The Islandman

Title: The Islandman
Author: Tomas O'Crohan, Translated by Robin Flower
Publisher: Oxford University Press
RadTradReviews Rating: SECY = non-religious, secular book, worth a read.
Why: In describing an Ireland whose culture has evaporated like Atlantic spray, this book is priceless. Originally published in the Irish language and titled "An tOileneach," it has been rendered into an English translation which is almost impossible to put down.
Excellence: Five Stars.
Summary in a Sentence: Tomas O'Crohan relates his life among the Irish speaking housewives and fishermen of Great Blasket Island and draws the reader deep behind the walls of a vanished world.

Great Blasket Island, located just three miles off the coast of Ireland's Dingle Penninsula, remains far off the beaten path of the modern tourist trade. This, however, was not always the case. Prior to the last of the island's inhabitants being evacuated in 1953, Great Blasket was sanctuary to a language and a culture which had all but died out in the rest of Ireland. Among the most repsected of all the men and women who lived on "The Blasket" was Tomas O'Crohan, whose memoirs I now have the great pleasure to review.

When Tomas O'Crohan was born to a family of poor fishermen in 1856, the peasantry of Ireland was still reeling under the catastrophic effects of the Great Potato Famine. The bonds that had once held the peasantry bound to the villages of their fathers and grandfathers had been shattered. Both the young and the old began departing en masse to "The Green Fields of America" and the Dickensian squalor of mainland Britain. Others, weighed down by the rackrenting extortions of their landlords, remained behind, enduring a poverty so crushing that it can still horrifiy their descendants.

Life was especially hard among the villages and islands of the far west, where Ireland's Gaelic language still thrived, spoken by half-starved dirt farmers and fishermen. Tomas would later recall the tales he heard about "The Wheat Ship," which went down with all hands during the worst year of the Great Famine. O'Crohan's elders would remain forever haunted by the sight of the drowning sailors whom they had tried so desperately to save. However, without the grain salvaged from the ship's cargo, no one on the island would have survived. One elderly woman from the island used to say that God had wrecked "The Wheat Ship" for the salvation of the poor.

Tomas would grow up in a world where games of hurling were played on the beach all the Twelve Days of Christmas and the ball was often chased into the sea. One set of clothing was to be worn until it fell off in pieces. A new hat or a set of boots were an almost unheard of luxury and a rare trip to the mailand was enough to make a young boy feel like a king.

However, in those days prior to the Advent of radio, television and the Internet, people were far less isolated from their neighbors. The Irish-speaking families who lived on Great Blasket Island might quarrel among themselves from time to time, but they would stand as one whenever their village was threatened from without. Whether the intruders were the rent collectors, the revenue men, or the police, outsiders trepassed on "The Blasket" at their own peril.

Not only this, but the tales passed down by the island's resident poets and storytellers are well worth the price of the book in itself. The other people of the island cannot fail to make the reader laugh, for this is a memoir of humor in poverty.

For those Catholics who have been offended by the lewd writings of Frank McCourt and are searching for an antidote, they need search no further than this book. The final words of the writer cannot help but linger in the memory. “I have written minutely of much that we did, for it was my wish that somewhere there should be a memorial of it all, and I have done my best to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again.”