BOOK OF THE DAY: The Irish Male: His Greatest Hits By Joseph O'Connor New Island, 429pp, €15.99
THE ONLY consoling aspect of being stuck in evening traffic these last 12 months and being simultaneously sledgehammered by bad news on the radio, has been to hear the deadpan voice of novelist Joe O'Connor reading his weekly diary for RTÉ's Drivetime. New Island has now brought out a selection of these diaries, together with the pick of O'Connor's previous three "Irish Male" collections.
O’Connor has been sharing his thoughts with the nation during a time of unprecedented financial upheaval and domestic political impotence. O’Connor’s was the beat on which we all entered Biffoland, a place few of us are ever likely to forget. “It would be terribly unfair to compare Homer Simpson with the Taoiseach. One is a large, surly grump who likes a few beers and is rarely in control of the catastrophes unfolding around him. And the other, of course, is yellow.”
In August 2008, as the true horrors of the Irish predicament became apparent, O’Connor delivered his Ode to the Celtic Tiger, “Baby Come Back”, which included a lament for the bling we would now miss:
“And four-grand handbags! Diamond bracelets!
“Apartments in former Soviet statelets!”
It is interesting to read pieces previously heard, including O’Connor’s cuttingly dry takes on Sarah Palin and the departure of George W Bush, and see how well they stand up. Of the free-market capitalist system, then in freefall, he remarks, “Some people think the world shouldn’t be organised like a slum that happens to have a casino attached. Crazy, I know!”
This collection also includes a selection from the three “Irish Male” collections, (1994-2006), a period when O’Connor also become a successful novelist.
He was 30 years old when he was sent to the US by the Sunday Tribune to cover Ireland’s participation in the 1994 soccer World Cup. The result was a hilarious series of reports, collected here as “The Road To God Knows Where”. O’Connor’s account of sitting at a match with two American psychiatrists on one side of him, and a deranged Irish soccer supporter on the other, is hard to beat.
The piece describing going on a publicity tour to promote a book, “On a Dark Desert Highway”, will be familiar to anyone who has undergone that torture. In “Getting to Know the Lord”, from 1996, O’Connor interviews Lord Jeffrey Archer, the overweening novelist, in his luxury London penthouse. “Lord Archer in conversation has two expressions. There is the smile, of course. He smiles like a man who has had emergency corrective facial surgery in a Third World Country. And then there is the serious, concerned look.”
O’Connor mercilessly dissects the vain and self-promoting Archer, then Conservative Party chairman and soon-to-be jailbird, and his novels. He discloses to Archer that he, too, writes novels.
“He looks at me, beaming, his eyebrows raised. ‘Do you?’ he says. ‘Do you really? Well, well, well.’ He regards me the way senior members of the Royal Family regard Rastafarians from the inner city whom they occasionally have to meet at charity functions. ‘Do you? Really. How marvellous. Well, well. How marvellous for you’.”
Short of garrotting, nothing could be more killing.
O’Connor’s ability to make readers laugh is an effective antidote to financial ruin, bad weather and swine flu. This collection should be prescribed for the nation.
Peter Cunningham is a novelist