Reminiscences of childhood are a well-furrowed path, often giving a nostalgic reflection on happy, sometimes forgotten times, as in Alice Taylor's work. And then there are the darker Frank McCourt-type childhoods, beset with bitterness against church, parents, the very soil itself. O'Connor's work is in the first category, a simple hymn to rural family life and the awakening of a sometimes bemused young boy to the realities of emigration, adult memories of civil war, animal castration, failure as an altar boy, tinkers, and the wake: all against a backdrop of turf cutting, hay saving, rabbits, salmon, blackthorn, waterhens, eels, yeast bread and oven cakes, enduring hospitality to the oddest of visitors, and most importantly, loving parents.
There are episodes of charm and humour, and evocative descriptions of the countryside and its people. The widow Delia's love for her children who have gone to America, Rory's adolescent stirrings "like the flutter of a wing" on seeing the breasts of servant girls; their plight if they became pregnant, a priest's comic and inept battle against "mixed bathing", summer holiday love, and the author's affectionate relationship with his father and Uncle Jack, are convincing, as is the depiction of an emigrant's return and restlessness.
The book, however, isn't helped by a flat, sometimes hackneyed, style. The long relaying of the wonders of the boxer John L O'Sullivan "rushing around like a bull in a china shop", references to an old man deciding "to take the bull by the horns", the "cruel arrow of love", the fish "not being up to much" and a sometimes awkward use of direct speech, diminish what could have been an endearing, and enduring, picture of 1930s life in north Kerry's Knocknagoshel.
Paul Murray is an Irish Times journalist