The Truth about the Irish by Terry Eagleton, New Island Books, 181pp, £6.99 in UK
Early in this guide for tourists, Terry Eagleton tells his readers that "Orange traffic lights in Dublin mean Go". At that point, you are tempted to think you have rumbled the author's dark intent. His purpose, clearly, is to kill tourists. The chatty, confidential tone of the book, and the large amount of astute analysis and accurate information, is simply a way of inducing a false sense of security. Poor Hans and Heidi, convinced Eagleton is a conscientious guide and unaware he is also a leading literary theorist with an eye for untrustworthy narratives, will plough through an orange light on the Merrion Road and smash into a two-tonne truck. The Truth About the Irish must, surely, be part of a devious Marxist plot against the neo-imperial practice of tourism.
These wild speculations are prompted by the feeling that Terry Eagleton must be up to something. The simple A-Z format (Alcohol to Zoological Gardens, Dublin), the cosily confidential approach, the use of that weasel-word "truth" in the title, the omniscient narrator - this has to be some kind of post-structuralist or deconstructionist game. For one thing, Oxford professors of English Literature don't just sit down and write tourist guides. For another, Eagleton's critical and theoretical writing is full of deadpan jokes, delicious perversities, clever ironies and traps for the unwary.
He is a brilliant self-parodist. A critic who tells you in the midst of a discussion of Macbeth that the centre of the play lies in the feminist commune of the witches, is one whose puckish sense of humour you have to watch out for. His stock-in-trade is the dissection of unexamined assumptions, the instability of meanings, the devious operation of the unconscious mind. So surely The Truth About the Irish could not be all that it seems. Isn't there something more going on here than a simple visitor's guide to the Republic?
The answer, perhaps inevitably, is yes and no. Yes, there is a certain continuity between this book and the rest of Eagleton's work. There are lots of dangerous jokes, such as telling the innocent tourist that B&B stands for Bar and Brothel ("Knock boldly on the front door and don't be fooled by the homely, respectable appearance of the Madame who opens it"). There is, as with the stuff about orange lights meaning "Go", an ironic tone that might confuse the innocent tourist. The book is an exercise in deconstruction aimed, as he writes at the end, at "spiriting away a few fairy tales and substituting a piece of reality". But no, none of this detracts from the basic aim of informing visitors about Ireland's history, politics, culture and present situation. This is, in other words, a playful guide rather than a play on the idea of guides.
And the putative tourist to whom it is addressed is extraordinarily ignorant and gullible. Where the book doesn't work is in its construction of a myth so exaggerated that the demythologising is just too easy. At the start, Eagleton imagines his tourist arriving at Dublin Airport expecting to be transported into town on a donkey cart driven by a poteen-swigging broth of a boy: "From the mud cabins by the roadside, simple-hearted peasants will strew shamrock at your feet, shouting `Long life to your Honour! . . . When you enter the ancient gate of the city, a band of kilted pipers playing Danny Boy will be on hand to offer you a hearty Irish welcome." And so on. But who really expects this sort of stuff now? If such fools exist, it's a fair bet they don't buy books - even ones, like this, that have cartoons by the great Tom Mathews.
Intelligent tourists, on the other hand, will hardly be enlightened by being told that the two big political parties "date back to the civil war earlier this century over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Fianna Fail opposed the Treaty while Fine Gael supported it." You know what he means, but considering that Fianna Fail was founded in 1926 and Fine Gael in 1933, a little more precision wouldn't go astray.
Eagleton repeats the myth that the civil war was fought over the issue of partition. He claims (though this may be just a misprint) that "around 20,000 young people are estimated to have emigrated between 1982 and 1992". The real figure is about 10 times higher. And the old shibboleth about Dublin's North-siders (living in Howth, for example?) being working-class and South-siders (Ballyfermot, perhaps?) being middle-class gets another airing.
When he's not taking candy-coated fantasies from baby tourists or repeating myths instead of demolishing them, though, Eagleton is canny and clear-eyed. His epigrams sometimes combine insight and expression with a felicity worthy of his hero Oscar Wilde. He is really good on religion: "Catholicism believes in absolute values, but the Irish are fairly relative about them." On Gay Byrne: "See God".
On emigration: "The most popular pursuit in Ireland has always been how to get out of the place." On Saint Brendan: "A saintly Kerry-man, which is an unusual enough combination." On Anglo-Irish distinctions: "One of the major differences between the Irish and the English is that the Irish like the Americans, whereas the English, on the whole, don't." Eagleton also includes crisp but subtle mini-essays on subjects such as History, The Irish, Northern Ireland and Irish Nation. He takes apart the notion that the Irish are obsessed with history. He explains the complexity and contradiction of Irish identities. He gives a fine account, in just five pages, of the way the different sides in the Northern conflict understand themselves. And he writes brilliantly about the strange impact of emigration on the way we imagine the nation. Because of their clarity and good sense, these elegant disquisitions would be as useful to natives as they will be to tourists.
And the book, in the end, captures well the tentative balance in contemporary Ireland between cruelty, fecklessness and vulgarity on the one side and good humour, vivacity and creativity on the other. Now that most of us are tourists of a sort, living in a place that has become suddenly exotic even to the natives, the "truth about the Irish" may be well beyond even the most acute observer. A better assortment of useful fictions may be all we can hope for, and Eagleton's is as good as anyone has yet arranged.