The journalist Cal McCrystal sets out to tell us the story of his father, and ends up revealing a lot about himself. The father was an incorrigible socialist, poet and self-taught intellectual who never lost his belief in the power of Northern Ireland to heal itself; the son takes a rather different view, as his summation of a piece of fossilised wood found on the shores of Lough Neagh graphically illustrates: "I hefted the heavy fossil, marvelling at how perfectly it epitomised Ulster attitudes, Ulster politics, Ulster culture. It preserved the past for ever. It yielded to no pressure other than the most brutal force. Other than that, it would never change." As the portrait of a good and gentle and ultimately tragic man is filled in line by line, we realise that what we are actually seeing is the portrait of a country; McCrystal writes with affection, exasperation, and a wry, dry humour that is - ironically enough - typical of the province of which he often despairs. Memoir seems to be a genre at which Irish writers excel: and this is one of the very best.
By Arminta Wallace