Review - Angela's Ashes
A Memoir
by Frank McCourt
Touchstone Books, 1996
Review by Wyndham Perring
Mar 16th 2001 (Volume 5, Issue 11)

I sometimes wonder why books are purchased. Is it in order to be informed? Or to be entertained? Or to be given an insight into aspects of the world that hitherto have been a mystery? This book by Frank McCourt succeeds in all three areas. It also has the ability to make you laugh and to feel sick. A powerful read. There are some drawbacks.

The story, as the flyleaf blurb will tell you is about Ireland, poverty, poverty and grinding poverty. The lesson does seem to point out, almost by accident that poverty is made worse by blind and appalling ignorance and monumental stupidity aided and abetted by an in-built brainwashing that teaches Ireland is great and the English are evil.

The story starts in the United States during the depression and the McCourt family are planning to return to Ireland. At this time I found the author to be rather boring and was considering abandoning my review, when skipping a few pages found that the arrival in Ireland also submerged me into the depths of Irish destitution, and disorganized pauperism.

Here the story takes off and becomes a vivid depiction of poverty at its lowest point, when survival is made possible by a Catholic Charity--the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Survival is the name of the game. Living, eating sleeping, cooking, washing­-of sorts--all in one rat, flea-invested room containing the heating and cooking facility of one small coal fire. Children are born and die covered in blinding ignorance and terminal hopelessness.

McCourt seems to have a lingering affection for his father, a loutish simpering drunk who only manages to keep any job until the first pay day when he leaves his starving wife and children and drinks all his wages, fails to go to work because he is drunk and instills his offspring with stories of Irish patriotism and English oppression. Why the author, relating his childhood, should seem to value the fact that his father was his father and portray him as a lump of useless scum is something of a mystery. Nevertheless he writes with a fluency that is compelling and has the ability to create in the mind of the reader a picture of the terrible conditions that was his life. His tendency to go off into poetry was pointless and irritating.

Undoubtedly McCourt has left out much that would fill in great gaps in the story. Perhaps he should have doubled the size of the book and filled in those gaps and further depressed, enlightened and appalled the reader

I do recommend this book to you