Kevin Myers' "Watching the Door": Book Review

This reads as if a mad picaresque tale. Myers as first a reporter for RTÉ (Irish state radio and television) and then as a freelance journalist with no real experience, finds himself wandering into savagery as he hastens north as the Troubles explode. A soldier dies next to him; he witnesses an IRA ambush; he sees children shot to death by snipers. The adjectives pile up: the conditions in 1970s Belfast lead to a life led as lies. Insane, vile, ludicrous, preposterous characterize what happens to everyday situations turned into hidden truths, revealed only behind one’s own doors, to one’s own tribe.

The prose takes one through barricades and checkpoints wittily if not to me always accurately. Perhaps as with Myers’ own encounters when he first ventured into the statelet, today’s intrepid tourists may find the “pathological hospitality” credited to Northerners but Ballymurphy, the admittedly dull housing estate in West Belfast, seemed overstated as “mesmerizingly hideous”. Myers, a mordant critic of nationalist pieties, heaps scorn on incoherent IRA Belfast one-time leader Seamus Twomey. Those for whom Twomey claimed to speak and fight, Myers insists, were rarely asked. “The vote for hostilities was unanimous among those people with guns: and those without were not consulted”. (89) 

Myers pinpoints the problem inherent in Irish republicanism as “an almost autonomous state with an internal folklore that embraces and indoctrinates those admitted to its mysteries. Suffering, either inflicted or endured, is a keynote to its ethos”. (14) He contrasts Twomey’s ravings with today’s republicans with a “telegenic veneer of suited respectability”. Twomey’s the “raw product: a man indoctrinated in the ways of death, who had repeatedly and casually caused men to be murdered. These deeds meant nothing to him: his eyes were not cold but angry, as if he lived his life in a permanently homicidal rage. His soul knew no pity, his conscience no sin”. (91) 

The IRA never wants to claim responsibility, as Myers argues it, for the Troubles; republicans blame a white Cortina’s disappearance before a bombing, or they blame the system. And even when blame’s justified, as with Bloody Sunday, why its fourteen sudden deaths garner far more publicity than the fifteen blown up by loyalist terrorists a month earlier at McGurk’s pub mystifies him as a reporter. But, such news ensures his own paycheck, and his pursuit of such horrors creates his own career. 

Not that the British troops, their commanders, the loyalist paramilitaries, the nutting squads escape opprobrium. “Everyone in Northern Ireland lied. Everyone, without exception: republicans, loyalists, soldiers, police—everyone. Lying is easy in such a place. It is the default mode to which everyone turns when there is no consensus about truth. In the absence of an agreed reality, truth is whatever you’re having yourself”. (117-8) Myers names the victims, and makes us watch as they die. He tallies forty people he knew who died in the North, and another eight he did not, but whom he watched die. We like him are forced to remember how statistics cloak murder, and how anguish shatters those left behind.

Myers rails against the warped Fenian perspective for those trapped there by their own stubbornness. “The Northern Irish nationalist ghetto experience” ensured that those “north of the drumlins concocted stereotypes, and then lived their lives surrounded by these people of their own imagination”. (145) As the son of Dubliners who left during WWII for work in Britain, his first name and his own English accent from his Leicester upbringing mark him as close enough to be suspected for his Catholic loyalties, foreign enough to stand out among the unionists. He’s also suspected as an undercover British officer spying on the paramilitaries. He judges himself one of the only men frequenting both the Falls and the Shankill Roads as he crosses sectarian lines to drink among those thugs who—as with the sinister UVF loyalist despot “Rab Brown”-- may plot his own demise from within the pub, if later that very night. 

