Memoir: Thomas Lynch's Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans - a memoir, travelogue, and social commentary - has at its core varying ruminations on the changes in Ireland since his coming here in 1970.
The material in the second and third categories will present no surprises for local readers. Irish-American, or any tourist - buyers of the volume will find a lot to interest and excite them.
The traditional marvels of culture and folklore on the island are put forward, but these are combined with the marvels of adaptation, betrayal, and transformation viewed on a global scale in largely journalistic terms.
The memoir part is the chief delight of Booking Passage. Thomas Lynch, scion of a prolific family, on his father's side hails from Moveen, Co Clare, up the peninsula outside Kilkee. In 1970 he made contact with his two remaining cousins there, Tommy and Nora Lynch. The author's purpose and pride is contained in the line, "I was the first of my people to return". He was royally welcomed, too, and given the run of the cottage, which he finally inherited; he maintained his cousin Nora's struggle against the Land Commission and saw to it the 28 acres were effectively bequeathed as she wished.
The two glittering points in this autobiographical strand of the book are the cottage - so typical and atmospheric, much added-to and improved in recent years - and the gifted spiritual character of Nora Lynch. The last survivor, and her habitation in the grand Arcadian landscape of the Loop Head Peninsula, sparkle like forgotten poems. The verbal pictures of the area throughout the book evoke the superb Emily Lawless and her poems of the Corca Baiscinn coast.
The best writing in the book evolves from the sound of voices, from memory crammed into voice. A climax that serves as entrance to what might be called the Celtic world and this other world occurs in the addendum to the grace said by the author's grandfather at festive Detroit dinners. Several pages repeat and declaim it until it blows Thomas Lynch to the lintel in Moveen west:
And don't forget your cousins
Tommy and Nora Lynch
On the banks of the River
Shannon
Don't forget.
At this magical moment Lynch uses Cavafy's Voices to ritualise the dead:
Ideal and beloved voices
of the dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead . . .
Lynch's grandfather's voice returns now "like distant music that dies off in the night" (the last line of Cavafy's poem).
Booking Passage is given vitality by a celestial nuance of auditory memory. To the above quotation can be joined the recollection of the sounds of that first cottage night: "They spoke in tongues entirely enamoured of voice and acoustic and turn of phrase, enriched by metaphor and the rhetoricals, and cadence, as if every utterance might be memorable, "Have nothing to do with a well of water in the night." "A great life if you do not weaken."
Nora had a Raleigh bike that she rode the "long road" though a short distance to Kilkee to perform the ritual of gossip and shopping. The golden age, with its emphasis on "news", all that moved or died since last week, lingers over encounters with tradespeople (most of them happily known to this reviewer). "Did you hear what I'm after hearing below?"
Kilkee is in some ways a literary experience: the Mac Cruitín poets came in the 17th century with other bards to sing the praises of the Jacobite MacDonnells in Kilkee castle, over the Pollock Holes; Alfred Tennyson and Alfred Percival Graves met swimming in the third Pollock Hole; Kate O'Brien picnicked under the rocks below Sykes' Corner; Michael Hartnett at leisure in Scott's, a premises about which Criostoir Ó Floinn wrote a book. Percy French's railway ghost walks on the strand.
These connections are not explored here, but they indicate a climate in which the vatic Lynch could adjust.
The Irish-American mission to get roots, to get back the miracle of intimacy with an actual Ireland, is set out in sometimes repeatedly obsessed detail. Thomas Lynch avoids the most common trap of American families: the fool's gold of genealogy on paper. This writing becomes a layered hymn of gratitude to having family left on the other side. The task of the returning several-generationed immigrant to connect back has been difficult. The best comment on the divide has been made by John V Kelleher, the finest scholar on the situation, who quoted his own father: "If you had the record of one night's talk, you'd have it all. But you wouldn't be able to understand most of it if you did have it." The luck of the Irish-American has changed.
Ambiguities haunt this book. The author can't make up his mind about the value of the simple Dev-era life - easy-going, at least on the surface. He is confused, perhaps defeated, in his barbed conflict with Catholicism, which may represent an inner ordeal. The religion of the saggarts was the signet of his race that was taken across the Atlantic. Lynch lies under the shadow of Rome and of his great uncle priest; though he shows disdain for Rome, he has anniversary Masses said for Nora.
Thomas Lynch is not an original voice, but he catches what he is trying to say. His writing is strange or sublime only at moments. I wish this were not, as it seems, a book of articles composed for different outlets but a work devoted to the amazing survival of feeling between Irish-America and Ireland. Is emigration now a return to the conventions that bind blood and wanderlust, an extension of tribe-making?
The facts of Lynch's retrieved family history achieve at times the inspiration of legend. There are spectacular associations. For instance, his grandfather's grandmother, Honora, was a great niece of Eugene O'Curry. He must have felt that walking O'Curry Street in Kilkee (my father called it Albert Road). Noting such metamorphosis, I give a toast to ancestor worship.
James Liddy is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His most recent books are I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness (Arlen House) and The Doctor's House (Salmon)
Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans By Thomas Lynch. Jonathan Cape, 301pp. £12.99