AFTER his excellent and remarkable novel, A Goat's Song, Dermot Healy now gives us an excellent and even more remarkable memoir. A seemingly artless set of variations on themes of attachment and loss, The Bend For Home is only in part, a record of certain landmark leave takings and affiliations in the author's life. It also conveys with great subtlety and imaginative freedom, a good deal about memory and how best to put it into words, about love and time, and about the complexities that make "bend" and "home" indispensible elements of a single, felt reality.
To put it another way, this is a marvellous book, satisfying on just about every one of its many diverting and artful levels.
The story begins with a series of perspectives on the author's native Finea, Co Westmeath, near the Cavan border, where his father was a Guard. His father's health declines, and the second part of the book depicts the family's move to Cavan town, where the author's inimitable Aunt Maisie runs a fancy bakery, the Milseanacht Breifni. Shortly thereafter, the author's father dies.
There follows the longest and the most outrageous, not to mention the most incredible, sequence in The Bend For Home. This consists of a diary kept by the author in the year following his father's death when he was 15 and retained over the years by his mother, much to his surprise. The diary (originally written in code - definitely a prudent move) records a year of chaos and excess, though it is easy to see it now as a year of disoriented desolation.
Thirty years later, his mother returns the diary. Reading it again, and the fact of his mother's increasing frailty, possibly provided the impetus to embark on the memoir. The book concludes with the author looking after his dying mother a sequence which - like the diary, in a way - does not spare the reader, but which also conveys tenderness and spunk.
The narrative is interspersed with scenes from the author's time in Dublin and London, but with the exception of an account of a bad acid trip, these do not add all that much. Neither is there much commentary on the historical times or social context in which the action takes place. The author has no - metropolitan pretensions whatsoever: even the city interludes have the intense intimacy of the focal that suffuses everything else.
And there is very little either about the shaping influences of background heritage, institutional reality, and the like. Considerations of that kind are supplanted by an overwhelming sense of the immediate, of an inescapable susceptibility to it; and there is also a strong sense of the complicated and not necessarily rewarding energies that being faithful to such a susceptibility produces. That sense comes across clearly from the diary, with its seemingly non stop round of drinking, courting and going to the pictures, giving cheek to teachers and stopping in bed the whole day.
FOR an epigraph, the author takes a couple of lines from Percy French's: "Come Back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff": "Just turn to the left at the bridge of Finea/And stop when half way to Cootehill" (where The Bend For Home ends). But we're told that this left turn can't, in fact, be made - except, of course, mentally, to make straight the line of a song, to give a temperament the leeway it requires, to accept that getting things wrong has its place in the scheme of things too.
In The Bend for Home, underlying the sketches of neighbours and townsfolk, the painful confessional moments, the tales out of school, the undifferentiated plethora of things as they are, there's a winning if rueful acknowledgment of the distorted perspective required to throw a shape on the hurts and happenstance of fleeting time.
At death's door, the author's mother shares a pizza with her two elderly sisters and, well oiled and giggling, they recall the phrase of a would be beau: "It's lilac time again." The scene typifies the blend of dislocating transience and seemingly effortless resilience which The Bend for Home captures so engagingly, so openly, and with such a wonderfully unassuming touch.