Andrew McNeillie is a poet, writer, literary editor and, according to Seamus Heaney, a playboy (of the western world).
Reissued this year in all its poetic romance is his book An Aran Keening. It is both autobiography and ethnography, a travel memoir and a “mock epic”. In a work set in the late 1960s, we hear from the then 22-year-old McNeillie living out a year on Inishmore, “fishing, scribbling, fishing, reading” and not much beyond.
He avoids introspection and instead embraces physical discomfort, arriving at joy and the philosophical. To McNeillie, books are just excuses for living and one of the greatest pleasures in life is the sight of a fried egg.
Though An Aran Keening is a book about living, News of the World, its slim prequel, is in the dreaming. Its very title hints at the push and pull encountered by its author, then a rising hack at the BBC, whose mind exists “somewhere in the future tense”.
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He is at the brink of transitioning from a life “ruled by the clock and its deadlines” to one dictated by “the light and the tides” on Inishmore. As a young man who was taught to read the news bulletin like it were a poem, his eventual rejection of all things metropolitan feels inevitable.
McNeillie writes with gratitude for how his younger self chose life, took the path unwalked, found his way to “the wilderness” elsewhere. Even, McNeillie stresses, if he “wasn’t quite of sound mind” when he did so.
In An Aran Keening, McNeillie laments his eventual departure from Inishmore, writing that “the only return you ever do is in the mind”. News of the World does not return to the subject matter of its predecessor as many prequels and sequels tend to do. Instead, McNeillie reaches to a time before his dreams took root.
In both books the writer approaches the world as if it is overlaid by the pages of his books. The language of Thomas, Kavanagh, Shakespeare and above all JM Synge informs his world view, mixing in with his sentences. Some of the many maxims and aphorisms are self-coined while others are borrowed and reordered.
Read one after the other, or in isolation, these books ring out as reminiscences beside a fire.
