"I rarely think that anything I write is true", was one of Oscar Wilde's many retorts to courtroom questioning by Edward Carson in 1895. Fintan O'Toole, who quotes this line in an epigraph to one of the essays' that make up his new collection, could hardly say the same.
The Ex Isle of Erin is characterised by a scrupulous and lonely willingness to turn over yet another stone, make another connection, explore a metaphor for yet more revelations, and it is no laughing matter, though there are some wry smiles along the way. It includes a few excellent essays, along with a fair sprinkling of the arresting images and anecdotes, the striking metaphors and sharp insights for which Fintan O'Toole is known, but it left this reader feeling a little like the small girl who returned a large book to the library, saying: "This book taught me more than I wanted to know about penguins."
The penguins in this case are not very different from the ones OToole so effectively described in Black Hole, Green Card in 1994. Ireland is an island floating just off its own horizon a place of the imagination - if we could only work out whose. The best essays here are those that attempt to answer the question by dealing with specifics rather than generalities is Ireland a place imagined by Tony O'Reilly, perhaps, or by Michael Flatley? Does the sometimes surreal vision of Anthony Haughey's photographs (one of which appears on the cover) tell us more about this island than words can?
The essay on Dr A.J.F., O'Reilly, as his own newspapers, are careful to name him, is by far, the longest (thirty two pages), as well as the first, essay in the book. Its dogged insistence on whole, unflattering truth is the same as has characterised Fintan O'Toole's work on the Beef Tribunal and the Hepatitis C investigation. Given the power of O'Reilly's publicity machine, it is a brave statement. Although it is provocatively paired with the Oscar Wilde essay, subtitled "Venus in Blue Jeans" in a section called "Global Irishmen", it promises more than it delivers. If Tony O'Reilly's Ireland is in the end not much more than a brand name, Oscar Wilde, touring the Wild West of North America in kneebreeches in 1882 and billed as "the new English poet", was indelibly branded an Irishman. For both men though, Irishness - otherness within the white and English speaking world - allowed a sort of cultural bilingualism, a protean quality which gave them distinct advantages.
O'Toole's introduction suggests that this will be the book's theme: that "multinational pop culture can be used creatively, rather than "merely consumed by Irish people", if Ireland will only remember and re imagine its "buried memories, forgotten histories". Unfortunately, though much of what appears here is more concerned with pithy and incisive pronouncements about points reached, ends of eras, than with ways forward.
The discussion of Irish language material shows an odd ambivalence, between celebration and repeated references to it as dead or dying. Perhaps it marks a growing engagement with material from which the writer has felt alienated in the past. The essay contrasting Riverdance and Lord of the Dance passionately and eloquently condemns what O'Toole calls "the smash and grab" approach of the latter show to vernacular Irish culture, noting that it used the beautiful lament song, Anach Cuain ... as so much suitably high sounding gibberish, its air as a useful slab of Celticy.
Elsewhere, still celebrating the art of sean nos singing, he writes sensitively about Joe Heaney's Peigin is Peadar, only to sum up by saying that such songs "were still being sung in Ireland by a generation that is lily now passing". Seosamh O hEanai has gone to his reward, but very many gifted sean nos singers live on, and new ones are still being born. People are still singing Peigin is Peadar, and Raidio na Gaeltachta is twenty five years old this spring, but the elegiac note has great authority in the discourse of those who write in English about Irish.
This tendency to inscribe gravestones rather than signposts eventually drags the book to a standstill. Perhaps, however, its energy simply petered out as its author covered the urgently important Hepatitis C story. Certainly it bears all the signs of having been hastily assembled.
The proof reading of this book leaves much to be desired misprints are legion, while accent marks in the quotations from Irish are sprinkled sparingly. The book's middle section, "The Way We Were", ends with the house siege involving a German national at Bawnboy in January 1997, but, the final part, "The Way We Are", dates mostly from 1994-5, speculating on the result of the referendum, and looking to Bishop Comiskey to establish a new kind of public discourse in the Catholic church. Maybe this is postmodern, but it looks incoherent to me. Without index or bibliography, The Ex Isle of Erin is more ephemeral than some of its content deserves.