Reviews of Music on the Wind

        The stories in Music On The Wind portray interesting human interactions in an Irish way or, to be more precise, in an Ulster-Scots way.  That Ulster-Scots aspect comes through in the values to which his characters adhere.  Money, whether making it or preserving it, is important.  Farmland, which is seen as a symbol of wealth and status, is also important and especially the need to keep it in the family name; hence having a son to inherit that land.  This is aptly captured in the first story titled Music On The Wind, and again in All Flesh Is Grass.

        It is unfortunate that the Scots aspect, derived from the Plantation of Ulster with Scottish Presbyterians beginning in the 1600’s during the reign of James 1, brings with it that strong Scottish Protestant outlook on life that tends to set the Ulster-Scots apart from the rest of Ireland.  The author stays away from this topic but does touch on it in the sensitive story titled If Only wherein a young man, Ulster-Scot, Protestant and British, is drawn to a beautiful young woman clearly from the other side of the fence; and love might have bloomed if only political nonsense and terrorism had not interfered.

        Whatever religion the people of a town or village may follow the author brings out the influence of the clergy in his story Passing Through. When the story-teller has left the village where he spent a few interesting minutes in a Pharmacy and is half way up the mountain and looks back, all he can see of the village is the symbolic chapel spire rising above the trees, the same trees that totally hide the village.

        Northern Ireland consists of those six counties that voted predominately in 1922 to remain British while all the other counties of Ireland voted to be independent and formed the Irish Free State, now known as the Republic of Ireland.  During the Second World War men and women of whatever persuasion in Northern Ireland joined the British Armed Forces even though there was no conscription as there was in England.  As with the First World War the Second left scars on the minds and lives of the people especially those returning from the battlefields.  The author captures the sadness of this in the story Phantom In The Hedgerow and also in the story Feathers.

        The other aspect of Ulster-Scots life that the author captures with great sensitivity is the role of evangelical religion and how it can sometimes interfere in the lives of others, depending of course on the beliefs of the other, sometimes for better as in the story The Guy From Belfast or with sad effect as in the story The Lesser Shadows Of The Day.

        The author also shows a sense of humor and fantasy in the two stories Dr. Simon's Night Out and The Terrible Sin of Martin McCabe.  His background as a scientist comes through in the story The Quark Syndrome.

        I will conclude by praising the author for writing beautiful human stories that avoid scenes of violence or of prurient sex, scenes that have become almost standard with so many writers today.

Review No. 2
Written by Donnchad Ui Cearbhallain

        The trouble with most Irish fiction published in America is precisely that: it is fiction about Ireland.  It is not rooted in reality.  The Ireland described in it is a made-up world full of leprechauns and little people, genial priests and heroic gunmen invented by writers of many ethnicities in Hollywood or by pious Irish Americans who have never stood ankle deep in the mud of a damp Irish field.  Gardiner Weir knows what he is talking about.  He has lived this reality.

        The people he describes are those he remembers.  That means they do not sit around moaning to each other about fairies, the Catholic clergy and doomed love.  They do not discuss the national question and throwing off the English yoke.  Mother Ireland, Kathleen ni Houlihan, mystical and airy and fairy Ireland do not appear at all.  Catholic Ireland hardly impinges.  There are no English villains to hate.  Even the World Wars in which so many Irishmen from all arts and parts of Ireland fought with distinction and bravery are offstage events and the IRA and the troubles of the last almost forty years are incidental, not central.  Weir’s people are focussed on their own issues.  They never, so to speak, raise their eyes from the plough.  They see only their own furrow.  They do not see the wider national picture or share its obsessions.  They think only about their own acres and how they might, by marriage or cunning or hard work, acquire some more.

        They are not Irish peasants beloved of drama and fiction.  They are not playboys of the western world nor do they ride to the sea.  The acreages they avidly discuss lie around 80 acres.  By the peculiar mathematics of Irish landholding that places them midway between the great lord in his estate with thousands of acres and the peasant in his thatched cottage with scarcely ten.  My own family in County Tyrone, hardly more than fifty miles away, held only 11 acres.  We were subsistence farmers  -  we could not be otherwise.  Weir’s people could generate surplus.  Weir does not emphasise the point but landholding in Ireland has its human consequences.  The lord of the great estate was very often only a summer visitor to Ireland.  He played out his life and had his triumphs and disasters on the English stage, making his way in the British Parliament or ruling some far flung part of the great British Empire.

        For the peasant life held few choices.  Small farms could not feed more than a few mouths.  You could stay and live unmarried or leave.  So peasants from Tyrone and elsewhere in Ireland travelled to whatever city they could find to become part of the wage-earning urban proletariat in Britain and America.  The middle landowners were different.  Weir’s people, the people of the rich fertile countryside, made their way into the local small towns and the educated middle class.  They or their sons became Protestant clergy, doctors, pharmacists, and university men.  Weir’s stories reveal an Ireland that is a nation of shop-keepers.

        These hardy profit-driven men also migrated.  When these men went abroad, it was usually for some political reason.  They saw no prospect of overcoming the power of the men with landed estates.  From about 1720 onwards they left for America.  They took considerable skills and a spirit of independence with them  -  over two hundred years ago John Dunlap of Derry, for example, was a printer whose most memorable achievement was printing the American Declaration of Independence.  They always had an eye for personal advantage that sits ill with the feckless but charming Irish purveyed by Hollywood.  Less than a hundred years after their arrival in the USA, they elected one of their number, Andrew Jackson, President.  At least half of all American presidents since have come from these people, the Scots-Irish.

        The Scots-Irish are the real Irish of the North.  Weir stresses their ‘Scottishness’.  For some sentimental and ill-informed readers that might place them in the category of ‘settlers’, a colonial people imposed on Ireland by England.  Weir is not interested in such questions.  He does not point out that the Scotland was a country that these same people of the Irish north (then called the Dal Riada) founded by invasion.  Go back far enough, say 1500 years, and you will find that the name ‘Scots’ applied to the Irish and to the people of Antrim in particular.  Paradoxically Scotland really means Ireland.  Weir ignores these great questions of history which sometimes animate readers interested in Ireland.  Weir is concerned to show his Irish people as real men and women in a real landscape motivated and driven by real desires rooted in their real culture and history.  We see their happiness, their music, and their sorrows.

        Ultimately we may find their lives futile.  Weir is right.  That is the way it was.  Much of it was futile.  Only the sentimental fool could find hope or redemption in the way people lived then.

        Weir has no sentiments.  He describes with a clear dispassionate eye an Ireland poised on the cusp of change, caught just before the impact of television brought new ways of thinking, new ambitions, new opportunities and a new, perhaps morally inferior, culture to Ireland.  Weir’s Ireland has passed like so many Irelands before it but that does not mean it can be discounted.  Weir’s fundamental concern in his writing is about truth and truth telling.  That is always of importance.  Cultures may change and adapt but humanity does not pass, love still abides and ambition, cunning and seeking advantage will always remain.

        If you want to seek a hidden Ireland, or if you want to understand the Irish better, read these stories.  Whatever your personal background you may find something of yourself here.  What you think you know or have read about Ireland may be false.  But these stories are truth.  Most of the rest of Irish fiction is not.  It is, as we say in Ireland, ballocks.

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