bill Cullen’s Penny Apples, Netherland, PS I Love You and Should Have Got Off at Sidney Parade.

PS I Love You got shocking reviews here when it was published. Not because it was awful, but because of who wrote it and who her father is. An Spailpín had the honour to rent a bedsit that was as draughty as it was expensive from the father of a chick-lit queen, and he assured me that PS would never have been published were it not for Bertie Ahern. But PS I Love You sold like hot cakes and even got made into a(n awful) movie, so good for Miss Ahern, who stuffed it down their jealous throats.

Sidney Parade is worthy of respect because in Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Paul Howard has personified exactly to whom we aspire now as a nation. Ross O’Carroll-Kelly started off as a satire in the Sunday Tribune but as the Tiger roared we all wanted to be like him. Howard softened the character to make him that bit more likeable at a cost to Howard’s art but to the considerable reward of his bank balance.

Immigrants read the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books in translation in order to figure out what the Irish are like. Fintan O’Toole may be who we’d like to be, a moralist in a post-Catholic Ireland, but Ross O’Carroll-Kelly holds a truer mirror up to our contemporary reality. Focking deffo.

The only book of the fifty your correspondent not only bought but liked? The Pope’s Children by David McWilliams. The Pope’s Children, as identified here at the time, is not so much a work of economics as of sociology, in which McWilliams forensically details what it was like to live in Ireland in the first decade of the 21st Century, when all we cared about was money and turning a buck any which we way we could. It’s the only possible contender for Irish Book of the Decade.





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The Best GAA Books

An Spailpín is flicking through The GAA: A People’s History these evenings, while listening to the spring rain fall outside. It really is a beautiful book. It’s put together in the same style as Diarmuid Ferriter’s Judging Dev – facsimiles of contemporary documents woven in through the main narrative. A lovely addition to the canon.

The canon of GAA books is not as rich as a 125 year history would suggest it might be. There are lots of reasons for that, and we could spend ages talking about them, but one of the biggest problems has to be that Irish people hate, hate, hate going on the record.

The Béaloideas, or oral tradition, is one that suits Irish post-colonial psyche well. And this is why the bubbling brew of the Championship becomes the thin gruel of Official GAA Prose. We like telling stories until the notebook comes out, and then it’s strictly a case of name, rank and serial number, and not one damn thing else.

As such, when a really good GAA book comes along it’s doubly notable. Firstly, because it’s there at all, and adds to a very slim canon, and secondly, like all great literature, it takes on a life of its own to place a sport in its wider context as regards the great world around it.

One of the best GAA books is Breandán Ó hEithir’s Over the Bar, which was published twenty-six years ago, to coincide with the GAA’s centenary. It is extremely doubtful if the book received an imprimatur from Croke Park as the curmudgeonly Ó hEithir was nobody’s insider and called things like he saw them, a sure fire way to make enemies at any time in Ireland. But Ó hEithir’s great love for the games shines through and the book is an essential testament to what the GAA was like in its formative years and what the people were like to built it, before the days of corporate sponsorship, games development officers or celebrity management who don’t get paid at all, oh no, love of the game, that’s what it’s all about, love of the game. Just cover me petrol, like.

Three of the best books on the GAA were published in the past ten years. Firstly, Denis Walsh expertly chronicled the most exciting decade in Championship hurling ever in Hurling: The Revolution Years. Secondly, Keith Duggan wrote his great threnody of Mayo football, House of Pain. And finally, Michael Foley published what is the best of all three, Kings of September, about how Offaly denied Kerry five All-Ireland football titles in a row in 1982.

Walsh’s Hurling was revolutionary in itself in its breadth of research. GAA people are not comfortable going on the record, and for Walsh to conduct the amount of research he conducted and get so many people to tell him inside stories was phenomenal. When students of the games in one hundred years time want to know what hurling was like in the 1990s Walsh’s book will be the definitive text.

