His Life Was Too Boring for a Memoir. So He Wrote Ireland’s by Colum McCann
In honor of St Patrick’s Day- please read Colum McGann’s review of Finian O Toole ‘s quasi autobiography. After you finish the review read the book. It is charming and provocative examination of the incredible changes Ireland has undergone in past 60 years. An isolated poor (almost third world level) island nation dominated by reactionary Catholic clergy is now one of the most economically dynamic and socially conscious country in Europe. O Toole spotlights the how and why of the transition with insightful anecdotes and entertaining characters. I would have reviewed the book but McGann captured my thinking and he said it better than I would have.
His Life Was Too Boring for a Memoir. So He Wrote Ireland’s.
By Colum McCann
The New York Times
Published March 15, 2022
Updated Nov. 29, 2022
Fintan O’Toole
Benson Russell
WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES
A Personal History of Modern Ireland
By Fintan O’Toole
[ This book was named one of the Book Review’s 10 best books of 2022. See the full list. ]
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now,” declared Samuel Beckett in a 1961 interview. The Irish playwright was talking about the “buzzing confusion” of the day, suggesting that the job of the writer is to find a shape into which the chaos can fit.
Perhaps we have always lived in ages of dubiety, but Beckett’s quote is particularly apt in describing the last 60 years. We have stepped into the eye of a technological and moral storm that has been moving at exponential rates. News is in doubt. Truth is in doubt. Memory is in doubt. Journalism, criticism and fiction also.
One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s “We Don’t Know Ourselves” is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span. “My life is too boring for a memoir,” he writes in the afterword, “and there is no shortage of modern Irish history.” The subtitle of the book is “A Personal History of Modern Ireland.” Indeed, it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us.
It is impossible to say where things begin or end, but O’Toole takes the year of his birth, 1958, as the launching pad for an Ireland that would turn itself inside out several times over the course of his lifetime. He attributes the beginning of change to a 250-page document written by the Irish economist T. K. Whitaker, who thought it was a good idea for an Ireland utterly lacking in self-confidence “to shut the door on the past,” and open the country economically and culturally to the rest of the world.
And so began the opening and closing of a battery of doors, not least those that led to the almost unimaginable fall from grace of the Roman Catholic Church, the reform of Irish education, the flare-up and eventual quenching of violence in Northern Ireland, a transformation of the Irish economy and a wild shakeout of the national soul.
O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust. The Irish — mea culpa — have always been willfully ambiguous, unbearably self-conscious and, as O’Toole puts it, riddled with the “known unknowns.” We have experienced decades of half-apertures, of which we have been neither entirely in nor out. But O’Toole manages to navigate the astonishing transformation of a valley of squinting windows into something far more kaleidoscopic.
The book begins, much like the era it represents, a little precariously. Instead of the focused burn that we come to find, the opening is a bit shaky, unconfident, more historical litany than the complete focus we begin to exult in later on. But O’Toole quickly settles down and makes a pact with his reader: I will open up a little panel of my life, which will open, in turn, another. He starts to develop a narrative swagger as compelling as any novel’s. His working-class Dublin background — his father, Sammy, was a bus conductor and his mother, Mary, worked in a cigarette factory — opens onto a sort of narrative everywhere. The tiny grows epic. The local becomes universal. We skip from year to year, from story to story, from tile-piece to an eventual mosaic.
“The transformation of Ireland over the last 60 years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one,” O’Toole writes.
An Ireland of available divorce. An Ireland of gay marriage. An Ireland without bomb blasts. An Ireland finally capable of admitting to the ongoing psychoses, passivity and prejudices that still bind it today, even as it becomes, as O’Toole puts it, “one of the most globalized economies in the world.”
In one chapter, titled “The Killer Chord,” O’Toole is 12 years old and spending the summer of 1970 learning Irish in the Gaeltacht. He unwittingly releases a drift of pigs from a house and later comes across an elegant jumble sale of a man who wields his walking stick like a “conductor’s baton.” The man guides the pigs home with utter assurance and panache. At Mass the next morning, O’Toole sees the same man conducting the choir, and he finds that “the melody was like a meandering river, slow and serene, yet utterly implacable.” The man, it turns out, was the musical genius Seán Ó Riada, who at the time was revolutionizing Irish music from within. O’Toole uses this marvelous cameo to indicate his realization that “the desire for connection was given meaning by the reality that there was still something to connect to, traditions of music and singing and storytelling and language that had their own highly distinctive texture.”
And so it is that O’Toole attributes a distinctive focus, both personal and political, to each unfolding year. The Irish Army in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1961. The entry of the Republic into Europe in 1973. The hunger strikes of 1981. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The “grandiose delusions” of the Celtic Tiger in 2008.
O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase. “Being European was the ultimate way of not being British.” “The idea of disappearance hung over the place.” “The violence was strangely weightless.” “There was nothing as simple, or as stable, as mere hypocrisy.” “The Irish economy was most like Humpty Dumpty — bloated, fragile, sitting smugly at a great height and headed for a fall.”
But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it. Near the conclusion of the book, he intones: “What is possible now, and was entirely impossible when I was born, is this: to accept the unknown without being so terrified of it that you have to take refuge in fabrications of absolute conviction.”
The book has no epigraph but if it had, it might belong to James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” itself now a century old: “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
Colum McCann is the National Book Award-winning author of several works of fiction, including “Dancer,” “Let the Great World Spin” and “Apeirogon.” He is a founder of the global nonprofit Narrative 4.
