jaywalking with the irish, pt. 1

So, I've spent the last two nights reading this book that I picked up at Waterstone's (the British equivalent of Borders, and therefore the British equivalent of a huge drain on my savings), and if I actually liked it I would probably stay up tonight to finish it. You know that I despise a book if I prioritize going to bed before eleven over finishing the last few chapters. It's called 'Jaywalking with the Irish' by David Monagan, and I picked it up because I thought that another American's chronicles of explorative vertigo in Ireland would help me to adjust. Instead, I've just become more and more annoyed at this guy. He and his wife (whom he makes occasional overly-cute remarks about) picked up their three kids and moved them all to Cork, Ireland, in pursuit of some upbringing less tainted by the modern living found in cold American suburbia. Clearly, anyone who picks up their family and moves to a foreign country suffers from a restlessness of spirit that some find charming and others find idiotic; perhaps since I was picked up and moved to a foreign county, I usually find it charming, but in this guy I find it idiotic instead.

I think that my main problem with him is that his language is always, inevitably, unavoidably overwrought. You can argue that that's my main problem as well (the fact that I even used the word 'overwrought' implies that I have some issues with clear, direct prose), but I think that the key difference here is that he *always* means it. There are times when I'm feeling sorry for myself and I use fancy words like window-dressings to cover whatever I'm thinking, but most of the time I use them because they are pleasantly ironic when one is describing otherwise-boring aspects of modern life. But, if you're using them to describe a country about which you want to make a larger point, such as the point that people have lost a great deal by sacrificing their backwoods cottages and charmingly-poor towns in the name of 'progress', you had best make sure that your point isn't lost in your endless descriptions of rainbows, rainstorms, your children's' friends, and the characters you've met at the local pub.

To put it another way, Monaghan dresses up everything that he sees in some sort of fevered dream of what Ireland used to be like (which, he likes to remind us, he is an expert on since he spent a year or two in Ireland in the '70's). Then, he is brought back to 'reality' by seeing some girl walk by in a midriff-baring shirt, or getting his windshield bashed in by some area youths (he bemoaned this as an Irish reaction against outsiders, but I think it was an understandable reaction against a self-involved prick), and this gives him a chance to wax eloquent on how all this new-found wealth is ruining Ireland. I haven't finished the book, so I'm hoping something bad happens and he gets shipped back to America, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. I think it's telling, though, that he doesn't have many anecdotes of people who are wishing away all of this prosperity--given how he loves to recount every conversation with anyone he's ever had over a pint, I would expect that anyone who said anything about how the country was getting worse would end up in the book.

At the end of the day, romanticizing doesn't pay the bills, and if you ask someone to choose between living in a soulless concrete apartment in Dublin, with tasty ready-to-eat meals from Marks and Spencer, or living in a two-room hovel with ten kids in the backwoods of County Cork, dying from famine and sending everyone you know off on perilous emigrations to parts unknown, I would imagine most people would choose the concrete apartment. Then again, maybe I'm being hypocritical, since I know even less of the situation than he appears to.

Maybe I'm also biased right now, since I had a ready-to-eat meal (spaghetti carbonara) from Marks and Spencer today, and it was delicious. I left work around seven, came home, tidied up a bit, ate dinner, and read that blasted book until now. One more thing, and then I'll shut up about it. Allow me to excerpt a passage:

"Beside the church lay a park where the grass wove thick and the birdsong sweet, but no fairy chatter could be heard. Instead, there waited a black, voluptuous sculpture of the Egyptian god Isiris, she the incarnation of fertility renewing without end. Beyond lay a mysterious series of fifteen-foot-tall pyramids of blue-gray Kerry slate, rising improbably beside the river and before the open water of Sneem's harbor." David Monaghan, Jaywalking with the Irish, pg. 123.

If you're going to write prose so that it sounds like you're trying for some high-minded literary prize (and especially if you're writing prose for a book, and not for a blog that you write haphazardly every night), you should know your facts. And the fact is that there is no god called Isiris. He meant Isis, but ended up with some strange cross between Isis and Osiris, and neither he nor his subsequent editors caught it. This bothered me so much that I flagged the page, and when I'd read another hundred pages with this still fresh in my memory, I looked it up just to make sure that I wasn't wrong.

Now, I'm going to fully admit that I sound just as overknowledgable and unbearable as Monaghan does, especially since I'm taking issue over extremely small pieces of his work. But, I guess I don't like reading the travelogues of anyone who takes themselves too seriously. And this guy, regardless of how much fun he had or how many 'dear friends' (an abhorrent and oh-so-fake way to describe people) he made, seemed to fall effortlessly into the 'I Take Myself Seriously' club. I'm still going to finish the book, because finishing books is what I fall effortlessly into, but I'm not going to be happy about it. And, you can probably be assured that if I'm not happy, you won't be happy, since you'll have to read another post about it.

On that note, I have tons to do tomorrow, so I should probably sleep. My ten-day-old sore throat has somehow developed a wracking cough accompaniment; usually coughs beget sore throats, but this one was the other way around. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow! Otherwise, I may have to break out the half-empty bottle of Jameson that the former tenant thoughtfully left for me. If whiskey can't fix me, you can bet that a visit to National Health Services won't do the trick either.