Books: Irish Invention

THE GREEN HILLS AND OTHER STORIES (205 pp.)—Walter Macken—Mocm//-lan ($3.50).

In 1904, in John Bull’s Other Island, Irishman Bernard Shaw developed the notion that the sentimental “top-o’-the-mornin’-to-ye” Irish character was an English invention designed to prove that the Irish were incapable of looking after themselves. Ever since, without exactly conceding Shaw’s point, or, for that matter, calling the man a liar, Irish writers have been adapting and improving the original invention.

One of the most skilled practitioners in the ambiguous craft of whittling the Irish character into attractive shape is Walter Macken, and his product is as exportable as the golden Irish whisky that sells for a duty-free $1.50 a fifth at Shannon Airport. Macken’s wild geese fly west, sometimes to nest in their natural habitat in the U.S. book club (his novel, Rain on the Wind, was a Literary Guild selection). He specializes in the most Irish part of Ireland, i.e., Galway in the west, least touched by the modern (or non-Irish) world.

Macken has told 21 stories, mostly in a brogue as thick as barley soup. A typical one is “The Currach Race”—a currach being the paper-thin, skin and withy rowboat in which Galway fishermen put out into the Atlantic. Colm wants to marry Sorcha, a fisherman’s daughter. But the fishermen despise Colm because he is a farmer. Their taunts goad him into taking an oar in a currach race on St. Patrick’s Day. He nearly kills himself, but in the end, bless him, they agree he’s a great man, and there at the finish is Sorcha kissing him and all.

Macken’s stories are charming, but the charm, like the defense mechanism of the inkfish, is calculated to conceal the soft, sentimental underbelly from its natural enemies—in this case, people who don’t like being codded.*

* Irish for “kidded” in a large way.