I wasn’t sure I was going to review this as there seems so little to say; no conflict no story, as it’s been said. Still it was a little amusing and not bothersome so I’ll give it a go. I’ll talk about classification, since that’s what I like.

At first I thought this (a church book club read) was going to be “Christian memoir” in my system, but it turns out to be more of a general literature memoir by someone who is also a Christian. He’s very old-fashioned and he does talk about religion, the church in its secular, communal and historical senses (“when I was a boy the church had a football team”: the only difference being it sounds amicable the way he says it), rather than its ultimate meaning sense. Even when he talks directly about the saints or the relations between the Church of Ireland and the Irish Catholics in the Irish republic, he seems to be mostly interested in history—as though he were an archeologist or a storyteller—like one of those “what does it mean to be Irish” Irish-Americans (although he’s Irish-Canadian). Personally both of my parents are Irish-American but I’m really not, to be honest; it’s generational. Actually I’m not sure how Irish they are either, since there’s little indeed they do or say or think that’s identifiably Irish. Maybe if they read this book and ones like it they would be. Anyway it is—not that it will all die out immediately since some young people like old people: one of my cousins is probably Irish, properly speaking, loves the family history and that sort of thing, probably more Catholic, it’s hard to put into words— largely generational, a matter of age, and Mr O’Driscoll is certainly a romantic old man. He’s a hug-the-hearth priest, like if Charles Bingely, so much Jane Bennet’s partner, had been a man of the cloth, as I suppose he has been, in Jungian terms, many times.

But it’s not a very spiritual book. That’s the funny thing about Christian clerics—any religious officiant; they’re not all equally spiritual. Some are mob leaders, or secret drinkers, or semi-atheists, and others are merely agreeable hug-the-hearths who want everyone to just sing, “Let’s rearrange/I wish you were a stranger, I could disengage/Just say that we agree and then never change/Soften a bit until we all just get along....” Which isn’t completely evil, to some extent it’s part of the church’s mission to get people to calm down and finally forget about the Viking Age, which was “a sword age, an ax age”. On the other hand, on the other side of Calvin torturing Servetus for insulting him, (as though Calvin were Kullervo, the cursing Finnish sorcerer), there’s a sort of nominalism (although there’s more than one form of nominalism, the intellectual and the common) which is also sub-Christian. In the end Mr O’Driscoll could be the grandfather of Kelly Corrigan (“The Middle Place”). Kelly opens her own memoir by saying that she’s proud to be a Corrigan and proud of her father, who wants everyone to know that he’s a Catholic etc and a good guy, but after that faith plays very little part in the book, for Kelly who wonders why life isn’t easy, and even for her father, who seems to mean by faith being optimistic, and liking team sports, and therefore being a Goodguy. And after all he’s Irish. When I first looked at this book, by the Irish Episcopalian in America, (by way of Canada, incidentally, and other places—Mr O’Driscoll considers himself a traveler), I thought, Ah. Cool. An older, more ethnic version of myself. But what I got from this book was how little that can mean. We’re not similar, but we’re both Irish.