As the decade and the Troubles grind on, Myers loses his bearings. He struggles to find work, to keep girlfriends (although he beds an impressive number), and to stay sane amidst the “exonerative moral machinery” which grinds down his resistance to republican rhetoric and unionist idiocy. As a “semi-hippy”, his loyalty to the factions supposedly fighting against imperialism turn tested as the Official IRA’s contorted justifications for capitalist gain in the service of a Marxist revolution confound even him. (See my Amazon US review of "The Lost Revolution" by Brian Hanley & Scott Millar; this cites Myers briefly.)

Everyone fighting against the Crown gets paid by it, for housing, rebuilding grants, the dole, and this turns the first war where both enemies benefit from a common benefactor and (sometimes) foe. The years wear him down, as he hears over and over how the IRA allows its members immunity for the most hideous outrages. The cant of its volunteers and the endlessly one-sided recital of their woes disgust him. “For immunity-to-consequence was both a by-product of the Troubles, and its fuel, rather as a nuclear reactor can run on its own waste”. (230) 

Still, Myers for all his acerbic contempt for all involved in taking a guerrilla war into a densely populated city manages to admit the “compulsive generosity” and unbroken gallantry of a resilient and kind resident who endures in the West Belfast ghettoes with admirable good will and innate decency. He fills the narrative with vivid reportage from his perspective, starting with the Shaws Road ambush he tape recorded after he stumbled upon its IRA setup, and continuing into Robert Bankier’s last breath as a British soldier, the final moments of Rose McCartney and Patrick O’Neill at the hands of loyalist killers, and a bomb attack Myers narrowly misses meant for that “deeply manipulative” republican apologist to “revolutionary tourists”, John McGuffin. Myers provides abundant tragedy, danger, and narrow escapes. 

Luckily, he intersperses happier tales. His best, such as Lady Henrietta Guinness meeting the consumers of her family’s stout in West Belfast’s pubs, combine a poignant moment with a satirical relish for the absurd that all too often became the ordinary. He loves relating his two escapades when the man of the house returned and Myers had to hide from the cuckold; his visit to his friend Barney’s brothel, surely the least successful in all of Ulster, represents a comic triumph. My favorite episode, near the end of this often dispiriting narrative, managed to lift my spirits. His hosting of Shannon, an utterly unspeakable American feminist, who befuddles Myers with her contradictions, as a splendid set piece succeeds. 

His memoir confronts his own complicity as a journalist who becomes too intimate with those who he meets, for Myers looks back upon his own compulsion to mix with the natives turned friends, lovers, and neighbors. Malachi O’Doherty’s The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 (see my Amazon or "Blogtrotter" review)  documents a similar experience by a fellow journalist, but a native who finds himself reporting on his own neighbors. As for Myers, he attempts to reduce the tension. He arranges a meeting across enemy lines.  This backfires. He flees to another district after loyalist brutes through whom he tried to broker a truce target him. Everyone talks to him, but Myers learns that half-truths fill their admissions. He is never trusted enough by any side.

Nobody’s innocent, at least those who he estimates provided fifty silent supporters in every community for the one among them who fired back. Certainly, his judgment of the IRA also stands for the recruits and activists whom the republicans fought. Loyalists and “security forces” indulged in their own equally lucrative, cynical, and repellent campaigns. While history often earned the appeal and politics the justification for violence and intimidation, Myers denies their ideological legitimacy. “The Provisional IRA did not consult the living, only the past and future: the present meant nothing to them”. (226) 

Of the catalyst for the deaths which sparked the doomed Peace People, Myers writes that the only sacrifices which mattered to the republicans were when the wrongs were committed by the other side. In this spiral of violence, it reminded me of Orwell’s 1984. As in Oceania, the IRA declared war against one if not always two of its opponents, as allies turned sudden enemies and friends were targeted as foes. This malignant maelstrom before decade’s end spun him out of the province, as he tried to escape the degradation that corroded his professional career and personal life. As I finished, I wondered what he learned, for the back cover tells us he went on to cover civil war in 1980s Lebanon and 1990s Bosnia. (Posted in slightly shorter and edited form to Lunch.com & Amazon US 4-26-11)

Malachi O'Doherty's "I Was a Teenage Catholic": Book Review

Theology vs. decency? During the Troubles, this Belfast journalist mulls over how Irish Catholicism and Ulster evangelicalism tangled his generation. Long an astute observer of republicanism, he proves here a diligent seeker into belief. Stubbornly skeptic, he concludes that in a sectarian North both sides may be groping, along with increasingly secular or agnostic counterparts, towards a simple human need: to test tradition that we're born into against our hard-won experience.

