I will try and keep this review short and sweet (and hopefully tech savy). Well as I mentioned in my last post this book is heart warming and delightful and funny and inspirational all together. The book is the memoir of American school teacher Frank McCourt,winning the Pulitzer Prize for this book, his debut novel. It is a heart felt account of Frank McCourt’s impoverished childhood in Ireland, how he survives and actually thrives despite what fate has in store for him and his family.
Humor and wit (and sarcasm I guess) are definitely the best defense against tragedy, and does Frank McCourt prove that right. Growing up in Ireland, Frankie is the eldest son of the very poor Angela and Malachy. His father Malachy is plagued by the Irish epidemic of alcoholism while obviously being a doting but extremely irresponsible father. Angela though enraged by her husband’s total lack of commitment to anything he does and his gross non contribution to the running of the household, is in love with him. Throughout the book you feel the love and the laughter that keeps the Mc Court home running.
Having grown up in India, living in India, I have gone through the cycle of being shocked at and subsequently getting used to poverty, for me the concept of poverty in a first world country seems incongruous. But the vivid and the grimly comical narrative of the abject poverty in the biting cold that Frankie and his three brothers fight out shocks me. Survival in the cold winters of Limerick without much food and warm clothing is not easy and Frankie discovers that the hard way as he loses people he loves on the way. McCourt Sr. finds it difficult to find and keep a job as Frankie spends many evenings looking for his father in the Irish pubs, straining to hear the Irish folk songs a sure sign of his drunken father having a good time somewhere inside. While his days are spent at the stairs of St Vincent de Paul seeking state dole with his mother to keep the hearth running quite literally. Through the hunger and cold, sickness and death the McCourt family keeps their sense of humor intact, together on the bed (six of them sometimes), where “away from grandmothers and guards, Malachy could say ye ye ye and we could laugh as much as we liked”. And it is this which makes this book charming and often poetic. With the beginning of the war McCourt Sr. moves to England in search of a better job and a steady income, however neither the money nor McCourt Sr. return back to Limerick, to the 3 boys and the mother. He fades away but what I found so completely refreshing is that fact that no where in the book is there bitterness against him. The boys and the mother love him as he regales them with stories of the Irish hero Cúchulainn (Frankie claims that it is his and only his story to tell).
What also makes Frank different from so many children born into abject poverty all over the world is Angela’s complete and utter dedication to her children’s education. She sends them to school and they study through all that life is putting them through. In Frankie’s intriguing life, school and religion play an important role often pointing him to go in completely impractical directions.
This tale is also about the coming of age of Frank McCourt, his resourcefulness and willingness to take risks while not taking his extraordinary circumstances too seriously. He helps his mother as he drives the carriage for poor crippled Mr Frank Mocggoin and writes threatening letters at the behest of Mrs. Finucane. He falls in love, sins and confesses, fights with his mother all the while keeping the McCourt sense of humor and observation intact.
Pick up this book not only to be shocked and intrigued, to expect things to go wrong when the worst has already happened, but also to be charmed and fall in love with the story of Frank McCourt. He is a master story teller, the details of his life as he tells them come from a place in his heart that is honest and lyrical and poignant.