Memoir: At one point in this book a character declares that travel is a good thing, that it broadens the mind and that "when you go away and come back you see things in a different light". Going away and returning forces us to see what we know - or what we think we know - in a totally different way.
The memoir, such a personalised form, functions in a somewhat similar fashion. Eschewing the purely material and factual - quite necessary for autobiographical writing - the memoir is where the act of writing becomes an act of remembering, and is the result of such imaginative engagement with one's past. That an audience, other than the author, might be even remotely interested in such an activity, is based not on the bare details and mundane facts of that past, but in the quality of that engagement.
John MacKenna, a writer better known for his short stories and his novel on the life of poet John Clare and his biography of explorer Ernest Shackleton, in this memoir succeeds brilliantly in engaging and sustaining the reader's attention. He does so mainly by employing a novelistic technique on his personal journey into the past. Though ostensibly a "memoir", there is a story here holding the narrative together, giving it a centre and purpose beyond the merely nostalgic. It is a story of how families can work, even in dysfunctional mode.
The account moves back and forth between the present moment and the remembered past. What the present-day John finds most attractive about the past is an overwhelming feeling of simultaneous excitement and comfort that pervades his youth: the excitement of encountering life for the first time with all the possibilities that it might offer, and the comfort that home and a lack of responsibility can afford a child. Of course, this is a sentiment that only the vantage point of retrospect can bestow: the contrast with the crises he confronts as an adult is telling, as he struggles to cope with the ending of his marriage. Thus, these twin strands of the narrative run parallel, echoing off one another, offering the opportunity to compare and contrast then with now. Interestingly, in the past MacKenna uses "I" but in the present moment the more distant and distancing "he" or "John" is employed. It is suggestive, perhaps, of the kind of dilemma faced by the author: which self is the more real and authentic, the more whole and complete?
Place is hugely significant in this piece of writing. Castledermot in Co Kildare is the homeplace, and the author has never really left its environs. The reader is presented with picture postcards from the town's past, with wonderful digressions on a cast of characters: the corner boys, the cinema owner, and the local GAA team. Each is allotted their integral space in the author's remembered world. It not just the people who are powerfully imagined, but the landscape too. The fields and the hills, the streets and the lanes, are also sites for memory and remembering. The seasons coming and going and the way they alter that landscape marks the rhythmic progression of the narrative.
Some of the memories and scenes here are nothing in and of themselves, but taken together, as a totality, these moments are those "things you should know": moments plucked from the flow of lived experience, held up, examined and thereby cherished. So delicate are they that, like a newly spun web, they might perish at the slightest touch. John MacKenna's skill as a writer, his sensitive handling of language and material, coupled with his honesty, means that this memoir is much more than a mawkish paean to his past. It possesses, rather, an urgency that has relevance obviously for the author, but potential relevance as well for the readers, who might themselves need to reassess both the past and the present.
Derek Hand is currently writing A History of the Irish Novel for the Cambridge University Press. He lectures in the English department in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra
Things You Should Know: A Memoir By John MacKenna New Island, 278pp. €14.95