Keith Duggan is the best sportswriter in Ireland right now, but he was bitterly unlucky to hitch his star to Mayo. House of Pain is essential for Mayo football fans, and required reading for GAA people, but for Duggan’s book to have really taken off he needed Mayo to deliver. The narrative needed Mayo to make a prison break. We’re still waiting for the sound of the file on the bars.

Michael Foley had the most raw materials. He had one of the most famous All-Ireland finals of them all, charismatic men on both sides, and his story was set in the Ireland of the 1980s, when running a GAA team was a lot less sophisticated than it is now. Kings of September isn’t just a history of one of the great moments in Ireland’s sporting life. It’s also a history of a time in Irish life that is now gone. An innocent time when, when Eugene McGee needed a player not to emigrate, the player did not find a job as a games development officer but had to feed McGee’s cattle at night while McGee himself was off sorting out other fellas. Should be running the country, that man.

Finally, in the light of all the GAA autobiographies that are written purely to cash in on the Christmas market, when daughters buy gifts for their fathers because they recognise the name irrespective of the worth of the book, it’s only right and fitting that one autobiography be singled out as having a nobler calling. A book that was not written for cash-in, but because a man wanted to be true to his place, people and heritage.

Lá an Phaoraigh isn’t the best book ever written and it could have done with a little more editing and shortening, but Seán Óg de Paor wrote his book in Irish to be true to who he is an Irishman and deserves all praise for that. The Irish is good, without too much to throw the tyro, and for those who feel like brushing up on the first language with Seachtain na Gaeilge nearly here, you could certainly do an awful lot worse than Lá an Phaoraigh.





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Death of a Bookstore

Borders Bookstore in Blanchardstown is shutting its doors this weekend, another victim to the recession and another indicator of just how quickly the country is sinking. An Spailpín will be out there this weekend, with wheelbarrow and credit card, looking for bargains with all the other vultures, but it will be a sad affair.

Though never a favorite, Borders was a lovely store to visit, as its parent stores in England and the US are. There was a coffee shop upstairs where ladies could sip tea and discuss Jodi Picoult, and there was a huge, really huge, selection of books.

If it had a fault, Borders always had a little too much of the taste of Britain about it. Like a lot of stores in the shopping centres in Dublin, you can get a sense of disorientation in there, not being sure if you’re in Dublin or Doncaster. A stronger Irish tinge to the place would have made a difference, and a few less examples of the Jeremy Clarkson / Chris McNab school of letters.

It’s unlikely that touch of Irish would have saved it though. It saves so very little else in the country as we slip further beneath the waves. Ultimately, there just weren’t enough people buying enough books for Borders to continue.

Maybe if had had been in the main Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, rather than one of the retail parks. Maybe if traffic weren’t so nightmarish on the M50 that people would be more inclined to stop and browse, rather than set the teeth grimly and keep crawling for home. Maybe if the worse recession since the thirties hadn’t descended from the clear blue skies...

No matter. Borders is gone now, and it’ll a long time before its masters back in head office sign off on another Irish adventure. In the meantime, the site is empty, waiting for whoever will take it over. The bottom has fallen out of the lap-dancing market, if you’ll pardon the pun – maybe Borders will become a tattoo parlour? After all, they already have the KFC out there.





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Fangs for the Memories

It’s ironic that vampires are so big in the culture now as Ireland is being sucked dry by her people's own excesses. Count Dracula stares balefully down from posters on lamp-posts in Dublin as part of the municipality’s One City, One Book promotion (reading more than one buke per calendar year would cause anybody’s head to explode of course – best not to take the chance), while the critics rave about Let the Right One In, the remarkable Swedish vampire movie that’s currently on general release.

Let the Right One In is not like other vampire movies that you’ve seen. It’s about a little boy called Oskar, living in a soulless suburb of Stockholm and getting bullied at school, who becomes friends with a strange little girl next door called Eli. Eli walks barefoot through the snow, can’t eat sweets, and knows exactly how Oskar should respond to the bullies. No Swedish pacifism for her.

