The Craic : A Journey Through Ireland

The cover, with its "sniper at work" sign, prominent statue of the BVM, and grinning red-haired dancing girl, leads you to expect another blarney-ridden series of anecdotes penned by a tourist who'd breezed through one summer. London-based journalist McCrum brings a more nuanced perspective, showing how, beginning in Dublin, going down around the southern and up the western coasts, stopping at market towns, plenty of b & b's and country houses, and ending with the North's urban terrain, he learned a more neutralized position on the "Irish question," if never coming up with one satisfactory answer. Refreshingly, he spends a bit of time in areas rarely portrayed in detail either in guidebooks or travel accounts. Anglo-Norman memories in the south-east, for example, or Puck, Lisdoonvara, and Ballinasloe fairs. Even when he visits familiar settings, such as the Aran islands, Derry's Bogside, or Belfast's Peace Wall, he notices what most visitors do not, or if they do, rarely record! His skepticism and enthusiasm often mix with intriguing results. Through mysterious set-ups he often stays with well-off Irelanders, and his encounters at a Kerry artist's colony epitomize this type of isolated hothouse setting as opposed to a more gritty scenario such as his meetings with the Travelling community in Tuam, or his frank talks with Loyalists from Shankill Road. My only letdown was that his itinerary does not penetrate the midlands, only easing into Ballinasloe in East Co Galway as the furthest point away from the coast. A look at Longford or Offaly would've been worth it, for certainly these too are less frequented spots in which McCrum might or might not have found tales to tell or people to interview. Sticking to the circle route, he never explains really why he never went into the interior of Ireland as well. And I'm still mystified about what Bord Failte did to compensate his stay--I sometimes felt that he was set up at places free, and at others he had to fend for himself. I got the impression he may have inadvertently wound up endorsing certain hoteliers or hosts with whom he lodged. He avoids easy putdowns of (some of!) his fellow tourists, and keeps his language free of self-indulgent pity or easy sentiment. In the rare instances he describes natural beauty, he conveys its sensations well. And the range of accomodations never fails to keep the reader alert and bemused. A book worth seeking out, an appropriate companion to two concurrently written travelogues also recommended: Pete McCarthy's more humorous McCarthy's Bar and Lawrence Donegan's more localized No News At Throat Lake.