ON the face of it, it's not clear to whom this highly uneven and slightly unnerving compendium is addressed. For one thing, it seems to have three levels to it, though it isn't organised as if this is the case. The first level consists of poems and prose extracts which are among the compiler's favourite pieces by Irish authors on the subject of fathers and sons. "Author" here is a term that covers multitudes, and includes Gay Byrne and James Galway, as well as Garret FitzGerald, Sean O'Faolain, and Joseph O'Connor. There's a bit from Michael Longley's excellent Tuppenny Stung, and John Boyd scarifyingly recalling his boyhood, and his father dealing with an alcoholic mother.
A number of fetching poems are included the words to Mick Hanly's Medicine Man and Eamon Grennan's Birthday Walk with Father being standouts and the daddy of them all, Seamus Heaney's Digging, is there as well. So far, so unexceptional. The book is an anthology, worthy enough in its way and subject to the same cavils and complaints about who's in and who's out that anthologies are ever heir to. And there is a gem or two Malachi Horan's recollections of life in 19th century rural county Dublin definitely deserve to be better known.
Interleaved between the verses and the excerpts, however, is quite a different kish of literary brogues. These second level works are testimonies by Tom Hyde and various friends and acquaintances, dwelling in a more intense and less artistic manner on their relationships with their repressed and repressing oul fellas. A lot of this material, including that by Mr Hyde himself, is cringe making in the extreme, notwithstanding the fact that father and son often eventually arrive at some sense of mutual acceptance. In general, these confessions have a common narrative core, made up of lashings of violence, tundras of silence and oceans of drink. Things typically culminate in cancer leading to premature death fathers in coffins irresistible symbols of their lifelong impotence and inaccessibility are strongly featured.
These recovering sons are honest to a fault. Literally. Some of the items read like wholesale "outings", in which father, mother, siblings, and above all author, have their most intimate areas of dysfunction unmasked.
Nevertheless, recovering they are. And how. These pages crackle the noise of all sorts of breaking at of taboos, of silence, of escape from the doghouse. Not only are these authors intent on clearing up the messes bequeathed and compounded by drink and loss, they are also attempting to challenge the model of maleness that they found in their fathers.
And it's at this point that Fathers and Sons declares itself as a volume with a message. The version of maleness sought by these insulted and injured survivors is, it turns out, that proposed by the a Men's Movement, with which many of the less well known writhers seem to be affiliated. Were contributors such as David Hanly, William Trevor and Hugh Leonard, and others already mentioned, aware that their essays would be ideologically co opted?
A heavy handled way of putting it, no doubt. But since the Men's Movement provides such a clear focus ant context for Fathers and Sons, the assimilation of all its contributions to that focus is at least implied. Tomy Hyde's view of the book as, simply, "Tom's story, with illustrations from other Irish sons", doesn't chime very well with the passionate intensity of therapist Philip Kearney's introduction. No doubt there is cause for concern in his diagnosis of the spiritual plight of the Irish male. But talk of communal initiation rites, mentoring, and the role of the elder, not to mention its belief that "the call to submerge differences and seek a rapprochement with women because `we are all human beings' is premature and misguided" has too many echoes of single issue politics, exclusivity (or is it sectarianism?) and reactionary paternalism.
As far as "the Irish Men's Gatherings of 1992 and 1994" where the burden of filiation was alleviated "through the medium of chanting a simple lament" are concerned, they are evidently to be seen in the light of Sean Haughey's conclusion to his contribution ("My Father, CJH") "If this is all too good to be true, well so be it."