The children playing Oskar and Eli look the part, but the real horror in the movie is the utterly hideous suburb in which Oskar and Eli live. They live in a block of flats that are like Finglas in the 1970s without the anti-social activity. There is no social activity at all – just a tremendous, soul-destroying ennui that leeches the life out of you just as much as little Eli drains your blood when she’s feeling peckish.

As horror films go the movie is quite tame, really, except for the occasional gory bit, and the lasting terror is of that awful housing complex. Horror films shouldn’t be quite so – dull, I’m afraid. But it is so terribly Swedish - close-ups are the vogue in Swedish cinema always, and the claustrophobic effect of this in Let the Right One In is that when we see Eli, that unearthly child, scurrying up the side of a building, our only reaction is to say “you go, girl! Anywhere but here!”

How far from our elegant host at Castle Dracula, who so enjoys the children of the night and the music they made. Dracula is a strange choice indeed for promotion – Stoker’s connection with Dublin is tenuous at best, and the book really isn’t that good. It really isn't.

It would be interesting to discover why the Corpo chose Dracula above any others. An Spailpín is willing to bet that while many of them will have seen the movie, very few will have read the book. A promotion that claps itself on the back over one book a year would suggest that the promoters are a little off the pace when it comes to reading. A current promotion in Eason’s, where the book will be signed by The Count himself this Saturday lunchtime - how selfless of him to put his notorious aversion to sunlight aside so they can shut up the shop at half-five as usual - would indicate the audience that Dublin City are going for, and the literary set they ain’t. How very depressing.

Better, then, to ignore it completely and sate your thirsts with Joan Acocella’s marvellous appreciation of the book Dracula, warts and all, in the New Yorker some weeks ago. They have super writers in the New Yorker, and Ms Acocella is one of the very best. Bon appetit.





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The Strange Death of the British Male

An Spailpín Fánach is fascinated by The Damned United, currently on general release, just as I was fascinated by the novel from whence the film sprang. Not because of what it says about Brian Clough or soccer or any of that, but because of what it says about the state of current British culture.

The Damned United is about the 44 days that Brian Clough spent as manager of Leeds United football club in 1974. It was a match made in Hell – Clough was the loudmouth manager of upstart Derby County, and a man who took a certain relish in goading his enemies. Enemy No 1 was Don Revie, manager of Leeds United in the 1960s and 70s and a man who was seen by some – but not all – observers as someone who mined a deep well of cynicism to get results.

Because Clough had made no secret of his distain for Leeds and their methods, his appointment as Revie’s successor was like making Joe Higgins head of the Central Bank. It didn’t last, and Clough was gone in 44 days. Clough then took over at Nottingham Forest and went on to make his name as one of English soccer’s greatest managers, and the Greatest Manager the English National Team Never Had.

Clough died some years ago from complications brought on by hard living, and in the book David Peace took that legend of the iconoclastic Clough as he’s understood and fondly remembered now and spun it back to what it might have been like when Clough was in charge at Leeds. The novel is described as faction, that terrible word that means it would be so lovely if things really were like this, so let’s just pretend that they were and not get bogged down in nasty old facts.

Johnny Giles, who successfully sued the publishers of the novel, and is allegedly considering going in with studs up before our learned friends concerning the movie as well, made the point on Newstalk’s Off the Ball recently that while the book is being sold as fiction it is being consumed as fact, and that’s what’s really bugging him. Giles has no objection to books being written and Revie being criticised by “football people,” but some guy just making stuff up strikes Giles as being deeply infra dig.

What’s really interesting, then, isn’t what the book or the movie tells us about the real Brian Clough but what the huge popularity of the book and movie tell us about the current state of British culture, its current fascination with the 1970s and its great, crying need for a hero as Brian Clough is portrayed in the book – telling one of the best teams in England on his first day in their dressing room that they should throw all their medals away because they were won by cheating, not bothering with reports on opposition teams and telling the boys to just go out and enjoy themselves.

