Sir, - Correct me if I am wrong, but is not the purpose of a book review to review the contents of a book? This has always been my understanding of its function, though I am now beginning to realise that this is not actually the case.
Where have I been? For certain critics, reviewing a book appears to be some form of axe grinding exercise, or an outlet for repressed anger - not necessarily directed towards the author in question, but rather towards an entire school of thought, if there are "schools of thought", that the reviewer has become obsessed with.
I refer to the attempt by Proinsias O Drisceoil (July 6th) to give readers an overview of Luke Gibbons's Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press). What Mr O Drisceoil achieves is to give the reader an underview of the book, and a pretty predictable one at that! By this I mean that he appears to be subsumed under the weight of an ideology which certain critics with The Irish Times seem irreversibly prone to, an ideology that frequently seeks to associate anything connected with "the indigenous population" as intellectual nationalism of the crudest kind.
Luke Gibbons, he tells us, "is at pains to promote how what he terms `traditional values' have made effective use of television and other innovative media." But lest we think for one second that Gibbons's work might be appreciated here as a valuable attempt at mapping "varieties" (a concept O Drisceoil will probably appreciate) in representations of contemporary Irishness, the bottom line follows.
We are told that Gibbons has exploited his own field in the same way that those concerned with "traditional values" have abused the media, and he has done so with one single objective in mind - to "give fresh life to traditional Irish nationalism". If you expect to learn much more from this review, then disappointment is in store. The book is of no interest to the reviewer. The supposed politics of the author apparently are.
I could go on at length about O Drisceoil's own particular brand of cultural politics, but I do not want to present my disappointment with his underview in such reductive terminology. I do want to mention the contribution that Gibbons has made to post colonial discourse in Ireland and abroad by offering a radically refreshing, challenging, and fair appraisal of what he terms the "dislocations" between tradition and modernity, the country and the city, the periphery and the centre. But it is not my role to address the contents of the book. This, we assume, is the role of the reviewer.
Writing letters to the editor is a form of therapeutic balm which the unfortunate reader can indulge in to calm the nerves when subjected to "reviews" like this. As to whose nerves need more calming . . . that is a question worthy of empirical analysis.
Yours, etc.,
Meadow Brook Court,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.