Chapter 1

Be careful about me. Be careful about my country and my people and how we tell our history. We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. If we are challenged about this tendency, we will deny it and say grimly: "We have much to remember."

"But," you may argue, "isn't memory at least unreliable? And often a downright liar?"

Maybe. To us Irish, though, memory is a canvas--stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the "story" part of the word "history," and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence. This is not a matter of behavior; it is our national character.

As a consequence of this ornamenting, we are accused of revising the past. People say that we reinvent the truth, especially when it comes to the history of our famous oppression by England, the victimhood that has become our great good fortune.

And do we? Do we embellish that seven hundred years since the Norman barons sailed to our southeast shores? Do we magnify those men in silver armor, though they stood only five feet six inches tall? Do we make epic those little local wars, often fought across rivers no more than some few feet wide? Do we render monumental the tiny revolutions fought on cabbage patches by no more than dozens of men with pitchforks and slings?

Perhaps we do. And why should we not? After all, what is history but one man's cloak cut from the beautiful cloth of Time?

Customarily, history is written by the victors; in Ireland the vanquished wrote it too and wrote it more powerfully. That is why I say, "Be careful about my country and how we tell our history." And in this account of my life as I have so far lived it, you will also have to make up your own mind about whether I too indulge in such invention, in particular about myself.

All who write history have reasons for doing so, and there is nothing so dangerous as a history written for a reason of the heart. The deeper the reason, the more unreliable the history; that is why I say, "Be careful about me."



Those paragraphs, written in a looping brown script, sat undisturbed for seventy-five years in a large wooden chest. They lay beneath a pile of clothing: a lady's green gown; a heavier and more ornate green brocade coat, with cream silk finishings; some brown leather gauntlets; a small velvet sack containing tresses of brown hair; and a pair of lady's buttoned boots.

The longtime owner of this trunk, an uncaring man with a runny nose, knew nothing about it or where it came from. It had been sitting for some years in a corner of the shed attached to his hardware premises and, ungifted by curiosity, he had never opened it. To this day he can't recall anything other than that he "bought it from a pair of tinkers," whose tribe had been buying and selling antique furniture and junk all over Ireland in the early 1990s. The travelers, when traced and asked, said that they "couldn't remember it," that they often bought and sold a vanload of "stuff" (or, as they pronounce it, "shtuff") in that town.

Now the chest rests in an attic of a county library in the south of Ireland. The man who donated it bought it from the hardware shop; he recognized it from a description he had been given by a family friend who had often talked about it and who had searched for it.

As a piece of furniture or an antique, it has little interest. Made of oak, with sharp, squared corners, it has a simple brass lock and two ordinary, serviceable handles; and when the lid is raised, the timbers still yield a faint, musty smell, that familiar incense of the past--probably from...

 

This fascinating novel tells the story of a young Irish doctor named Charles O'Brien and the chance encounters that befall him along his journeys. These include famous people such as Wilde, Yeats, Charles Stewart Parnell, and the founders of Sinn Fein. The story paints a vivid portrait of late-nineteenth-century Ireland and offers well-crafted characters who intermingle with real-life events. Frank Delaney's expert narration captures the spirit of his tale. With his rich Irish brogue and perfect literary aesthetics, Delaney offers an experienced yet intimate reading that expresses the pure melancholic ache that permeates history and literature. This true Irish experience will seize the listener's imagination from start to finish. L.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

 

Tipperary by Frank Delaney
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