Just going out and enjoying yourself is grand when you’re training the Sunday XI of the Dog and Duck, but it’s guaranteed disaster if you’re playing for keeps with the big boys. That the notion has appeal to the current British male says something about the appeal of the juvenile that is currently so high in the culture.

Brian Clough’s mother died while he was manager at Leeds. Peace makes a big deal of it in the book: “The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad... No afterlife. No heaven. No hell. No God. Nothing - The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad.”

Is that not a description of the current lost state of the British male? Lost in the world, not recognising it anymore or his place in it? Always seeking a return to childhood when heroes like Brian Clough were easily identified?

The iconic status of Detective Gene Hunt in the BBC’s Life on Mars TV show is another riff on the tendency current in the culture to glamorize the 1970s in England. This is very much a post hoc glamorisation of course – there was nothing too glamorous about recessions, deaths in the North, bombings in Birmingham and winters of discontent. But the 1970s are being presented as Shangri-la compared to now, when England has become one of the most politically correct places on the face of the Earth.

In Life on Mars, Sam Tyler represents the modern British male – caring, sensitive, aware of minority rights. Gene Hunt is the old style copper, who likes beer, mushy chips, football on the terraces and beating the Jesus out of suspects back in the police station. Current cultural conditioning has made Sam Tylers out of the British, but it was the Gene Hunts that took Quebec and held the Khyber Pass.

The Damned United and Life on Mars are evidence of the tremendous power of nostalgia. The 1970s were grim times in England any way you slice them, but the children of the seventies currently working in media and culture are hanging on to their childhoods as hard as ever they can. Because the alternative is the void - the end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad.

The US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said in 1962 that Britain “had lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” The Damned United and Life on Mars would suggest that not only has she not found a role, but she’s given up the search entirely. The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad.







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World Book Day and Dublin's Second Hand Bookstores

Leonard Cohen hailed Dublin as “a city of writers and poets” during his series of concerts at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, last summer. How sad, then, to reflect on how Dublin’s second hand bookstores are now winking slowly out of existence, like stars in some doomed galaxy on the edge of the Milky Way.

Dandelion Books, a haven for science fiction, or speculative fiction as the aficionados currently have it, was on Aungier Street. Now it’s not. The Rathmines Bookshop is currently mutating into an art gallery and, saddest of all, Greene’s bookstore on Clare Street is now a haberdashery – the body is clothed where once the soul was fed.

Greene’s was the best of the three, because it has those two features without which no true second hand bookstore could be considered worthy of the name – it had shelves and it had stairs, and it had both in abundance. The shelves in Greene’s started at the very bottom of the stairs, and then snaked an eclectic path upwards, John Grisham standing cheek by jowl with John Milton.

Upstairs, a huge arched window lit the first floor, and shelf after shelf of books of theology and divinity that were never going to move. There was a shelf of Irish interest next to that, and then an alcove of Americana, biography and, bizarrely, true crime stories.

I bought a lot of old Irish language books there, in the old typeface and the old spelling – double jeopardy for the amateur, and no walk in the park for the seasoned student of the First Language. I bought a volume of short stories by Séamus Ó Grianna there, who published under the pen-name of “Máire” – a reverse Ellis Bell, if you like.

The book is called “Úna Bhán,” and the cover has a lovely water-colour illustration of that same lady, up on the back of a jaunting car, flowered hat tight on her head, a spare in a round hatbox behind the driver, waving goodbye to her people while off to make a new life in America.

The jaunting cars and hats are all gone now, and poor Greene’s is gone with them, exiled from its sweet city centre spot between the canals to one of the industrial estates that skirt the M50, now existing only in cyberspace like that other Irish bibliophile’s Shangri-la, Kenny’s of Galway.

The Hidden Bookstore on Wicklow Street carries on, of course, and that marvellous store in the George’s Street arcade with all its wonderful old Irish books, including marvellous Anvil paperbacks about faction fighters, the Normans and Devil’s Own Connaught Rangers. But the new prince and chief of Dublin’s second hand bookstores is now on the other side of the river, part of the astonishing development of Parnell Street as the twenty-first century rumbles on.

