May Book of the Month: Minor Monuments by Ian Maleney

Minor Monuments - Essays
by Ian Maleney
Published by Tramp Press

Review: Marcel Krueger:

Ireland is not always the country of gentle hills, Atlantic ways or peat fires in pubs that German tourists in Goretex seek out. This is a country of shibboleths and tribalism, of bullets on wets streets, hunger strikes and bomb blasts. And for me these things are as apparent on the streets of Belfast and Dublin as they are out on the tourist coasts, as apparent along the Grand Canal as they are out in the Midlands. For me as an outsider who has lived over a decade on the island of Ireland now, there are few lines of text that describe my feelings for this country better than the last stanzas of Seamus Heaney's 'The Tollund Man':

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

Maybe it is no coincidence that on the first few pages of his essay collection 'Minor Monuments', Ian Maleney recalls his partner taking a picture of him overlooking the bog near his family home in Pollagh in County Offaly and adding the same lines of Heaney to that image: Maleney is aware of the same darkness.

Together with Emilie Pine's 'Note to Self' (also published by Tramp Press) and Sinead Gleeson's 'Constellations', Maleney's 'Monuments' forms the spearhead of a new wave of Irish essay writing. Where in the past fiction was the order of the day, these days a new wave of Irish writers is again concerned with navel-gazing in the best sense of Michel de Montaigne: of looking at places, the country and oneself without the added filter of fiction.

Maleney's book is a rare kind of thing, as it finely weaves together three-layers in his (essay) writing: it contains 12 essays, each aligned topically: 'Shelter','Machine Learning' and so; and at the same time charts the descent of Maleney's grandfather John Joe into Alzheimer's and death; and this is also a book about Maleney literally leaving the bog and the established community and family structures of his home place - and observing them from the outside.

The main setting throughout the book is the home of Nana and John Joe, especially the kitchen ('a room where you can really feel the night falling.'), and the overall rural environment of the family houses and the ever-present bog at the periphery. Maleney, who also edits and designs Fallow Media, one of the finest examples of new online publishing in Ireland, not only talks about the meaning of the bog as energy supply and source of income for the community (Bord na Móna, the Irish Peat Board, built a peat-operated power station here, and John Joe and many others worked in peat harvesting), but also as the wild living thing it is:

The boundaries between bog and farm seemed to break down entirely. Houses, sheds, and farmyards appeared out of nowhere, perched on the edge of the blackness beyond. It was as if they'd carved a little bit of calm out of the bog many years previous, and had spent all the time since being attacked and undermined by feral wilderness. Whatever civilising sense they had was porous and partial. Nothing grew straight. Every bush and tree was a mass of tangles and nothing man-made remained square for long. Fences and gates were crumbling, and the breeze block walls of tin-roofed sheds sagged into the soft ground at incongruous angles. The road itself was one long twist punctuated by jagged potholes. The leafless branches of the hardy roadside trees reached out towards us, desperate and lonely. This was Turraun.

Maleney also talks about the distance that the writer as an outsider writing about history has to the lived memory that keeps community and place together, from which he willingly removes himself, with the help of other artists. Seamus Heaney makes multiple appearances, as do Richard Skelton, Rebecca Solnit or Susan Sontag. But Maleney's writing is strongest when he approaches the slow disappearance of John Joe and tries to examine what Alzheimer's means for the human suffering from it and their family and carers, which he beautifully does in 'Pneumonia':

Often the sea is literally wide, but sometimes it is more ambiguous than miles plotted on a map. Sitting in the kitchen with John Joe, I was struck by the resonance between two different experiences of exile; the emigrant and the amnesiac. As the past grew more distant and foggy in his mind, gradually disappearing over some unrecoverable horizon, the songs became more important and more accurate too. They were a link with that past, that foreign country, even as they dramatised the experience of losing it. John Joe sang like a man whose boat was rapidly filling with water. He had a very wide ocean to cross, one he could not swim over.

The place where Maleney and I live these days is still a dangerous and dark island, one where murder, pollution and cronyism prevail. It is good that we have writers like Ian Maleney laying himself and the country. For a clear and honest look at the sensitivities of Ireland and its people there are few better books out there at the moment.       