Like the republican and loyalist movements, Catholicism and Protestantism have operated in the North of Ireland upon fundamentalist tenets; their adherents generally claim allegiance not after mature choice, but by habitual upbringing. "I fostered fantasies of my own martyrdom, perhaps because that was all I could ever imagine my teachers would approve in me." (22) Early on, O'Doherty chafes against a 1950s childhood among the Christian Brothers. He insists upon testing what he's told to avow against his own bold life, and he finds wanting the faith of his fathers.

Yet, such a fantasized martyrdom "became more tangible against the background of Northern Irish sectarianism." (28) Circa 1968, "I was deciding that I wasn't a Catholic when others were deciding I had no say in the matter." (53) Losing his commitment before his convictions, his faith withers. He leaves a career in journalism after three years covering Irish strife, and after three aimless years in England he snags a vague job offer to compile a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita for a Hindu sage. He's off in the mid-'70s down the countercultural trail to an Indian ashram outside Delhi.

Swamiji looks like a mop of black hair, whether back or front. Loneliness consumes O'Doherty, and he tells movingly of the despair that kindles desperate trust in a stronger man than what one perceives as oneself. Beaten down by the Brothers as a boy, he struggles as a man nearing thirty to recognize how the soul's longing can or cannot be separated from devotion to a cause. Those who resisted the Christian Brothers, he notes, belatedly became Provos in the IRA, bowing to an Irish need for old conservative ways drummed in by parents and teachers. Threatened early on by the British Army in an home invasion, O'Doherty covers the Troubles for three years, while figuring out how far he can go down the path to belief as a secularized Irish man, schooled in the tenets of a creed and a cause both of which he has disavowed. After England, in India his need for uplift returns. He's attracted to an even more idolatrous manifestation in the utter obesiance a guru demands from a disciple.

He drifts, it seems, into lengthy meditation, mind-expanding to the point he envisions his head swelling like a ball, until he sees a white disc hover before his eyes, after years of relentless practice. Yet, he shrinks from Swamiji's Brahmin disdain for everyone else. O'Doherty, of no caste, is as untouchable as the Hindu tradition he cannot defend for his own adaptation or appropriation. Compared to Catholicism, at least its worst priest, he reflects, would have to care for a beggar he publicly met on the street; gurus like Swamiji loftily disdain any such charity. He grows impatient with O'Doherty's humanism, while Swamiji tries to impel his Irish charge to bend to traditional ways. But, as in Ireland, O'Doherty cannot kneel.

No surrender brings eventually his epiphany: "I cannot die to the world to save my soul." (134) Religion, he reflects, seems in the Irish to be divided between magic and fatalism; neither can soothe his innate rebelliousness. After a year apart from Swamiji wandering India and resuming his writing career, he goes back to the North as a religious affairs correspondent, whose specialty becomes the soundbite from the field, or the parade route, without profanity but with enough naivete or hatred from his earnest or fiery interviewees in the field that will get the best bits aired.