Chapters Bookstore has moved from its snug spot besides Arnott’s and Eason’s and the former office of the Irish Independent newspaper on Middle Abbey Street to its current glass façade in the Ivy Exchange, shared with the new and shiny Tesco on the corner.

Where on Middle Abbey Street it was small and dark and pleasingly musty, Chapters on Parnell Street is all brightness, light and fluorescence. The contrast between the old gloom and the new glow is such that going inside is as jarring for the bibliophile as entering the great cathedrals of Notre Dame or Chartes must have been for the medieval monks of France, used to tallow candles and perpetual twilight.

The selection in Chapters is better than it ever was in Dandelion Books, or Rathmines, or even Greene’s, but it’s hard not to notice that a second hand bookstore isn’t really about the selection. This ebay age has changed the rules that regard, because the internet now means that nothing is ever unobtainable.

But the fact of the books being second-hand is what generates the magic in a second hand bookstore. A bookstore is just a place of retail, but a second-hand bookstore feels more like a library. A library that belonged to thousands and thousands of people, each of whom had his or her own story and life and existence, and brought worth to that existence through their reading of books.

And now there’s a good chance that person is in another existence, and the books have been left behind. Any time you see a row of newly stocked Modesty Blaises or Bonds or ever poor Louis L’Amour in a second hand bookstore, chances are someone has gone on their last caper, assignment, or lonesome trail in the west, and the books are now foundlings, looking for a new home.

Isn’t it a pity that Dublin can’t emulate Paris and its great love of books? How lovely it is to see the stalls being set up in the mornings along the Seine, in the shadow of the great cathedral, and the rich display of wares.

There are bookstalls in Rome too, but they seem rather more interested in selling what used to be known as pictures of the Eiffel Tower than musty old copies of Dante or Boccaccio. One hopes none of our own visiting clerics peers too closely – it may shatter one too many illusions.

The weather in Dublin militates against the open air kiosks, of course, and those few braves souls who set up stalls in Temple Bar need to keep their eyes peeled for squally hens and stags coming from the east as just as much as showers and gales blowing in from the west. But it is rather sad that Dublin, a city haled as a city of poets and writer by one of the greatest poets and writers of our age on a blessed Friday the thirteenth last year in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, is losing these second hand bookstores, these lodestars of the literary life.

The city of Long Beach, California, designated Bertrand Smith’s famous Acres of Books bookstore as a “cultural heritage landmark” eighteen years ago, and Long Beach, lovely though it is, does not have the literary reputation that Dublin enjoys. Something to ponder today, World Book Day.





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The Two James Bonds

If the James Bond of the Ian Fleming novels and the James Bond of the EON Productions films ever met, in some glamorous bar in St Moritz or some seedy dive in the back streets of Belgrade, would they recognise each other?

Would the impossibly ripped Bond of the upcoming Quantum of Solace movie, which enjoyed its royal premiere in London last night, recognise as his progenitor the hard-drinking, 60-a-day-smoking cold war hero into whom Ian Fleming breathed life in 1953?

Both men live in utterly different worlds. With the exception of his womanising, Ian Fleming’s Bond is still a clubland hero of the Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond stripe, one of our chaps whose upper lips stiffen at the sound of Elgar on the Third Program. But the James Bond of the world’s most successful movie franchise is an iconic cinematic hero, an avatar of want and desire, a man whose life is soundtracked by the sounding brass of John Barry, without whom the cinematic Bond would be just a little bit 006.

Daniel Craig is only the second Englishman to play James Bond onscreen, but the Bond of the books is not English at all. The London Times’ obituary of Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR, as quoted in You Only Live Twice, the second last James Bond novel that Ian Fleming wrote, states that Bond is the son of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, a sales rep for the Vickers gun company, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, of the Canton de Vaud.

