The Falling Angels: An Irish Romance
John Walsh
HarperCollins, 282pp, £16.99
No News at Throat Lake
Lawrence Donegan
Viking, 251pp, £15.99
The crowning triumph of the erstwhile thick Mick is that now it's cool to be Irish. England's homegrown neo-Paddies may say ah-ctually and eschew spuds and sprouts for prosciutto-pouches from Alistair Little. But if two autumn memoirs are any indication, these Hibernian transplants no sooner pass for proper limeys than they want their bog back-their bodhrans, their barm-brack, their brogue, and their blarney. Sure the grass is always greener on the other side of the Irish Sea.
The tension between an English upbringing and an Irish heritage is gentle, more entertainment than torment, as John Walsh, former literary editor of the Sunday Times and now at the Independent, would doubtless agree. Hence the aims of his warm, seamlessly well-written memoir The Falling Angels are modest: to tease out the strands of Union Jack and Tricolour woven into his personal history, and to determine which flag flies over his own life.
Second-generation John Walsh grew up in Battersea, where "Irish gossip, Irish woe, Irish exile... hung around like a great green fug." While teachers drilled him to say caaarn't instead of can't, priests were streaming through his Battersea kitchen to wince down eternally scalding tea. Boisterous late-night knees-ups wound down into boozy renditions of "The Castle Doneen" by dawn. "You had to sing," Walsh explains. "Not to sing was to be English."
Yet on visits to relatives in western Ireland, English was exactly what young Walsh, with his Little-Lord-Fauntleroy accent, was taken to be - to his own despair. At twelve, he befriended a local west Cork boy, whom Walsh was soon querying, "Any dacent fishin' off the pier?" The boy guffawed, and Walsh's clumsy effort to "talk like a Mick" queered the friendship. A cautionary tale for the Celtic-wannabe.
The Falling Angels is also an elegy to Walsh's late parents. His mother spurned Ireland as "a place of ignorance, want and illness" in her youth, and couldn't wait to see the back of the place. After an enticing nibble at the upper-crust as a private nurse to wealthy Britons, she embraced her role as the Doctor's Wife in London. On ambivalent visits to Sligo, she cast herself as "a homecoming queen, a refugee made good, an English tourist. She glanced at the dismal fields of her childhood with the air of a duchess running her finger along the sideboard of a provincial parlour, and inspecting it for dust."
Nevertheless, Walsh's father pined for Ireland, and in retirement convinced his assimilationist wife to pack up for County Galway. Bewilderingly, on arrival he found a changed country, where "neighbourliness and old decency were being left behind by a new brash confidence." Visiting his repatriated parents, Walsh was thrown a party that "was not a success". Sipping spritzers and minerals, the company chatted urbanely about Brussels; ambitious Celtic Tigers left early and sober; nobody sang. Despondent that his friends were so offhand about his return, the father succumbed to leukaemia within the year. Ironically, it was Walsh's mother who lived out her final years in a land whose charms she had fiercely resisted.
The prose in The Falling Angels is fluent, its craftsmanship meticulous. The dialogue is dead-on: the hungry father could "eat a reverend mother's arse through a cane chair". Thankfully, this "Irish Romance" never descends into the schmaltzy, cutesy, or painfully quaint. Walsh does overuse "fug" and "pong," although in conjuring a culture of boiled cabbage the tics are apt.
Walsh's affection for his subject matter is infectious, which cannot be said about the Gaelic passions of Lawrence Donegan, a former Guardian journalist born in Scotland drawn to attenuated Irish roots. No News at Throat Lake is a sloppy, dull account of his 8-month reporting stint at a regional newspaper in Creeslough, County Donegal. Aiming for a droll, heart-warming eye-opener, Donegan only portrays a rural Ireland every bit as dreary as we might have feared. A visit by Meryl Streep, a scuffle over a new telephone mast, the birth of kittens... Colourless incidents congeal into a porridge of a life that any quick wit would flee. No News at Throat Lake is less an advertisement for adorable Creeslough than an argument for Irish emigration. Little surprise that at length our author lams for Britain himself.
Donegan does himself no favors with a nod to John Healy's marvelous The Death of an Irish Town, conceding that "what I have written bears no resemblance to Healy's masterpiece". You can say that again. Glib sallies like, "Alcohol has never been a stranger in my life" are palmed off as snappy segues; banal observations like, "Isn't it amazing how much stuff you collect as you progress through life?" are meant to pass for authorial geniality.
Donegan's jokes are unfailingly flat ("Squalor is my confirmation name - I won prizes for untidiness at school"), and his one-liner imagery is leaden ("Y-fronts make your balls sweat like two Sumo wrestlers in a sauna"). He has an ear for neither lilt nor lingo, and long passages of recounted Donegal dialogue might have been uttered in Iowa.
It may be cool to be Irish, but hitching a slapdash book to an ethnic fad is lame - or, as the Irish would say, "wick".
• Lionel Shriver's most recent novel is Double Fault (Doubleday, $22.95).