The first part of this narrative began as he braved a protest while working for the BBC in the Protestant enclave of Harryville; as his name reveals O'Doherty's counted among the enemy. After the central Indian portion, the story pivots back to his continued immersion in the North, where religion battles with politics. It's where one standing on the sidelines with a BBC microphone in hand must jump into the fray again, still marked by friend or it seems more often by foe by the faith he left behind. He's a wise interviewer; he stays detached. His discovery: God keeps out of our affairs, entreaties by gurus and claims by visionaries to the contrary. "Our language about God is like the language which in our dreams describes the world. In both we are insulated by metaphor from what we cannot know or must not know." (169)

As expected by readers of "The Trouble With Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA" (1998), O'Doherty can be prescient about the dangers of rigid fidelity to irrational ideals and rabid trust in destructive ideologies. He's at home with Irish end-games of all pursuits. I note that he has since written more about republicanism as "The Telling Year: Belfast 1972" and continued decline in Irish religion as "Empty Pulpits." I look forward to these; unlike other analysts of the Troubles and Irish culture, he's able to link the rise and fall of monolithic republicanism and inescapable Catholicism to the maturation of his fellow citizens.

He proposes that the peace process and the collapse of clerical authority came about when "literal minded and obedient religion" dissolved, and when the republican cause found itself concurrently unable to command once unswerving ranks of those who learned that for contraception or decommissioning, "truth itself became negotiable." (137) O'Doherty lacks fellow commentator Eamonn McCann's radical stance, in his similar blends of autobiography and analysis "War and an Irish Town" and "Dear God"; the two authors share an ability to move between the personal and the political nimbly, although McCann's harsher on these twin fallen idols than O'Doherty, whose faith led him not to Marx but to India along the way, expanding his perspective in metaphorical and practical ways neither lad raised in postwar Northern Ireland might have imagined. O'Doherty's tenure in these twin fields of wartime dissension and religious agitation provides many anecdotes, at first appearing perhaps as casually as this short but densely packed and philosophically challenging book's title.

That is, it seems a throwaway line. But, "teenaged Catholic," existing in the past tense for this first-person subject, stands for a whole world-view, one that younger folks like myself (exactly a decade younger), cannot truly remember. O'Doherty's exploration takes familiar topics such as priestly scandal, poverty, hypocrisy, Ian Paisley, theodicy, and the impossibility of proving God's existence. "And if God is a myth, he is the patch we cover ourselves with." But, he's too smart now to deny God. "I take God to be the mirror in space of the whole self, to which nothing need ever to be said, which acknowledged, can be taken wholly for granted." (169-70) Facing death in his family, he accepts it as "Nature's rebuttal of tradition." (166)

This 2003 memoir stands beside his peer's eloquent 1995 defense of a similar agnostic balance that measures an adult's distance from pre-conciliar Catholicism, by the late Waterford-born, Cork-based journalist-poet Seán Dunne. "The Road to Silence" tracked an interior journey paralleling O'Doherty's, if removed from the Troubles in the relative calm of the South and the Continent. Younger journalist-memoirist, Manchán Magan, in his "Manchán's Travels" in early '90s India, provides another skeptic's testimony, another republican-raised Irishman's more recent reaction to Hindu fanaticism and the predicament of outcasts and India's poor. All three writers share respect for their Irish culture, and objectivity about their own loyalties as men who've outgrown their childhood pieties, political or spiritual, while becoming cautious and patient enough to listen to the yearnings and to record the longings of those at home or abroad who hold dogged beliefs or generous decency within themselves as believers.

Enriched by his probably unique comparison of a Belfast boyhood with a Hindu exposure, plus a journalist's objectivity with a cradle Catholic's scrutiny, O'Doherty combines disparate threads and casual scenarios. Upon reflection, for this reader he reveals a carefully arranged pilgrim's progression through the byways and highways that all of us, whatever our denomination or lack thereof-- or muddle between-- can recognize as an modern man's honest tale of how he tried to look God in the eye, and what happened when he faced that moment and decided to turn away.

(I've reviewed Dunne & Magan on my "Blogtrotter" blog and on British & US Amazon; also see my review of "The Miracle Detective" by Randall Sullivan on Amazon US about the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje that O'Doherty also recounts in a vignette here; Posted to Amazon US and Britain 7-25-09.)