An Aran Keening

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Summary: A book of considerable insight and justifiable reverence
Review: An Aran Keening is the personal and compelling memoir of Andrew McNeillie, a man who traveled to the Aran Islands off the Atlantic coast of Ireland and stayed there for eleven months. McNeillie is clearly filled with admiration for a land of profound natural beauty and an appreciative people who work hard to maintain their traditions and culture from one generation to the next. Unique, superbly written, highly recommended and rewarding reading, An Aran Keening is a book of considerable insight and justifiable reverence.

Rating:
Summary: Help Wanted: Editor - Part 2
Review: Sorry. I mistakenly said in my review just submitted that the author spent 3 yrs living in the Aran Islands. He actually spent under just one year. He had been there 3 years previously. Sorry for the mistake.

Rating:
Summary: Help Wanted: Editor
Review: The first chapter is very good. The last chapter is excellent. It's the 200 pages in between that are problematic. If you suffer from insomnia, rush out and buy this book. The only thing that kept me going is that I have been to the Aran Islands --... The story line skips around and seems to have no continuity or narrative flow... I still don't understand why the author, at college age, spent 3 years living on the island... What an odd glop of uninteresting stories, poetry, observations on corncrakes, and education on fishing lines and rabbit hunting. I did learn some new vocabulary words, though. Like "monody," which might be the kindest way to describe this book.

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Summary: "Closely observed lanes" but little life to see
Review: This memoir has been painstakingly crafted and perhaps over-written. In smaller sections, it captivates you with a sense of what it was like, in 1968, just before this then-isolated island got an airport and electric hookups to the global village, to spend a wet and windy winter on the edge of the Atlantic. But, as a whole, the authorial smugness and arch prose drag down a book in which nearly nothing happens. Not that this itself is a downfall, for in parts you realize what it'd be like to face yourself, as a young person shy, awkward, and introspective, who has taken yourself out of urban life nearly entirely for long stints. The pleasure of this account, in fact, is in its lack of the picturesque, the quaint, or the predictable travelogue produced by so many Irish visitors, short or long-term. The writer's failure to come to terms with even a fair try at the Irish language prevents him from appreciating more than a superficial understanding into a very crucial element of the Aran mentality. This transience distances him from his place. Certainly, this short book lacks the overwhelming erudition of Tim Robinson's hefty and valuable academic investigations of the island, but its lightweight quality itself's too ephemeral. (By the way, consulting Robinson's island map and comparing it to McNeillie's whereabouts, he seems to have boggled his true location, perhaps to protect the identity of his host family.)

It reminds me of another outsider who came to stay for a time in the West of Ireland, Lawrence Millman's They'll Never See Our Like Again, which also added little but likewise floundered when the writer tried to assume a bit too hubristic attitude when it came to one who thinks he knows better than the daytrippers once he's mistaken by them for a native. Not everyone who well-intentedly visits a foreign place can afford to live there for a year, and such condescension diminishes the authority of those who stay longer but still (as McNeillie to his credit admits) will never really "go native" at least in the eyes of the real inhabitants. Very few of Inis Mór's natives seem to establish any rapport with McNeillie. This ironically draws for me a truer picture than many tourists hoodwinked by pub chatter and conniving characters into thinking they've gained some profound insight into Ireland.

So, while his intent can be admired, this product nevertheless fails to live up to its intent. Far too often the pages float by with little ballast. He writes well about nature, but this could have been an essay, since it has no reason to be so drawn out for so little substance. If McNeillie wrote it to warn off his children against their father's example, it's not apparent here what harm this mundane sojourn one winter had on the author. He spends time in a drafty cabin, gets seasick, gets really sick, fishes, helps with farm chores, daydreams, drinks, and keeps a diary. Eventually he has to go back home come summer. Full stop.