BOOK OF THE DAY: EAMON DELANEYreviews Ruinairski,By Paul Kilduff Gill and Macmillan, 266pp, €12.99
BOOK BLURBS always overstate things. The jacket here claims that, after his previous book, Ruinair, the author is “fortunate to be still allowed to fly Ryanair”. On the contrary, I’m surprised Kilduff doesn’t have free flights for life, with drinks on top. Far from being a critical account of the low-fares airline, Kilduff’s book is a tribute to the reach of Ryanair and its colourful chief executive, Michael O’Leary.
As with Kilduff’s earlier bestseller account, the objective is to go to cities in eastern Europe the airline flies to and explore the culture. In between these trips, there are reflections on the airline’s methods and background. At one stage, Kilduff humorously applies for a job as its head of communications. He is, after all, a smooth and engaging writer, and the narrative flies along, to use an appropriate metaphor. But his subject matter is hardly original. To go to Bucharest and find it grim is like shooting fish in a barrel. Not for a long time has the Romanian capital been known as the “Paris of the East”.
His portrait of Prague as sleazy and overpriced and overrun with tourists is also a familiar one, although well worth saying (given the city’s official “cultural” image).
Kilduff is more interesting about the Baltic states and their emergence from communism. But his is a patronising style of travel writing: a blokey mixture of Jeremy Clarkson and Sacha Baron Cohen. The blurb describes Kilduff’s amazement at unpronounceable destinations like Brno and Ljubljana (“do they even exist?”). But Brno is the birthplace of Milan Kundera and Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia, where the first Yugoslav war broke out. But then to know these things would not suit the purpose of the book, which is to explore how weird (or dull) the east Europeans can be. In Latvia, he is bemused by some strange reality TV. But turn on the TV in any country, especially in the daytime, and you’ll find some weird viewing. He also bemoans the communist-era tower blocks. This always amuses me. Do such critics really think that sink-estate Ireland or England looks so good?
The book is thus a strange hybrid. Kilduff makes a poignant visit to the Czech town of Lidice where the Nazis massacred the inhabitants and bulldozed the buildings. And then goes to Bratislava, which he rightly applauds as being a beautiful city. But then he goes on, at length, about the beautiful women there, including his tour guide, Katka, whose broken English causes great merriment, and who (if he lost his fellow tourists) “could be mine for the day, and mine alone, and all for 13 euro”. Classy. Maybe this is why he warms to the humour of O’Leary, whose witticisms feature throughout. Kilduff has even edited a collection of them called The Little Book of Mick.
Perhaps a future volume could include O’Leary’s happy claims about arranging “blow jobs” for passengers or, best of all, his proud boast that grieving relatives are the “best customers, because they’ll pay anything for their last-minute flights and are too grief-stricken to question the price”. If such callous, distasteful remarks were made by anyone else, we’d presumably all be offended, but not when our Mick comes out with them because he’s a “great character”, a “can-do businessman” and he knows “how to get publicity”. He will certainly be very pleased with this account. For the rest of us, it’s a diverting read and will certainly get you through a stiff flight.
Eamon Delaney is a former diplomat and editor of Magill magazine