I SPENT a couple of lovely days in the city of Galway recently and while I was there I read a book that was set in Galway and I can only say it made it all the more alive.
Not, of course, that Galway needs more life put into it.
It got me thinking, though, that visitors to Ireland in the coming months could do a lot worse than see how a work of literature opens a place up.
There are guide books, yes, and they’ll give you handy information. There’s Google, of course, which will tell you everything about everything and some of it might even be useful.
What I’m talking about though is a novel or some short stories. A work of fiction because the imagined place can bring you a lot closer to the real place than simple, bare, information.
So I was reading one of Ken Bruen’s dark and wonderful Jack Taylor books and there I was, waiting for my friend, sitting in Garavans in Galway city drinking a black pint whilst reading a scene set in Garavans in Galway city about the drinking of a black pint.
Galway city in the west of IrelandIt gave the pint a deep flavour. I’d recommend it.
If you were in Cork city you could, for instance, read a Frank O’Connor short story.
The lyrical undulation of O’Connor’s masterful writing will only bring the city slopes and heights of Cork into deeper focus. You could read The Genius, one of O’Connor’s best, which has these lines that for obvious reasons I treasure.
“Why can’t you go out and play with the Horgans?” he would ask wheedlingly, trying to make it sound attractive.
“I don’t like the Horgans, Daddy,” I would reply politely.
“But what’s wrong with them?” he would ask testily. “They’re fine manly young fellows.”
“They’re always fighting, Daddy.”
Cork city sings anyway but when you read Frank O’Connor you can really hear it.
You could leave Galway city behind and go out into County Galway and read the works of Dónall Mac Amhlaigh.
Read Exiles for instance and you get a double magic for that novel is translated from the Irish and recounts emigrant life in London in the 1950s.
What better backdrop too it, though, than the west of Ireland where so many of those exiles came from.
You could go up and across into Leitrim and Cavan and read John McGahern.
What better way to be in those counties than reading Amongst Women or They May Face the Rising Sun. McGahern’s brilliance is to show the essence of rural life in having nothing really happen but showing how this is, in fact, everything.
Go up to Donegal and read Islanders or The Big Window by Peadar O’Donnell who was writing miniature masterpieces well before any literary trend in that direction. Read a writer who was a thorn in the side of establishment Ireland and isn’t that Donegal?
Of course, there’s Dublin and you could read Joyce and Dubliners, but you could also read Karl Parkinson’s The Blocks, which is a Ulysses for now and will give you a feel for the city as it exists.
You could sit in any pub in any county and read Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and its nightmarish, hilarious, Irish landscape.
You’ll be imbibing the essence of Ireland. You could sit in a pub and read Brendan Behan but you might be sorry the next morning.
You could take yourself out beyond Dingle and sitting opposite The Blaskets, you don’t even have to get the boat across, you could read A pity youth does not last by Micheál O’Guiheen.
I know it’s not a novel it’s a memoir but if you don’t hear it there by the Atlantic, hear the Irish it was written in, then you’re not listening.
So I came out of Garavans and it was dark and there had been a good few dark pints too and however good the pint was, and it was, a pint is just a pint, isn’t it and an Irish street is just an Irish street and the wind is blowing in and you know the rain is only around the corner.
But I have to be honest, reading a book in Ireland about the place you are in, a work of imagination, makes you feel all that closer to the place, all that more like you are really seeing the place, really in the place. I guarantee you won’t regret it.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Galway, Ireland, Irish Writers, Joe Horgan, Literature
