Exile (Padraic O’Conaire): Irish writer O’Conaire (1882-1928) is relatively unknown – probably because he wrote all his stories and poems in his native Gailic. This short novel (wonderfully translated by Gearailt MacEoin), first published in 1910, is a sad and compelling story of a young man who lost an arm and a leg in a road accident. He was awarded £250 in compensation, but soon frittered it away and ended up making a living disguised as a wild man and paraded as a circus freak. It’s a wonderful, lyrical evocation of life on the bottom rungs of society in Ireland and England – focussing on Galway and London. It’s a desperate, but frequently very funny, tale of utmost poverty told in the first person by a resourceful, determined, simple man whose judgement is frequently poor and whose emotions fluctuate wildly with circumstances (I would describe him as a well-read pipe-dreamer). Sadly, O’Conaire’s own life, in some ways, reflected that of the book’s central character… he died in the pauper’s ward of a Dublin hospital in 1928, aged 46; his sole possessions, apart from his clothing, consisted of a pipe, a piece of plug tobacco, an apple and a pocket life.
Mother Country (Jeremy Harding): When Harding was five, he learned that he’d been adopted. His mother, Maureen, told him. As he got older, wondered about the identity of his biological parents and, eventually, embarked on a quest to find them. Harding and I are roughly the same age (he’s three years younger) and so I could relate to much of the book’s background. Inevitably, his search is made more difficult by the lack of key details relating to his birth but, eventually (after a couple of false starts and the odd piece of good fortune), he DOES manage to track down his mother (who was originally from Limerick, but who travelled to London after the war looking for work). Surprisingly for Harding, one of the outcomes of looking into his family’s past was the amount of information he was able to discover about his adoptive parents – the scary bigotry of his ‘father’, Colin, and the Liza Doolittle-like story of his ‘mother’, Maureen (who herself was adopted). It’s a complicated, sympathetic and intriguing story – going off at too many tangents for my liking. The class consciousness of the 1950s and 60s has now thankfully given way to a rather different way of looking at the world.
Patrick Heron (edited by Andrew Wilson and Sara Matson): I’ve previously posted about the exhibition at Tate St Ives here. I always like, if at all possible, to buy a catalogue/record of exhibitions I’ve particularly enjoyed and this one is really excellent. Beautifully and fully-illustrated (of course) - although, somewhat predictably, also containing (as far as I’m concerned) some rather over-the-top descriptions and assessments of Heron’s work (eg. Andrew Wilson’s introduction to the catalogue). Fortunately, the book also contains a number of essays from various Heron admirers, art critics and other writers which helpfully unpick various aspects of his work (I particularly liked the final essay by Matthew Collings, who had visited Heron twice at home in Cornwall a year or so before his death, in 1999 – once with a film crew for a documentary and the second occasion for an extended magazine interview). All in all, a very impressive book and a wonderful pictorial record of Heron’s work.
WG Grace: His Life and Times (Eric Midwinter): Reading this at the end of September seemed like a desperate attempt to prolong my own personal cricket season! This biography (published in 1981) is not first of the ‘Grace’ biographies I’ve read (there have certainly been at least two others), but I thought it would be interesting reading it as a ‘resident of Bristol’ (Grace was born just 6 miles away and played most of his cricketing career for Gloucestershire… indeed, he apparently played rugby on the ‘field behind the Hen+Chickens in Bedminster’ (which is just down the road from our house) on at least one occasion! Predictably, Midwinter’s book contained lots of references to particular cricket games and individual innings. In addition, there was much reference made to Grace’s ‘sham-amateurism’ over expenses and match fees; his egotistical nature (and ‘prejudices’); his ‘gusty temper’; the fact that (despite being a medical doctor) he was ‘singularly inarticulate’ and ‘non-intellectual’ (and was once described as ‘just a great big schoolboy in everything he did’) and much more. Nevertheless, Dr Grace (1848-1915) WAS ‘Mr Cricket’ at a time when game of cricket was emerging as the sport we might recognise today. He made his cricketing debut, aged 9(!), for West Gloucestershire against Bedminster. In first class cricket, he scored 54,904 runs, took 2,879 (in fact, in all cricket he scored just 160 runs short of 100,000!) and, quite remarkably, played first-class cricket for 44 consecutive seasons! It still puzzles me why he was never awarded a knighthood? But, sadly, I found the book rather disappointing. I didn’t think it uncovered material that hadn’t been written about in previous years and, increasingly annoyingly as the book went on, Midwinter KEPT on making lengthy references to one of his own ancestors (WE Midwinter – the only player to represent both England and Australia against each other). Clearly, THAT was the book he really wanted to have written!
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