A look at Irish books - from comedy and Typhoid Mary to history and more

Wacky Eire
By Geraldine Comiskey

Ireland is the acknowledged home of surrealism and Geraldine Comiskey (a roving reporter for the Sunday World) often has occasion to encounter it at its source. 

Having a journalistic resume that includes getting set on fire by stuntmen, dancing on the wings of a World War II bi-plane (well, who hasn’t?) and joining a circus trapeze troupe, she’s clearly ready for anything.

Ireland in Comiskey’s book is a magical place where all manner of weirdness awaits you down almost very boreen, so in a way her job is an ideal one, scouring the nation in search of fun.

Her book is an eye-popping procession of dodgy faith healers, rural swingers, ghost hunters, GAA players, all of Irish life really. Gifted with a never say die spirit and an uncanny ability to find herself at the center of the wackiest stories, she’s an ideal guide to the books theme and this is one of the moist singular books of its kind you’re ever likely to read about its subject.

Dufour, $22.95.

Fever

Mary Mallon was called a lot of things in her time, but she is known best to history as Typhoid Mary. It was an unfortunate moniker for the poor Irish immigrant woman who had traveled on her own to a new life in America, where she was to discover many new things about herself. Among the most employable discoveries she made was her remarkable talent for cooking.

In Mary Beth Keane’s new novel, Mallon’s life is imaginatively recreated in an act that seems determined to rescue her demonized subject from history. The writer looks behind the headlines to the individual life and the struggles Mallon contended with.

Working as a cook in upper class kitchens, Mallon unwittingly infected multiple people with typhoid, which eventually led to the discovery that there could be such a thing as an “asymptomatic carrier” (a person who carried the disease without becoming infected with it).

In order to contain an outbreak, Mallon was sent by the Department of Health to North Border Island, where she was held in quarantine from 1907 to 1910.

Along the way she became a legend, and this book seeks to rescue her from the headlines by reminding us that she was also a person, not simply a carrier of disease. Keane has crafted a remarkable narrative from a fascinating and ultimately heartbreaking tale.

Scribner, $26.

Lola’s Secret
By Monica McInerney

If you have grown up in a feuding family (and if you’re Irish that more of a certainty than not) the last thing you’d want is for some do-gooder relative to concoct stratagems to bring you and your warring relations to the same table.

But in Lola’s Secret, by bestselling Dublin based author Monica McInerney, the heroine can’t help herself. At 84 she’s still determined to exercise her talent for creating truces among long battling families.

Her latest scheme involves inviting a number of mystery guests to stay at a local hotel – guests who have their reasons not to spend Christmas with their loved ones.

If this sounds contrived, well it is, but it is also effective too. And the woman who breaks her heart to make everything right for other people discovers that she’s not above experiencing a little healing of her own. McInerney’s addresses the occasional stuckness and the obstinance of family dynamics and she reveals just how much can change for better with a little push.

Ballantine, $15.

Smashing H-Block
By F. Stuart Ross

H-Block. Even the name is like a talisman that takes you right back to the darkest days of The Troubles in the North. In F. Stuart Ross’s study he offers a political history of the Irish Republican struggle against criminalization from 1976 to 1982.

These men were not terrorists. They were soldiers defying an occupation, and their struggle eventually culminated in the hunger strikes that were a turning point in the long war.

Ross insists that it was not just the prisoners themselves but also the wider activism of the grassroots movement outside the prisons that reshaped the Republican struggle and revitalized its ambitions.

Ross is a Derry based academic who reminds us that through their political activism ordinary people, the friends and relations of those “inside” had a profound effect on the emerging political consensus that was built during the darkest years of The Troubles and would change the debate thereafter.

University of Chicago Press, $34.95.

Irish playwright Jimmy Kerr's House Strictly Private was a standout of the recent First Irish Theatre Festival

Irish playwright Jimmy Kerr

Two Irish playwrights emerged from the recent 1st Irish Theatre Festival in New York, and it's time to mark their achievements. Playwright Jimmy Kerr is already well known to the Irish community here for his successful run of Ardnaglass on the Air, a knockabout rural comedy which played at the Manhattan Theatre Source in 2010, directed by actress Geraldine Hughes.

But House Strictly Private, a pitch-black comic drama, is an unexpected follow up to Kerr's rollicking festival debut. Tackling the subject of an Irish wake, the play at first unfolds with deceptive simplicity. Kerr introduces us to the McCracken family, who have gathered on the death of their uncle, whose early passing has not been anticipated. Coming together for the first time in years, they must confront the past and what it has made of them.

Kerr is a northern playwright and so he has an engaged sense of just how thorny and intractable the past can be, and how hard it can be to create a shared future when confronted with truths that can seem insurmountable. He certainly doesn't make it easy on his characters, whose lives and choices are revealed in panels that add dimension and layer to this uniquely thoughtful drama.

How am I going to live now? That's the question that hunts each of the blasted survivors of the destructive hurricane that was their uncle's life.

It's a hard question for a play that includes genuinely comic moments, and yet Kerr manages to wield the material with real skill. In particular he's good at offsetting your expectations with revelations that take you in directions you never anticipated.

Betrayal and how to contend with it is at the heart of House Strictly Private. Whether it's betrayal in love, or the way parents can betray their offspring, or the way society can betray its most vulnerable to the wrath of the strong, what engages the playwright is how long injustice can leave a legacy before the courage or the resolve is found to start again.

Although abuse is the theme that ties the generations together here, stepping out from its shadow is the unexpected option that makes this play both timely and indisputably Irish. Even the most broken family can cobble together a future from the glass shards of the past.

Kerr's characters are remarkable in their desire to live and their desire to heal. He also reminds us that nothing is funnier than suffering, and that if you can stand it -- and you should try to stand it -- a day will come when you may think so yourself.

The savagery that is unleashed on his characters when they're least equipped to withstand it finds its match in their determination to move beyond it. I have rarely seen the North's determination to contend with its past and find its future so memorably and movingly portrayed on a stage.

For Love, by debut playwright Laoisa Sexton, is the most impressive first play I have seen in two decades. Featuring a flawless cast that included the writer herself, the play took us on a whirlwind tour of contemporary Dublin seen from a young woman's perspective in a way that was so authentic and casually funny that it disarmed you from the first scene.

Sexton writes with humor and real passion about the actual lives of young women, crafting dispatches from the trenches that tell it like it happens, and you realize as you’re watching it just how unusual that is in the all-too male dominated craft of Irish playwriting.

Sexton's writing is highly crafted, smart but straight from life and it frees her actors up to give arrestingly rich performances, which they do. Jo Kinsella, Georgina McKevitt, John Duddy and the playwright herself are pitch perfect from start to finish, owning the language like they own the play.

McKevitt is particularly funny in her underplayed and subtle characterization of a bored housewife redeemed by shopping. Kinsella is a revelation as a good time girl who suspects the good times are coming to an end, and she finds both the scalding ironies and the unforgettable gags lurking in each scene so expertly that she had the audience applauding her mid speech. Both these actresses bring lived experience to the stage and enrich the show with them.

Sexton conveys a nervy defensiveness and vulnerability on stage that makes her impossible to look away from. Playing a character who has had her heart broken so completely that she holds everyone and everything at a remove, Sexton's female characters are the most interesting and most recognizably Irish I have seen on an Irish stage in years.

The 1st Irish Theatre Festival deserves accolades for bringing these talents to an American stage, and Irish drama has been enriched by their appearance.