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Wherever possible we recommend that readers of Elsewhere buy their books from a bricks and mortar bookshop or direct from the publisher.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

April Book of the Month: The Border by Diarmaid Ferriter

The Border - The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics
by Diarmaid Ferriter
Published by Profile Books

Review: Marcel Krueger

It's quiet as I cross the border. The Enterprise emerges from the granite flanks the Gap of the North, for a moment there is the small grey hulk of 17th-century Moyry Castle visible to my left, and then the train chugs into the fields and hedgerows inside the Ring of Gullion. I've slipped into the North. While there is no visible sign of it, there is always a moment however that indicates the division between the Republic and the United Kingdom: when the phone networks change and the onboard wifi skips for a moment. A few phones across the almost empty carriage of the afternoon train start beeping, but that’s the only indication of a chance in jurisdiction. I could pay my tea in Pound or Euros all along the way anyway.

As I write this, the ship of fools that the House of Commons in Westminster has become is with every day producing new proof that as a parliament it is no longer functional and increasingly declaring its own bankruptcy over the issue of Brexit, and as Professor Tanja Bueltmann put it on Twitter: 'As a historian I am fascinated by watching a democracy dismantle itself.

As an EU citizen I am worried about what is happening to my home. As an observer I am facepalming basically every minute now. Never forget: everything that is happening is a *choice*, not a requirement.' And one of the things that is, unsurprisingly, seemingly confusing the British parliament is the border on the island of Ireland, the one I cross so often, quietly, on the train. If they would have time in between voting down any constructive motions for any progress, I would make historian Diarmaid Ferriter's latest book mandatory reading for every single Westminster MP. It's a small book, just 184 pages, but it concisely and understandably lines out the history of the Irish border from its creation in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act to the present day with (or without) its Backstop.

In 7 short chapters, Ferriter charts the negotiations between the Irish revolutionary government and the British Crown that lead to the Anglo-Irish treaty (and subsequent civil war in the south) and the creation of the border; and the often bizarre details of its inception, for example that the newly created border in Silesia between Weimar Germany and the new Polish Republic served as one of the blueprints for the Irish one. From then on he (literally) follows the border and its political implication for the leaders in Dublin, Belfast and London over the next decades, into the conflict in the North and how the subsequent opening of the border as part of the Good Friday Agreement helped overcome division and sectarian hatred and slaughter.

But this book is not purely historical or political non-fiction. Ferriter also weaves in voices from all areas of society and what the border meant and means for them, and how much the two countries on this island are interconnected: there's the Irish Football Association/Football Association of Ireland and Gaelic Athletic Association history of a divided and yet united Ireland (in sports at least) and the perspective of writers and poets; like Eugene McCabe (who's farm driveway crossed from Monaghan into Fermanagh) describing the borderlands as a '"dim, hidden country, crooked scrub ditches of whin and thorns stunted in sour putty land; bare, spade-ribbed fields... housing a stony-faced people living from rangy cattle and welfare handouts... To them a hundred years was yesterday, two hundred the day before."' And then, a few decades on, there's also the man who owns a bridge across the border and decides to plant his chip van smack-bang in the middle, avoiding taxes North and South. As Ferriter puts it, when referring to the shared commemoration of the Irishmen who fought in World War I: 'Such attention to inclusive commemoration, alongside the peace process and the sense of an "invisible" or "soft" Irish border, greatly improved relations between North and South; ultimately, up to 30,000 were travelling over the border each day, and that was convenient and valuable for both jurisdictions.'

What's most striking in this book is the crystal-clear analysis of past and contemporary blunders especially in London. The last few pages addressing the implications of Brexit on the Irish border are interspersed with recent quotes by English politicians who seem to have unlearned everything that should have been the lesson of the almost 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland followed by twenty years of peace. It hurts to read these bon mots of buffoonery collected in one place, and Ferriter's analysis sadly only increased the clinching of my guts and the fear of what mini-Trump Boris Johnson or the living cartoon Jacob Rees-Mogg might do if given free reign over politics that have a direct and immediate impact on the communities on this craggy island.

But there was, it seemed, a return to the politics and and ignorance of the past over the course of next two years as a succession of clownish Tories revealed the depth of their ignorance and contempt when it came to Ireland, none more so than Boris Johnson, foreign secretary from July 2016 to July 2018, who embarrassingly suggested the invisible boundary between the London boroughs of Camden and Westminster as a possible model for a post-Brexit border.

Ferriter has no solution for the dilemma of Brexit, but ends his book with a quote by Benedict Kiely, 'the most that can be hoped  for is that all Irishmen will some day learn to view the past without passion, ...'

The next time the House of Commons suspends its sitting amidst a crisis that has implications for millions of people because of a leaking roof or sewage leak, every single MP should a) receive a slap with this book (as I said, its relatively small) and then read it. The border with its past tragedies and current hopes must stay open.     

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Wherever possible we recommend that readers of Elsewhere buy their books from a bricks and mortar bookshop or direct from the publisher.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2019). You’ll find him on twitter here.