BEN LANDER (Benjt Viklander) is a young Swedish writer who first came to Ireland as a visitor in 1981 and has lived here since 1992. On the evidence of this slim book he has been keeping an ear close enough to the ground to hear the grass growing.
Irish Voices: Irish Lives consists of interviews with people he chose to guide him through the complexities of Irish society in a time of rapid change. They make a diverse dozen, by turns informative, opinionated and entertaining, and Lander's imaginative selection and arrangement means his book adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
To appreciate his achievement one has only to consider how an exploration of modern Ireland might have turned out in other hands; some school-of-management "author" wheeling out predictable worthies from the world of industry and augmenting their contributions with the obligatory analysis of our collective psyche.
Lander has worked hard to excise himself from the book, yet the sly presence of the absent interlocutor can be detected on almost every page, either in the echo of his promptings or in the skilful way he has shaped what one assumes is recorded speech. Individual sound patterns and rhythms are carefully preserved, but one gets a sense of thoughtful distillation. Listen:
"I didn't know anything at all about pigs, so to learn how to rear them I became their student. For example, when designing a hut for them I gave them a choice of three designs and then developed the hut they chose to life in."
That, from his first page, is Seamus Hogan, a poet and pig farmer from Co Cork. And this - from his last page - is Maureen Hogan, a widowed farmer from Co Tipperary who recalls with fortitude and good humour the 11 years of her blindness.
"Yes, I lost the eyes and I lost the car, but I won the birdsong ... Now I have peace and calm and it is beautiful in the spring morning when the birds start singing. Then I know it is dawn.
To try to understand the underlying causes of a quarter-century of violence in the North the author listens to Billy Hutchinson, a Progressive Unionist from Belfast ("I have nothing to fear from Irish culture . . . what concerns me is that people have a republican ideology which is about blood sacrifice."), and to Jim McAllister, a Sinn Fein councillor from Crossmaglen who looks out on Slieve Gull ion and invokes Cuchulainn, "probably our most heroic warrior ever".
In a later chapter Margaret Mac Curtain, a Dominican nun and historian, in an eloquent consideration of whether the Irish are a spiritual people, puts the Cuchulainn myth in context: "It is, so to speak, a metaphysical heroic death wish, dangerous when taken to the lengths that it was taken in 1916 in the rebellion in Dublin. Dangerous also when it has been taken to the limits such as in a movement like the IRA..."
Recent scandals involving the church are welcomed by Fr Pat Buckley as "graces from God". "The church and the priest has been put on a pedestal for far too long, and now they are falling."
The book provides our miscalled Magdalens with a memorial as poignant as it is pungent: "It's not because the nuns have reached some kind of enlightenment that that kind of slavery is over. It's because they wouldn't get away with that kind of shit any more." The voice is that of Aids sufferer, Pat Tierney, a man you may remember for busking poems in Grafton Street in a dramatic last statement in the grounds of a north Dublin church. Here he casts a final, irrefutable clout from beyond the grave.
To say that Ben Lander could weave a purse of the finest silk from a saddleback's ear is not to disparage any of his contributors, least of all Seamus Hogan, but to acknowledge his achievement with an unpromising project. {CORRECTION} 97052000022
