Memoir: Frank McCourt, in his celebrated tale of boyhood in Limerick, famously remarked that the happy childhood is hardly worth your while, writes Eugene McEldowney.
Well, in this memoir, Joe O'Toole proves him wrong. Looking Under Stones is a hymn to the simple pleasures of growing up in small-town Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s.
It has its store of sorrow and tragedy, missed opportunities and blighted fortune. But on the whole, the tenor is upbeat and positive and it is a joy to read, chronicling as it does the intricate web of loyalties to family and parish that bound a community together in an age that is rapidly becoming a mere memory in an archivist's file.
But if Looking Under Stones will delight the reader, one immediately senses that it was also a pleasure to write. Where most chroniclers would be content to begin no further back than their parents, O'Toole leaps across whole centuries to get a true fix on his family tree.
On his mother's side, he reaches back to his great-great-grandfather, Daddy Tom Moriarty, while on his paternal side he goes back further still, to the end of the 17th century and John O'Toole, great-great-great-grandfather and patriarch of the Galway O'Tooles.
He has patiently researched census returns and parish records and talked to people who could fill in the generational gaps; as a result, O'Toole's memoir is populated by lively characters who would not be out of place in a Dickens novel.
There is Uncle Foxy John, publican, coffin-maker, psychiatrist and shrewd observer of the human condition, who looks remarkably like Mr Pickwick as he stares out from the counter of his hardware shop in one of the photographs in the book; and Uncle Jack, the country doctor who carried on a thriving sideline as a dentist and on a good day could fill a galvanised bucket with teeth at half-a-crown a time.
And, of course, Daddy Tom, himself, who lived to the ripe age of 105 and kept his family bonded to him by a locked chest which he kept under his bed and which on his death was found to be filled with bags of buttons and not the bags of gold they all expected.
This book bursts with vitality and lovingly records the lives of the common people of Corca Dhuibhne at fairs and markets, wakes and weddings, bonfire nights and Wran days.
In writing it, Joe O'Toole has done us all a service.
Eugene McEldowney is a writer and critic. His most recent novel, Stella's Story, is published by New Island
Looking Under Stones: Roots, Family and a Dingle Childhood By Joe O'Toole O'Brien Press, 303pp. €24.95.