Another Country, by Gene Kerrigan Gill & Macmillan 233pp, £7.99
Gene Kerrigan doesn't waste time before getting the first blow in. On page four of Another Country, his memoir of a Dublin working-class childhood with the odd lecture on sociology thrown in, a terrible pun knocks the wind out of the reader.
The story starts in the Ireland of today. The "Faith of our Fathers" phenomenon has begun: people of a certain age are queuing at the Point Theatre to hear the Roman Catholic anthems of their childhood. It is in this comfortable atmosphere that the pun explodes. It's not a subtle, stiletto-like play on words that can be slipped through the gap between one rib and another. This one is like a hand grenade thrown into a Daniel O'Donnell concert. "They take you back, those childhood hymns, they take you back," he writes, and then socks it to you with: "Play it again, Psalm."
Reeling from the blow one can only stagger through the next pages dreading a similar unprovoked attack. But things calm down a bit. Back in the Cabra West of the 1950s and 1960s Kerrigan eases off on the puns but gets very hard on other things.
The Church gets it, of course. All that imposition of guilt, the confessions, the confraternities, sodalities, Mass, the priests, the bishops - they all get their just deserts. He does, mercifully, stop short of describing Benediction as a Psalm-enchanted evening.
Living through a childhood in the Ireland of that time marked every one of us. Some grew out of the pain, others did not. For Kerrigan, apart from the oppression of that last gasp of ultramontane Catholicism, the educational system provides the main target.
The Irish Language in his mind is not represented by the poetry of Aodhagan O Rathaille or Eoin Rua O Suilleabhai n but by a gibberish he presents in English phonetics as: "Will cad agum dul amok?" and "Inamananahar agus a vick agus an spirrad nave."
Latin is not the language of Virgil or Cicero or Ovid or Horace. It is merely the tongue of Canon Burke from the Church of the Most Precious Blood, the argot of the hierarchy, the private jargon of the John Charles McQuaid, Archiepiscopus Dublinensis, Hiberniae Primas. Latin and Irish, Kerrigan makes it clear, are hardly worth wasting time on.
And then there are southsiders. The distinction between oppressors and oppressed is distilled into the following sentence when he writes of the Dublin of today: "The ghettoes sink deeper into despair while southside gobshites chatter inanely about the Celtic Tiger."
By substituting geography for reality, a picture is painted, in this reader's mind at least, of southsiders from Ballyfermot, Drimnagh, Crumlin, Tallaght and Sallynoggin singing anthems of praise to the new economics while Clontarf and Howth and Malahide sink further into the trough of despond.
But there is, fortunately, an abundance of the real Gene Kerrigan too, the one who writes so well and so incisively in the Sunday Independent.
He is at his best when the preaching stops and the bitterness subsides. His description, for example, of how he once beat and bullied a smaller and younger boy, but failed to make him submit, vividly and frighteningly conveys the terror and the guilt of that long-ago moment.
To those like myself who grew up in similar places at a similar time, his incredible memory for the physical and linguistic detail of the times truly brings the past to life. To those languid marketeers from the posh northside suburbs, it could evoke feelings ranging from horror to condescension.
Seamus Martin is an Irish Times staff journalist