Bond’s parents die in a climbing accident when he is eleven, and he is subsequently raised by a maiden aunt in a village outside Canterbury, in Kent. Bond’s aunt, one Miss Charmain Bond, sends her nephew first to Eton and then to Fettes in Edinburgh for his education. That the inchoate 007 left Eton for Fettes due to “some trouble with one of the boys’ maids” is an indicator of what Bond would be like once he was old enough to be served in public houses.

These mixtures of nationality and upbringing explain the contradictory strands of the Bond of the books’ nature. His snobbery (“Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot. It showed too much vanity. It was often the mark of a cad.” From Russia with Love, 1957) is a product of his public school education, while Bond’s gourmet tastes are continental in origin; they did not arise from the post War diet of spam and tripe in 1950s Britain.

Bond is described as looking cruel in the books. Vivienne Michel in The Spy Who Loved Me describes Bond as “good looking in a dark, rather cruel way” while Domino Vitali in Thunderball sees “dark, rather cruel good looks.” A Russian general in From Russia with Love cuts closer to the chase: “he looks a nasty customer.”

How jarring it was to hear Daniel Craig say the famous last line of Casino Royale the book, “the bitch is dead now,” in the recent movie. The harshness of the books is out of place in the elaborate fantasy of the movies. On the final page of 1955’s Moonraker, Bond recognises that conventional love and relationships are not for him, that he must “take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.”

By contrast, the Daniel Craig Bond proves that the “bitch is dead” line was just tokenism, a sop to the sort of pathetic and hopeless wretch who would enjoy a brief thrill of recognition of something from the novels. The cinematic Bond is the most hopeless of romantics if he spends the entirety of the next film in seeking to avenge Vesper Lynd’s death. This is a phenomenon known as the magic of the movies.

Have the James Bond novels dated? Considerably. The James Bond books were written in one of the Empire’s final outposts after all, and the days when Great Britain was a player on the world stage are now over. The racism in the books is profound, but 1950s Britain was a racist society – when the first Dirk Bogarde Doctor movie, Doctor in the House, was made in 1954, Bogarde and Kenneth More note on the college noticeboard that a lodging house has no interest in Irish gentlemen.

Bogarde takes the rooms anyway and gets entangled with the landlady’s lovely daughter, played by Shirley Eaton – the same Shirley Eaton who would go on to global fame ten years later as Jill Masterson, the girl who is asphyxiated by gold paint in Goldfinger.

Are the Ian Fleming books still worth reading? Yes, they are, once you get over the hurdle of those dated attitudes (or else revel in them as incidental comedy, of course). The argument of whether or not Fleming was a great author is somewhat moot in age that cleaves to Jacques Derrida’s theories on the death of the author, but Fleming had an unquestionable gift for narrative.

How great a gift is evidenced by the fact that Kingsley Amis, who is considered a literary great, wrote a James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, under the pseudonym of Robert Markham in 1968, and failed utterly to capture that deft Fleming touch.

Where Amis failed and where Fleming was a master is in the constant cascade of detail. Fleming noticed everything, and put it all down in his books. The effect can sometimes make Bond seem an anal-retentive (his breakfast egg must boil for three and a third minutes; his coffee must be from De Bry in New Oxford Street) but the richness of the detail brings everything to life, and that is the most important thing in a thriller.

The Bond of the books, for all his expensive tastes, walked the same streets and lived in the same world as his readers, while the Bond of the movies, with his underwater cars and enemies who command such vast armies of personnel that they can build space stations without anyone ever noticing, belongs strictly to the realm of fantasy.

When Bond tries to buy time in a deadly confrontation with the SMERSH assassin at the end of From Russia with Love he curses his luck that the cigarette he’s smoking is just that, a cigarette: “if only it had been a trick one – magnesium flare, or anything he could throw in the man’s face! If only his service went in for those explosive toys!” If the two Bonds ever do meet, in some strange trans-dimensional beachfront bar at Nassau, it’s clear which one will envy the other.







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