I Could Read the Sky, by Timothy O'Grady, photographs by Steve Pyke Harvill 165pp, £14.99 in UK
This book is drenched with the yearning of the spalpeen for home. The dislocation of the thousands who left Ireland to find work on the building sites and in the potato farms of England in the 1940s and '50s is telescoped into the voice of one man, who brings us on an elliptical journey from his rural childhood to lonely old age in an anonymous room in London.
Part social documentary, part stream of consciousness, always on the edge of over-the-top nostalgia but managing not to fall in, the book is hard to define. Like the work of Frank McCourt, Dermot Healy and Seamus Deane, it is not a novel in the usual sense of the word.
First of all, it is too short, with the distilled intensity of poetry. Its leanness has been artificially fattened by the addition of Steve Pyke's black and white photos. These depict faces and landscapes from both Ireland and England. There are the now stereotypical shots of the Cliffs of Moher, thatched cottages, grizzled old men and a girl in her Irish dancing dress, but also less well-known, revealing scenes of labourers working in tunnels under the Thames.
John Berger, author of an unnecessary although beautifully written preface, makes a strong case for putting the words and images together, but I am not convinced. O'Grady's text is simple, concrete and, for the most part, stunningly evocative, full of vivid snapshots of its own, such as the nightmarish abattoir in Ipswich. It does not need photos. That is not to say that the photos are redundant, but they would be seen to better advantage on their own, in a gallery space (Pyke's work is currently on view at the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar in Dublin). In the book they are often squashed in spaces which are just too small to do them justice.
And why are portrait shots of Irish writers Dermot Healy and Leland Bardwell distractingly dropped in amongst the anonymous others? Recognisable faces such as theirs do not sit easily in a book which is about the shadowy nature of the emigrant's identity: "We have one name and we have one body. We are always in our prime and we are always fit for work . . . We are unknown and unrecorded." On this theme, the narrator keeps trying to reconstruct a sense of who he has become, grasping at memories of boyhood, reluctantly looking at his present, decrepit self, saying incredulously: "This is me." His self-interrogation is illustrated by a highly effective, frequently used question and answer device: "What could I do. I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall . . . dance sets. Read the sky . . . play twenty-seven tunes on my accordion."
Music is the exile's great consolation in a land where "the sky looks like pork gone off": "When I hit the first notes my hands take off like a pair of birds. I can feel the tune spilling itself out inside me." It is music that cements friendships for our narrator, and through music that he meets his beloved wife, Maggie.
As part of his research, Timothy O'Grady interviewed many men and women emigrants, and his faithful rendering of their histories blends into a kaleidoscope of longing; the towns they've left behind are named in a recurrent litany of loss. Their deaths are sudden and violent, like the dramatic, instantaneous combustion of Francie when his jack-hammer cuts through a mains cable.
Like Synge, O'Grady has listened to voices and has given them a slight twist to show their poetry. Scenes are evoked that are so well known in Irish culture they have become cliches, but in language that is never cliched.
Unlike Synge, O'Grady has not been able to create a uniquely memorable story. The voice of his narrator recounts a medley of archetypal scenes: the killing of the pig, the Stations at the house, one spalpeen who is sleeping with his landlady, the other who is afraid that his wife is cheating on him while he is breaking his back to send her money every week. We do not get a real sense of a specific individual, but of scenes running through a memory, perhaps intended to be collective.
In this too short but singular work, O'Grady illustrates one of his character's definitions: "The thing about a book is that the man who is writing it brings all the lives and all the different places and makes them flow together in the same stream."
Katie Donovan is a poet and critic