Travel: Two new books about Ireland in one month, each of them tackling the subject of what it is like to live in Ireland today, and offering two radically different views of Ireland: Monagan is the outsider, Ruane the insider.
They also have completely different styles. Monagan's favourite words are "dreams", "timeless" and "wonder". Ruane's favourite word in his first book was "asshole"; in this one, it's "toerag", closely followed by "scumbag".
Monagan is an American journalist with distant Irish roots. In 2000, he moved with his wife and three children from Connecticut to Cork city for three years, because the family wanted to have an adventure and follow their dream of living in Ireland for a period. Ruane - whose fine first book last year, Tales in a Rear-View Mirror, recounted his eye-opening experiences as a Dublin taxi driver - has followed that up with a sharp look at the state of modern Ireland.
Monagan has made a big mistake in not deciding what kind of book he wanted to write for Lonely Planet's non-fiction list. The obvious option was to write about an outsider's experience of living with his family in expensive, drunken, racist, loutish, corrupt, maddening but still occasionally seductive Ireland. This would be edifying and interesting to all. He does do this but, most unfortunately, not exclusively so. He also has a crack at writing some kind of unnecessary guidebook to Ireland's culture and sights, which include excruciating passages full of fey nonsense along the lines of "Not long ago, the west of Ireland was full of native Gaelic speakers who lived in a timeless world into which the Creator seemed to breathe an inordinate share of the world's dreams".
There is a lot of this. Every time Monagan writes about a) Irish landscape, b) Irish culture and history, and c) his children, he comes over all strange, and his usually reasonably robust style evaporates into self-indulgent mush.
It's a real shame, because there are lots of potentially good things about this book. Monagan is excellent on our culture of drinking; he is also good at capturing the ad hoc way things work in Ireland when looking for employment; and he has salient observations on neighbours, brattish local children, and our mysterious capacity for craic. But a lot of the time, his humour and tone don't work.
He also gets simple facts irritatingly wrong, such as his confident declaration that Irish roads have no Stop signs (was he driving straight through them?). It undermines the reader's trust in the rest of his many declarations.
Donal Ruane's book about modern Ireland resembles an invaluable handbook in six parts, each of which focuses on one "thing": drink, infrastructure, property, racism, tribunals, and happiness. Each subject is tackled in Ruane's intelligent, fresh, distinctive, guff-free style, interspersed with some quite hilariously illustrative anecdotes.
These are all excellent, pertinent and entertaining analyses of our current national obsessions, although even Ruane's considerable talents can't quite succeed in making the tribunals chapter reader-friendly. But the star chapter of this book is the one entitled 'The Happiness Thing', which is worth the price of the book alone. As Ireland canters ever further towards a society which adores at the altar of materialism, Ruane asks unsettling and necessary questions about our current value systems, both as a society and as individuals.
This terrific, timely book should be required reading for everyone in this country, particularly economists, politicians, property developers and anyone who shops regularly at Brown Thomas.
Jaywalking with the Irish By David Monagan, Lonely Planet, 240pp. £7.99
I'm Irish - Get Me Out of Here! By Donal Ruane, Gill & Macmillan, 234pp. €10.99
Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist and a poet. Her non-fiction book, County Bounty: A Treasure Map of Ireland, will be published by New Island Books next year
