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18 February 1999 Edition

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New in print: Memoir: Act of contrition

By Eoghan MacCormaic

Memoir: My Life and Themes.
By Conor Cruise O Brien
Published by Poolbeg Press

I'm worried that if I wait any longer to review Conor Cruise O Brien's latest book - My Life and Themes - that he might have another one ready for the printers and I'd be landed with the task of reviewing it too. That would be painful, wearing me down by attrition.

Mind you, a sequel just might give the Bashful One an opportunity to undo some of the more outlandish claims, allegations, and hypotheses in the present book. The trouble with biographers like O'Brien is that they often believe that they know their subject matter well. We know otherwise. There is an authentic autobiography in there somewhere if we could only find an honest autobiographer to write it.

The Cruiser's book actually begins before his life - but such is the importance of the man, that obviously God would have been a meanie to have simply allowed the stork to drop Conor into an off the shelf world. No, Conor's family had to be shakers and movers of their time, although sadly for Conor, they shook the wrong way. O Brien's description of his maternal grandfather's political demise, when the scoundrel Shinners decimated the Irish Parliamentary Party makes sad reading. Pathetic reading, really.

Words like `moderate' `constitutional', `tolerant' are scattered about this section of the book, setting his family apart from the rest of the pack and the reader can almost hear O'Brien wheezing out the words `Sinn Féin-IRA' in his apportioning of blame for his less well-heeled upbringing. The label may be 1990s, but Conor writes it into the period of the Tan war with the consummate ease of a revisionist. The Republicans cost Conor a more esteemed position in life:

``If Home Rule had been achieved by the parliamentary route David Sheehy (his grandfather) would certainly have had a seat in the Irish Cabinet. Our whole family would have been part of the establishment of the new Home Rule Ireland. As it was, we were out in the cold, superseded by a new republican elite...'' If only, if only.

It's easy to understand the passion of his later life in engaging in an anti-Republican crusade, the pinnacle of which came last week with his `elevation' by his party to Honorary Life Membership. Indeed, he is one of life's great Friends of the UKUP. I won't bother you with the acronym.

So, having woken to the sound of the shelling of the Four Courts at the age of four, and being able to correctly identify the calibre of ordinance being used; travelling on through a journey of thought, and clever replies and answers he was, as they used to say at home, `as aul' fashioned as a porter bottle'. He tells us, however, that his childhood was wracked with the moral dilemma as to who was right: Uncle Frank (Sheehy Skeffington) for being a militant Republican pacifist, murdered by the Crown, or Uncle Tom Kettle, MP and soldier of the Crown, killed in action in the first World War. Years were wasted hankering after lost opportunity, and no doubt he was the sort of child only a mother could love.

O'Brien the child prodigy became a genius. I know. I read it in the book. Passing exams with ease, winning scholarships with a carefree abandon. Tackling tests that smarter cookies would have balked at. Beating others into second place... and, the guts of sixty year later, remembering with spiteful glee his ill treatment of less fortunate colleagues, teaching staff and anyone else who stood in his way.

One side of O'Brien is saying `look at me, I'm honest enough to admit what I did, while another side smugly flaunts and relishes, a lifetime later, acts of humiliation and breaking the will of others such as the deaf teacher to whom he took a dislike, and on whose disability he played havoc. The basis of contrition is remorse but this book contains none of that quality of weakness. This is boastful O'Brien in full flight.

The book is one series of bragging incident after another. From the cradle to the Congo everyone else in the world from boyhood butties to UN officials and Foreign Ambassadors is conspiring to deprive O'Brien of greatness, yet in one great leap after another our hero always manages to break free from his bonds. This is the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 791/2.

Some people might mistakenly pick up this book in the belief that they'll find a rational explanation for O'Brien's shifts in life. Save your money. Twenty five years of censorship and political strangulation through Section 31 earns a mere half page, his switches are all tactical, his earlier `guise' of being a republican (for example his time in The Irish News Agency) merely a device, a task carried out unwillingly and subtly corrupted - arsa sé - when he could find the opportunity. And like most of the opportunities we find recorded in this book, Conor is successful, Conor is astute, Conor is craftier than the rest. Conor is, indeed, the bee's knees. And lucky for Conor, he got to write his very own autobiography and allow dotage to pass for memoir.


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