In 1999, when the theatre director Peter Sheridan published 44: A Dublin Memoir, it was greeted with almost uniformly good reviews. It detailed his growing up in Emerald Street, just a stone's throw from Dublin's Sheriff Street, in the 1960s. The household Sheridan grew up in, presided over by Ma and Da, was a maelstrom of passionate individualism made wholesome and nurturing by bonds of love and loyalty. The scope of the memoir took in not alone the intimate, the familial, but the societal; everything from the coming of television to the moon landing via the Beatles and the movie Helga. All of this Sheridan managed with a seeming ease and sleight of hand. Granted, the story lacked nothing in the telling, but nowhere did one get the feeling that Sheridan was straying far beyond the truth.
Forty-Seven Roses is an altogether different proposition. On its cover it is billed as a memoir. Within, we find the same Sheridan family but tellingly under the dedication Sheridan says: "In order to write this book, I have combined memoir with fiction. Many characters, scenes and dialogues are consequently from my imagination. That it floats somewhere between memory and invention is deliberate, but where one ends and the other begins, I do not know." Faction, in other words.
On January 14th, 1994, Sheridan's father died alone while marking up the racing results. Dying as he lived, this larger-than-life patriarch left an enigma in his wake. The roses of the title commemorate his 47-year relationship with another woman, a Lancashire lass called Doris. When she visits the grave and places the flowers there, she forces Peter Sheridan to confront something he has inwardly known all along; that his father's relationship with Doris was more than a routine letter-writing friendship. It was, instead, a passionate (if unconsummated, though this is not clear) attachment vital to both Doris and Sheridan snr through all of their adult lives.
What a surprise, then, for Peter Sheridan to realise with certainty that the fat envelopes his father tore open in his private lavatory, were, in fact, love letters. There are few things more intriguing to a son or a daughter than finding out in adulthood something about the secret life of a parent. That the known, the familiar, can turn suddenly and explosively otherly. Thus, Sheridan embarks on the process of deconstructing Da.
In conducting the investigation, Sheridan P.I. must turn for information to the surviving witnesses, his mother and Doris. But the problem is that, just as they competed for Sheridan senior's affections in life, they would both offer contradictory interpretations of the past by way of staking superior claims to his memory. In the course of the book, Sheridan ricochets between Blackburn and Dublin in pursuance of the truth while trying not to ruffle any feathers. He walks the thin line of balancing his natural filial allegiance to his mother with his empathy for Doris's grand passion (as she sees it).
Where fiction comes in is obvious at times, less so at others. For instance, Doris relates her story in the form of a monologue sprinkled throughout the book; and this, it would seem, is largely Sheridan's imagining of her thoughts and perceptions. But where fiction comes in, credibility is often strained, and the reader is left skittering about wondering the purpose of it all.
Doris's contributions seem merely a means of padding out an admittedly intriguing, but slight story, into a full 200 pages. Furthermore, we learn nothing here about Dublin of the 1990s, and very little about Peter Sheridan's own life, though where we do - in the preface, on his journey to Derry the day his father died, with the visitation of alcoholic relatives from Australia (but are they real or a device?), and again in the closing pages - the expectations of what one might hope to find in a second volume of memoir are met.
But overall, there is little sense of Peter Sheridan living the full life he must have led while in part-time pursuance of Da and Doris. There is not enough movement beyond the timescale of the first memoir, or away from the towering figures of Ma and Da, to make this book an entity in its own right. Some day, a shortened Forty-Seven Roses may end up in a single edition alongside 44, where it rightfully belongs. Hopefully, by then Sheridan will have completed his limbering-up process and will be a fully-fledged novelist.
Yvonne Nolan is a freelance journalist and critic